Performance Thread

[SpaceSquirrel]

I'm not a techie, but think somebody should atleast start a performance thread of what helped them the most. NOT to imply these tweaks are my own invention. Most of them are other people's postings, some are my own. My game is now mostly fast and mostly smooth. I still don't get 60-70 fps but I do get 35-40 and smooth.

(By order of what helped me the most)
((1)) CCF explorer

http://www.download.com/CFF-Explorer/30 ... 64296.html

Start up CFF explorer

use file open X3TC.exe

left click FILE HEADER

then look for the word Characteristics

then on the same column will be a word in blue saying
'click here'

then check on the option

X App can handel >2gb address space

X Aggressively trim working set

frymaster
don't forget, if you're on a 32-bit OS, you also need to enable the OS switch that allows it to _allocate_ more than 2gigs to applications:

For XP 32, add /3GB to the boot.ini file as per this
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pl ... AEmem.mspx

For Vista 32, set it as per the instructions here
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=24158581


2 warnings:

1. By altering your boot parameters like this you are running the risk of something going horribly wrong and leaving your computer unbootable.

2. By altering the x3:tc executable as described a few posts above you are putting the game in a modified state that could potentially cause subtle or unsubtle bugs or crashes. If you have done this, it is your responsibility to mention it in any subsequent tech support requests, and you understand that you _may_ be told you can't get support, in the same way that you can't for scripts and mods. (In the same way as scripts and mods, just turning it off again doesn't help, because your save game has been "tainted". You have to start a new game to be sure)

Realistically, if you follow the instructions closely you shouldn't have any problems with 1, and I've never come across and bugs introduced by 2, so it'll probably be all good

(I only have 2GB and when I added the /3GB switch to my boot.ini it garbled my graphics.)



((2.)) Page file defrag

I was aware of 3rd party page file defraggers, but didn't want to spend money. Sysinternals has a free one and I thought I'd give it a try.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 97426.aspx

When you first run it, it will list how many fragments its broken into.
It takes about 3-4 minutes to run after reboot,relative to how fragmented your page file is.


I reran X3TC using Fraps, and flew around Seezewell with my Heavy Neomosis and glow enabled and settings on high as usual.
I noticed I got the same frame rate as I measured before, but.........it flew smoother. I could tell.
I think because it was accessing the hard drive but not the graphics card or cpu at the time. So its better, I'd just I'd mention it.


((3.)) Memory Manager

I've used memory managers on other games but didn't notice any improvement at all, but Did notice an improvement for some reason with X3TC.
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?id=26&sort=8

I use Cacheman XP myself.



((4.)) Sound problems
(Wasn't sure what helped me the most)

-Disabled onboard Realtek audio in Bios
-updated my sound card drivers for my creative sound card( I updated them 9 months ago, but recently noticed it had a 2006 date on them?)
-Ran two programs;codecfixer and codectweaktool 231(that supposedly fixes codecs)
-Ran Installedcodec(a program that can disable Nero codecs

((5.)) Win Xp SP3

Basically if you have Win xp, Microsoft issued a hotfix that was included in SP3 to better handle multiprocessor CPU's, because game
play wasn't smooth. So update to SP3.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Others


FFdshow

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=217747




Also:

-update my graphics driver
-let X3TC handle the graphic settings,not Catalyst(so in other words I always put 'Let application decide')
-I have my page file set at 2048 minimum and 2560 maximum, the Gaming Tweak Guide recommends 2048,2048
-I only have about 15 processes running in the background, too big a subject to cover so I won't.

[netWilk]

If the /3GB switch garbles your graphics, you can add the /userva=XXXX switch to adjust how much memory (between 2048 and 3072 MB) to give to applications.

/userva=2700 seems to work quite well with the 896MB video cards. For 1GB video cards you might have to drop it to 2500.

This will work even if you have only 2GB of memory or less, but if the game allocates (and actively uses) more memory than you have, you're gonna get pagefile swapping.

[edit] Forgot to mention that the /userva switch is in addition to the /3GB switch.

[eladan]

Something else I noticed, examing my computer, I don't think the store I purchased it from installed the correct Hard driver drivers. In my device manager it says IDE but I believe its supposed to be SATA.

It's probable that the drivers and/or perhaps the BIOS is responsible for that. Not something to be concerned about, anyway. If you had the wrong drivers, you'd know about it - they wouldn't work at all.

I've read that Win xp doesn't natively recognise SATA and must be installed with a floppy.

SATA has been recognised since one of the service packs - I forget if it was SP1 or SP2

I have my page file set at 2048 minimum and 2560 maximum, the Gaming Tweak Guide recommends 2048,2048

The reason the tweak guide recommends keeping the min and max the same is to remove page file fragmentation as a factor in slow RAM access.

[BugMeister]

- you could also put the swapfile into its own HD partition (or on a different HD altogether) away from the OS - this will improve your timings

- and, if you're running with XP, drop the sound sample conversion rate to "Good"..
[ external image ]

- good thread, dude..

[SpaceSquirrel]

RE; eladin

Sorry about that, I simply copied and pasted a previous post without reading thouroughly. I found a benchmark for my hard drive and correct jumper settings on the web. It benchmarked the same as it was supposed to be. Sorry.

RE: bugmeister

Ya I know about the external page file on a separate partition, I looked into that before but found I had to purchase a dynamic third party partitioner, maybe there is a free one now I'll look.

I tried setting the sound to all 4 levels and then benchmarked it.....it came out exactly the same FPS.
So I'll leave the sound.

But I was hoping everybody could submit there own tips on performance, so everybody could benefit.

Not to sound overly critical of Egosoft, but it maybe the X3TC engine is basically the same as the previous engines all the way back to X BTF? and maybe they simply add a few changes and resell it as a new game? If that's the case, then version 2.1 won't improve performance much, if any. Somebody said the Terracorp station uses 2.5 million polygons, why? Isn't that ancient technology now with normal mapping? An entire scene with thousands of objects in Unreal 3 uses 1 million polygons? But I'm just guessing I don't know the real problems behind the performance slow downs in X3TC.

[BugMeister]

agreed - the sound trick only seems to affect certain games
it may have something to do with the way each game is constructed..

what does interest me is the fact that X3:TC's GUI explicitly states that it uses Windows Media Technology:

[ external image ]

..and anything that may help improve the efficiency of that technology is worth investigating
- within the constraints imposed by the game's design, obviously..

on the swapfile thing, I actually installed a separate 40G HD just for this purpose,
but for partitioning HD's, EASUS is a good choice:
http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm
NB:- you need to be careful with the program, so read up on it first..

I used it to enable a dual-boot with Windows7Beta, and it did the trick perfectly..

[SpaceSquirrel]

RE; bugmeister

I just tried the EASUS, it won't allow me to resize or create a new partition. I think because my hard drive is mostly full.

[BugMeister]

yep, sounds as though you'll need to make some space..
or simply add an extra HD - you can pick them pretty cheap these days..

[exogenesis]

....what does interest me is the fact that X3:TC's GUI explicitly states that it uses Windows Media Technology....

I think that might just be about the format of audio files in the \mov dir,
i.e. 'Window Media Format' -> 'Windows Media Audio 9'
Also DX3D, but that's obvious.

Thinking of getting a seperate drive now for that swap file,
if the speed up is significant ?

[Cker]

I believe I read this in an earlier thread, but X3:TC is not multi-threaded.
Doesn't this ultimately mean that whatever tweaks we make it will do nothing as the load on the cpu is ultimately the restricter of FPS?

Surely there has to be some way to get some parts of the game, or background processes to be put on the other cpus?
Or perhaps there is some way to reduce the load on the single cpu used by X3:TC.

Although I appreciate the fact that recoding the entire of X3:TC to be multi-threaded is impossible, it does seem to make the game not very future proof, I can just imagine in 10 years using a supercomputer swearing at X3:TC because of it's cpu bottlenecking

However I did find that the removal of the movies from in game bilboards did significantly improve my FPS, it didn't change CPU usage though as it's nearly always 100% on core 1 anyway.

[frymaster]

I believe I read this in an earlier thread, but X3:TC is not multi-threaded.
Doesn't this ultimately mean that whatever tweaks we make it will do nothing as the load on the cpu is ultimately the restricter of FPS?

Surely there has to be some way to get some parts of the game, or background processes to be put on the other cpus?
Or perhaps there is some way to reduce the load on the single cpu used by X3:TC.

Although I appreciate the fact that recoding the entire of X3:TC to be multi-threaded is impossible, it does seem to make the game not very future proof, I can just imagine in 10 years using a supercomputer swearing at X3:TC because of it's cpu bottlenecking

However I did find that the removal of the movies from in game bilboards did significantly improve my FPS, it didn't change CPU usage though as it's nearly always 100% on core 1 anyway.

not quite true; the Egosoft part of X3:TC is single threaded, but a lot of the directX stuff runs on different threads. All together I estimate these threads use about 33% as much CPU as the main thread - not amazing but better than nothing anyway.

As regards making the rest of the game be multithreaded, that's a chore and a half. The AI scripts for example can't be easily multithreaded because it's a co-operative multitasking model (ie the script writers choose* when they will let other scripts take over) so every single AI script would need to be re-written from scratch.

*Choose in the sense that certain script commands (including the "wait" command) are marked as forcing the script to yield.

[StormMagi]

Lets hope then that there is a patch later on that will enable support for multi core machines ^_^

[eladan]

Lets hope then that there is a patch later on that will enable support for multi core machines ^_^

Highly unlikely, I'm afraid. There's too much work involved in changing the engine to support this for it to have any hope of happening in a patch.

[BugMeister]

I hate to admit it, given that I'm planning on buying a monster MultiCore beast some time later this year,
but my old P4 DualCore 3.00GHz CPU is doing amazingly well with X3:TC -paired with the ATI HD3850(512mb) AGP card, via XPHome..

..guess I might have the same stutter problems that some of you high-enders are currently getting..
not really looking forward to that, as X3:TC is my main game at the moment..

- no doubt the new rig will come equipped with the dreaded Vista/DX10 combo
- does it make any difference if the individual cores are >= to 3.00GHz..??

[SpaceSquirrel]

So.......if X3TC is media 9 then what? I have Windows Media 11 installed on my computer. Would uninstalling that and installing 9 improve any thing?

Thats a good tip about the movie folder, I'll try that. So what folder is that?

Observe has been working on a performance improvement mod, I wonder how far he's gotten.

[frymaster]

nope, it's just that installing a newer version of media player than what you have, (or reinstalling what you have), seems to be a good way of resetting codec preferences.

Media player 9 was always suggested because iirc that was 1 version up from what came with XP, so you could install/uninstall/reinstall

[SpaceSquirrel]

As for in game movies I think I found it. 00080.dat and 0002.dat?

[eladan]

So.......if X3TC is media 9 then what? I have Windows Media 11 installed on my computer. Would uninstalling that and installing 9 improve any thing?

You're more likely to introduce problems if you do that, rather than fix anything, so no.

Thats a good tip about the movie folder, I'll try that. So what folder is that?

The /mov folder in the main X3:TC dir. At least one of the files is audio, but most are video - you should be able to open them in WMP.

[MegaJohnny]

After backing up my TC executable I did the CFF explorer thing to see if it might help the rampant performance problems (that weren't there at all in Reunion). No change, still poor framerates in most cases, never EVER going above upper 30s in the main gameplay. I can just delete the existing executable and put the backup back in with the right filename, right?

Also is there anyone who've had these horrible performance problems and got rid of them? I've heard that the 2.0 patch will fix such issues but I'm not convinced. After doing various things with the task manager open, it seems that CPU usage usually hovers about 40-60% and only goes to 100% when there's a big fight going on.

Framerate problems for me seem mostly tied to graphics. Almost any sector runs fine as long as I'm not looking at anything, but when I go for example to Legend's Home, not only does the framerate seem lower than usual at all times, looking at the supershipyard or the OTAS HQ seems to drop the framerate, as does my tiddly little self-sufficient complex in Omicron Lyrae. But if I keep enough distance to hide behind the low draw distance, it seems nice and smooth.

I've got a 2GHz dual AMD with a 8800GTS 320MB and 3GB of RAM.

Is this a crap rig or something by X's standards? It ran Reunion fine and going back to it for a second now is pretty shocking to see how good the performance used to be.

[SpaceSquirrel]

Re; Megajohnny

I believe you can just simply undo what you did in CFF. Like uncheck the app needs >2Gb......

As for CFF increasing frame rate, I didn't benchmark mine, but did you notice it ran smoother? Mine seemed to run faster and smoothier.

I don't think 2.0 is promised to fix performance problems, that'll be 2.1.

So did you try some of the tips for performance mentioned, like defrag page file etc.....?