Huge performance increase !! --> use NVIDIA settings

[LUBEggA]

Hello everybody,
I had like many of you some significant performance problems especially with big stations and many ships on screen (AMD 8350 eight core, gtx770, 16gb ram).

I would like to share the following link
http://steamcommunity.com/app/2870/disc ... 593096077/

The performance increase was significant so perhaps some of you might also want to give it a try (sorry for ati users, you should perhaps check the same for catalyst driver).

Cheers!

[Miniding]

My game setup

Resolution: 1920x1080
AA: 0x (this is very important, it will be set on driver level)
Fullscreen: On
Display adapter: (make sure game is not using any on-board gfx card if you have an external gfx card with better performance)
V-Sync: On (also works with Off setting but looks very ugly when panning view horizontally)
Shadows: Off
SSAO: Off
LOD setting: 30
View Distance: 50
Effect Distance: 50
Shader quality: High

CPU boost

After game is launched to main menu then alt-tab out of game (or use window mode) and start task manager. In Process tab find the xrebirth.exe process, rightclick on it and set CPU
priority to Above Normal (you can try to set to High but it may make computer unstable). This is a pain to do at every launch so i recommend to google "prio process priority saver" and download from site. It is free. Windows restart is required. This tool will remember your priority settings.

Nvidia 3D driver setup

Make a xrebirth.exe unique setup

Anisotropic filtering: 2x
Anti-aliasing - FXAA: Off (this is the discount AA version, very fast but lower quality. Try this On if normal AA is too hard on your system)
Anti-aliasing - gamma correction: Off
Anti-aliasing - transparency: Off
Anti-aliasing - Mode: 2x (this can be switched Off and FXAA On for better performance but don't set both to On)
Anti-aliasing - Setting: Improve app setting
CUDA - GPU's: All
Multi display: Single monitor performance
Vertical sync: Adaptive (this is very important for smooth gameplay, at least on my system)
Max pre-rendered frames: 2 (normal setting is 3, for me reducing to 2 frames completely removed stuttering!)
Ambient occlusion: Not supported
Threaded optimization: On (even with this On ppl with only 2 cores may never get smooth gameplay)
Power management: Adaptive (you can try setting it to Max Performance)
Texture filtering - Anisotropic optimization: On (set to Off if you get gfx flickering)
Texture filtering - Quality: Quality (setting this lower will get you more fps but at the cost of some image quality)
Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Clamp
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: On
Triple buffering: Off (very important to put less load on CPU)

Other minor tweaks (may make a difference for some hardware setup's)

In Steam games list right-click on X-Rebirth and choose Properties.
- Here you can choose to deactivate Steam chat in-game by deactivating Enable Steam Community In-Game (may make a difference in stability for ppl with low GFX memory)
- Click on Set Launch Options and type -dx9 in parameter input field (this will force game to use DX9 drivers rather than DX11 drivers running DX9 compatible)

General performance increase suggestions

- Defrag your HDD (not if you have a SSD). I recommend MyDefrag which is free and it has the option to only defrag files, so you don't waste hours waiting for a full file relocation defrag.
- Disable anti-virus scanning while playing game.
- shut down any unnessary applications.
- Before starting game, start task manager, view processes and sort by CPU usage. Stop any non-System processes that are using CPU time.
- In Control Panel under Administration check for services starting automatically. E.g. printer service is useless if you don't have a printer. Check google for a guide on what services that can safely be set to manual or completely disabled. (saves a lot of memory and maybe some CPU time by not loading and starting so many useless services)

Other suggestions

- If you have a save game from version 1.11 and after tweaking you still have low frame rates in version 1.12+, especially in stations, then i suggest to start a new game. That solved a major performance problem in stations for me.

- When i load a save game in above setup, there is some stuttering for about 1 minute and then frame rate becomes completely smooth, so be patient


I hope some of these suggestions can help you tweak your own system for a more smooth XR experience. Seems to be setup trial and error to get CPU and GPU to work in perfect sync to completely avoid frame stuttering, at least until game is patched.

To be clear...

Applying those settings the way they are written will increase perf for low-middle end hardware (as high-end ones don't seem to fully load on CPU)

However, even when XRebirth doesn't use full CPU load, the quickness of the CPU to compute and transmit infos to your Graphic card may be improved with those settings.

Not very surprising that NVidia driver gets best performance if uses its own graphic-computing settings than the game does...

Having a test with that, I didn't get a huge FPS increase but very less FPS drops in "heavy" zones so the game seem more smooth...

My Spec:
Z87-PCmate Mainboard
i5-3.4Ghz Quad cores/4 Threads
8Gb DDR3 1600MHz
Steam/rebirth Drive EVO840 SSD 120Go
Nvidia GTX 650Ti/v2 OC 2Gb GDDR5 (not overclocked) Latest NVidia Drivers
Windows 7 x64


Let's all feedback on this for everyone to have a better experience of the game.

[Evildweeb]

My POS computer is as bottom shelf as it gets.

Win7
64-bit
Dual core AMD 521's - 3.5 ghz
4 gb RAM
1 TB drive

All I need to say about that is ATI Catalyst 4200 - ok?

Anyhoo...................

I tried the graphics adjustments as noted above, and it has improved gameplay 200%. And that's NO lie.

I still get jet lag in heavy systems, but oh well that's to be expected.

The game looks better, definitely smoother especially on platforms (haven't tried it on stations yet - ain't been in a station for ages).

Also haven't tried to prioritize the CPU above normal yet but I will work on that one next - just HAD to come back and report.

YOU GUYS ARE MY HEROES !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Endeavour79]

Good read regarding FXAA!

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/12/what-is-fxaa/

[Zetoss]

I seem to have accidentally installed the Swedish version of Nvidias stuff and despire being a swede I don't understand much of what it says any more but here are some tips for actual high end machines since my hardware is significantly weaker than LUBEggA's but my settings are MUCH higher than that and the game is nice and smooth almost everywhere. Not sure I translate everything right, but should be close enough for you to get it.

FXAA generally blurs the image a bit and doesn't smooth only edges, the performance increase will vary greatly depending on your specs generally speaking from 0% for high end to a little bit for low end. Many expensive GPUs have separate computing of "after effects" that does not impact framerate much, FXAA is not needed but can make games easier on the eyes in some cases, try it and see what you prefer.

Anti Aliasing in general is not used in a clever way by most people, up to 4x you will clearly see great differences along edges with minimal FPS loss but most higher settings than that will kill framerate much more than do your eyes any good unless you have extremely sharp eyes.
AA for Transparent textures can often be set to a low/moderate setting for a good compromise between framerate and eyecandy, much the same as regular AA but depending on how transparent textures are used in a game it can impact framerate much more or much less than regular AA, hard to give general advice beyond "try messing around with it".

ALL forms of Power Saving for ALL hardware components should generally speaking be completely disabled for heavy games.

Pre-rendering of frames will sometimes smooth out framerate but generally it will increase input lag, setting this as low as possible is usually the way to go.

Vsync should neither be set to "off" or "on" if your card supports a hybrid of these, Nvidia cards good enough to run XR will support an "adaptive" setting that disables Vsync for low framerates to increase performance but will turn it on for high framerates to prevent image tearing, you get the best of both worlds.



I've been unable to get any quality sleep for the last few days due to summer heat so the above should be viewed as "probably mostly right" but I may have given questionable advice since my brain barely functions right now, if you know more about any of the above than what I said feel free to correct me please.

[Miniding]

This sounds quite right dude!

Your analyse of the settings is mostly right and helpfull to understand impact on the game. As a computer technicien and long low-end PC user until my last hardware upgrades, I totally agree.

Of course any one single config, even two very close ones, can have differnet results.

Best advice is help yourself with what is given in this thread and adjust it according to your "troubles" ingame...

Thanks for it anyway

[sabrehawk]

well too bad adaptive vsync is NOT a setting you can chose in the nvidia driver...its a setting that has to be supported and offered by the GAME.
That is not the case with X Rebirth.

Driver 340.52

Well whatever it still runs like ASS on a nvidia 680 GTX M + core i7 ivybridge , 16 gb ram , system hd : SAMSUNG 840 EVO SSD. ,game is installed on hitachi mechanical storage drive, game assets should be pretty much loaded completely into the ram using the 64bit exe ..no? I cant really note any siginificant disk activity anyway. I even cleaned my laptop from the inside and im running in full power mode.

FFS i can run SKYRIM on U L T R A on this rig. and when it came out was still one of the top mobile GPUs and top midrange for a desktop system.

Whatever i checked on this game every 3 months or so to see if it got any better...and no it still sucks in about every aspect...technically, gameplaywise, AI and economy still horrible...wtf i give up on this piece of crap now. Final uninstall bye. No more purchases EVER.

[YorrickVander]

Tweaked the settings you suggested a bit but gained shadows (normal, soft on) and 16x aa (as opposed to 2x max from game aa settings). Maintaining my normal 20+ fps. Thanks for posting. i5 2500 @ 3.6ghz, 550ti card with 1GB @ stock, 12gb 1600 ram.

[LUBEggA]

Found another big performance issue:
I have been playing with the same game building my empire for >300 hours in-game. I noticed that the game is crowded with drones in some sectors. I'm not talking about a drone bug caused by a mod though.

Go to a xml-editor like notepad++ and look for all instances of combat drones, you can use this expression (check regular expressions in search options)
<component class="drone" macro="units_size_attackdrone.*
This will look for any drone flying arounf freely, so no docked drones are counted.
I found over 3000 drones in my game!

I had a drone bug causing huge numbers of drones spawning (~4000). When I realised it I went to the save game and carefully removed them. Now here is the point: not only my savegame size was reduced from ~100mb to 50mb, but also ingame performance was notably much better !

To make a long post short:
1. If you have performance issues and have been playing for a while check the number of roaming drones.
2. Drones need a timer, maximum operation time after which they self-destruct otherwise the universe gets too crowded and performance is significantly reduced.

Until then is there any talented programmer or modder who could help with the savegame edit? Until now I can find easily find all the headers for the drones in the save but have to remove the corresponding section in the save by hand! Any help to remove the drones automatically from the save would be much appreciated. An expression for search and replace would be sufficient.

[adrian_egosoft]

Hi LUBEggA

I had a drone bug causing huge numbers of drones spawning (~4000).

Was this problem made by a mod? If so, nothing we can do about it sorry.

if not and it was in Vanilla game, could you please provide that savegame?

[LUBEggA]

Hi LUBEggA

I had a drone bug causing huge numbers of drones spawning (~4000).

Was this problem made by a mod? If so, nothing we can do about it sorry.

if not and it was in Vanilla game, could you please provide that savegame?

Hi adrian_egosoft,

The bug was caused by a mod for sure, but there is another point in my post:
drones tend to get lost in the x universe. The bug actually caused drones spawning in one sector in a huge cross shape. Nonetheless being >300 hours ingame now building my empire I see drones in many sectors doing nothing.

Can anyone confirm on this ?

To me it seems quite logic: drones may get lost for various reasons in vanilla game and they just sit there doing nothing. A self destruct counter would prevent this. This also applies to containers btw !

[adrian_egosoft]

If the behavior of the drones is not properly configured when they are spawned, there will be many problems with them (eg. no self destruction, no movement)

We cannot manage the setup of them in mods, but in vanilla game the drones have the correct defined behavior when they are spawned.
But if you see problems in vanilla game, please report them. And thank you for help.

[YorrickVander]

LUBEggA

I can confirm that mods made before 2.00 release that affect drone AI will cause these issues. UFO mod definitely breaks ES changes since 2.00, CDOAI + MCE also break certain things but not 100% if drones are included. I tend to remove likely problem stuff my end anyway (ie stuff that throws a lot of debug spew)

If in doubt check the aiscripts folder in the mod and delete anything related to drones. It wont clear any problems in the save but it will dstop new problems happening.

[LUBEggA]

LUBEggA

I can confirm that mods made before 2.00 release that affect drone AI will cause these issues. UFO mod definitely breaks ES changes since 2.00, CDOAI + MCE also break certain things but not 100% if drones are included. I tend to remove likely problem stuff my end anyway (ie stuff that throws a lot of debug spew)

If in doubt check the aiscripts folder in the mod and delete anything related to drones. It wont clear any problems in the save but it will dstop new problems happening.

Thanks for your comment. I'm using CDOAI, will remove it and see whats happening.
Thanks also to adrian_egosoft for clarification !