Feedback X4 is an unoptimized non scalable mess

[KextV8]

Maybe I am missing something.

You're missing how your cpu utilization actually gets reported, vs what is really happening.

Its displaying an average/capacity across your system, not how heavily a single thread is utilizing a single cpu. And by default, threads will move around to different cpu cores unless you force it not to, so it will not give you a true picture of utilization until you both force it to execute the thread you're interested in on a single core and monitor that instead of displaying an avg. Even then, its still showing an avg, just one that is actually representative of why you're slowing down.

X4 only uses a few threads heavily. It is always the bottleneck unless you have an exceptionally weak GPU. That simulation thread can cause everything else to be delayed because the game doesn't know exactly what to send to be drawn by the gpu until it gets that info from the simulation calculations. Thus you see a huge fps drop when number of objects being simulated rises.

[Tidaar]

Maybe I am missing something.

You're missing how your cpu utilization actually gets reported, vs what is really happening.

Its displaying an average/capacity across your system, not how heavily a single thread is utilizing a single cpu. And by default, threads will move around to different cpu cores unless you force it not to, so it will not give you a true picture of utilization until you both force it to execute the thread you're interested in on a single core and monitor that instead of displaying an avg. Even then, its still showing an avg, just one that is actually representative of why you're slowing down.

X4 only uses a few threads heavily. It is always the bottleneck unless you have an exceptionally weak GPU. That simulation thread can cause everything else to be delayed because the game doesn't know exactly what to send to be drawn by the gpu until it gets that info from the simulation calculations. Thus you see a huge fps drop when number of objects being simulated rises.

Silly me must have missed the spec requirements for this game. I need to get a desktop, latest single threaded CPU and and overclock the crap out of it. Got it.
P.S. sarcasm not intended for you , I really appreciate your insights man , makes sense.

[Old Drullo321]

Every heavily simulated game suffers from decreasing performance in later stages of the game. That just lies in the nature of those games. Have a look at the Anno series. They share the same fate of lower FPS when your map is full of settlements. And again. don't compare a simple RPG with a simulation. What do you think why weather simulations, particle simulations or or nuclear bomb szenarios need supercomputers or whole clusters of CPU? Do you think the developers are all F rated losers? If Cyberpunk or GTA V simulated all city life independant of your positions, I'm sure your performance would be far worse.

[Matthew94]

And again. don't compare a simple RPG with a simulation. What do you think why weather simulations, particle simulations or or nuclear bomb szenarios need supercomputers or whole clusters of CPU? Do you think the developers are all F rated losers?

Professional simulation software can typically scale to any number of cores and many can use GPU acceleration. Using a simulation model that is mostly limited to a single core is unusual and X4's performance is a great example why.

[Old Drullo321]

Professional simulation software can typically scale to any number of cores and many can use GPU acceleration. Using a simulation model that is mostly limited to a single core is unusual and X4's performance is a great example why.

Yes, and professional software is often developed by a far greater team and/or cost alot more and/or has system requirements that require such systems. Or is especially optimized for that one system. But for normal games, especially if developed for PC and not for consoles, there are certain things to consider:

* You have to aim for a broad base of different hardware, from low-end to high-end machines. From old to new. It just doesn't work to just invent a system that scales perfectly from two-cores to hundred-cores.
* You have certain time- or money-constraints. With the man-power of the NASA you may develop a X4 which runs 30% faster, but for like 10times the development costs.

[XGamer]

GTA V simulated all city life independant of your positions

would probably make for a fun game though

[Matthew94]

Professional simulation software can typically scale to any number of cores and many can use GPU acceleration. Using a simulation model that is mostly limited to a single core is unusual and X4's performance is a great example why.

Yes, and professional software is often developed by a far greater team and/or cost alot more and/or has system requirements that require such systems. Or is especially optimized for that one system. But for normal games, especially if developed for PC and not for consoles, there are certain things to consider:

* You have to aim for a broad base of different hardware, from low-end to high-end machines. From old to new. It just doesn't work to just invent a system that scales perfectly from two-cores to hundred-cores.
* You have certain time- or money-constraints. With the man-power of the NASA you may develop a X4 which runs 30% faster, but for like 10times the development costs.

I just want to preface this by saying that I've seen plenty of replies from people like CBJ and I'm not advocating that they "push a button and make X4" multicore or anything like that. I know that they say the simulation structure doesn't lend itself to saturating all available cores. My purpose with this discussion is to make the point that if a detailed high-performance simulation is needed, it appears to be typical in industry to create a simulation model that can be scaled, in some form, to use additional hardware. Your point that I first replied to seems to say that its natural for big simulations to slow down which is why things like particle simulations use multiple CPUs. It seems natural to me that, considering X4's economy simulation is also very demanding, that they would have adopted similar simulation models to solve their similar problems.

I guess in summary, my real point is not that Egosoft should have made X4 scale perfectly to N cores or that it was feasible, merely that I believe that it was possible. (After rereading this, I might be talking utter shit but I still feel like expressing this).

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by system. Do you mean hardware or the domain that is being simulated e.g. electromagnetics?

I think you're right that the team sizes for Pro software are much larger and the licences are indeed very expensive (though the market is much smaller, they can't sell a million copies like X4 could) which justifies the design effort but I disagree that the performance increase might only be 30% or so. My experience is with circuit design and electromagnetic solvers and when I increased my virtual machine's cores by N times, I saw an N times speed-up in my EM solver. I went from a 2 core VM to 32 cores and my simulations ran 16 times faster.

While the EM simulations are not real-time like X4 (it just computes a single solution), the circuit simulators do have time-domain simulations that are also multithreaded, so the evidence is there that a linear real-time simulation can be multithreaded.

In reference to your first bullet point, this software ran on any x86 PC and this is the case for most engineering software that I've encountered. The days of software being designed to run on special-purpose hardware have been over for decades with the obvious exception of cutting edge research software used by places like IBM, something not relevant to this discussion. At most the software might be locked to an OS but most things are written for x86 these days. That said I'm not sure what you mean by "It just doesn't work to just invent a system that scales perfectly from two-cores to hundred-cores.". Are you saying it isn't practical or it isn't possible?

[Panos]

AMD CPUs are typically behind intel ones on this. Its almost mandatory to overclock them to get to the same performance you'd get out of the box with a similarly priced Intel one.

This is 2021 not 2011.

[Panos]

GPU settings make no difference, whether max high settings or deactivating antialias.
CPU is 10870H. Better than my older I5. Here is the game save for info: https://gofile.io/d/YX7azq.
I asked a friend of mine to run the save on a powerful desktop version with 2080 TI and I9. Guess what? Same story. CPU is till used like 30% of the time so no scaling.

So you play on a laptop with 45W CPU of the wost kind?
Check your power settings to be on high performance and plug the power cable.
And your laptop RAM will be hampering a lot of your performance regardless.

Nothing wrong with the game with is well optimized and scaling to 12 cores on a mature campaign on Linux, is your laptop.

I mentioned that CPU draws up to 100W. RAM is fine. I run on Win 10 pro. Look Linux is another matter. That is a super resource efficient OS, you can't compare.

Powerdraw is irrelevant. Is a mobile CPU which throttles due to heat.

[Tidaar]

So you play on a laptop with 45W CPU of the wost kind?
Check your power settings to be on high performance and plug the power cable.
And your laptop RAM will be hampering a lot of your performance regardless.

Nothing wrong with the game with is well optimized and scaling to 12 cores on a mature campaign on Linux, is your laptop.

I mentioned that CPU draws up to 100W. RAM is fine. I run on Win 10 pro. Look Linux is another matter. That is a super resource efficient OS, you can't compare.

Powerdraw is irrelevant. Is a mobile CPU which throttles due to heat.

I wish heat was an issue or throttling at least it would make sense. I have CPU temps at 85 max for full performance. The cooling on this machine is powerful , noisy but powerful. So no in this particular situation is not the heat.

[Alan Phipps]

Can we please discuss the game and not general or relative hardware capabilites and issues. Feel free to debate those topics in the Off Topic forum.

[SpaceCadet11864]

I've upgraded my PC 3 times since I first played X4, and I didn't upgrade it for X4 but just in general.

I have a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (really wanted the 5xxx series but could not find them anywhere when I got this one)
32gb RAM
RTX 2080 Super
Samsung 970 EVO SSD

For the most part this game runs great. The only time I have frame-rate issues are around asteroids, the ones in second contact flashpoint 2 seem to be the worst. The game will run at a decent framerate (60+ fps) but once I am flying through the asteroids the frame rate will drop to 15 fps for a few seconds and then hold around 30 fps for a while.

Pure speculation but:

1. When moving from low attention to high attention, I think it uses a lot of processing when there are lots of asteroids loading into high attention. This is why it drops to 15 fps for a few seconds (its loading Low attention into high attention) This I feel would be the CPU portion but then there's just rendering them which is quite taxing in 3 machines I've used to play this game.
2. The asteroids tax my GPU. My 2080 Super gets to 100% while the framerate is low around the asteroids. Not ALL asteroids do this but the ones in second contact flashpoint 2 for sure.
3. lowering graphics settings improves framerate around the asteroids in SCFP2, but it still drops.
4. There are other systems that are heavy with asteroids that cause similar issues as well, its not just SCFP2 but SCFP2 is the absolute worst.

I've had this issue with all 3 machine setups that I used to play this game. It's always the asteroids and its always the ones in SCFP2. The asteroids there have taxed my 1080 and my 2080 the same.

I know the game is CPU intensive, but I think the asteroids have a lot more polygons then most asteroids I've seen in other games. Also I dont know at all how the collision detection works but if its trying to mesh with all the faces on the asteroids then that would explain why they lower frame rates too, even though that would be CPU. I highly doubt that is the case, I'm sure the collision mesh or whatever has less faces than the asteroids because GAWWD DAYUM them X4 asteroids have a toonnn of rendered faces on them.

Elite Dangerous for one, has some nice looking asteroids, but their shapes are very similar to eachother and none usually as deformed as X4
Everspace has some really nice looking asteroids as well, and those are also simpler in shape and when I examine them closely I can clearly see where the polygons are, and I suppose a lot of the effort was in texture tesselation and shaders and not polygons. But really when looking at X4 asteroids, I dont even know where the damn polygons are most of the time, I'm really curious what the triangle / face count is on those things. I wish there was an option to not only lower texture detail on those asteroids, but lower the damn face/polygon count, and only the asteroids so I can have a nice looking game with some low-poly asteroids chillin in the background that I barely notice.

Again, I think the asteroids in X4 have more polygons than most modern games, more triangles if you will - which leads to more faces which have textures drawn on them. I wish there was an option in the graphics settings to just lower the graphics settings of the asteroids and not everything else. But I really think the designers should scrap the ones they made and make new ones with less polygons and complexity, and just use other techniques to make them look good like tesselation, shaders, textures, etc. I feel that too much complexity was added to them and really when you have a ton of asteroids in a picture, not each one has to be perfect and have so much detail. Not to mention some of the asteroids in X4 dont really look that great, the ice ones are my favorite but some of the brown and dark grey ones look pretty bad. I will say that some asteroid groups coupled with volumetric fog look realllly good.

But SCFP2 needs work. The weird white smoke particles that are really big look bad, the different asteroids look bad, it just looks bad and runs bad.

I also wonder if only NVIDIA or windows systems are struggling with the asteroids and the devs are playing with AMD / LINUX systems perhaps? IDK does anyone here have great framerate in SCFP2 when flying around all the asteroids?

[Lander1979]

I'm running on a circa-2011 AMD FX4100 Quad Core O/C'd to 3.8 Ghz with 8 Gig Ram and a Nvidia 1050Ti 4Gb. My OS is Arch Linux and I run the game in a Steam Proton wrapper so that the game detects both my Joysticks.

My main bottleneck is that the 8Gb Ram gets filled completely and I go into the sub-FPS (something like a single frame every 5 to 7 seconds) for several minutes after every Quick-save as the game partially re-builds itself from the Swap Drive.

[KextV8]

IDK does anyone here have great framerate in SCFP2 when flying around all the asteroids?

You'd have to note your gfx settings. I haven't noticed any strange slowdown personally, other than the normal slowdown from having bajillions of owned objects in my empire. But I'm also only playing at 1080p with most settings on the lower end and antialiasing on fxaa.

[SpaceCadet11864]

IDK does anyone here have great framerate in SCFP2 when flying around all the asteroids?

You'd have to note your gfx settings. I haven't noticed any strange slowdown personally, other than the normal slowdown from having bajillions of owned objects in my empire. But I'm also only playing at 1080p with most settings on the lower end and antialiasing on fxaa.

I have antialiasing turned off 1440p running most settings at medium.

I have tried it on low and it still drops in framerate in SCFP2. It's not as bad when everytthing is turned up.

Sad thing is I can play a lot of the game with everything on ultra and have a good experience, except in areas with lots of asteroids. Combat + asteroids is also a sight to see lol.

I've used all kinds of graphic settings(even absolute minimums at 1080p), nothing fully nullifies the asteroid experience, but indeed mitigates it. Still I think the asteroids just need reworked. I bet if they cut the poly-count down it would run smooth even with high quality textures.

EDIT: Forgot to add, I once had a bunch of stations in hatvica's choice and the framerate wasnt as bad as second contact flash point 2 - that place needs reworked.

[KextV8]

I have tried it on low and it still drops in framerate in SCFP2. It's not as bad when everytthing is turned up.

Can you post up a map image of where in sector? I'm curious to see if I drop as well there. Or is it just that sector as a whole?

[SpaceCadet11864]

I have tried it on low and it still drops in framerate in SCFP2. It's not as bad when everytthing is turned up.

Can you post up a map image of where in sector? I'm curious to see if I drop as well there. Or is it just that sector as a whole?

Specifically in SCFP2:
I find it anywhere when flying in and out of asteroid clusters. So it can be really smooth even with lots of asteroids visible, but once I cross a threshold and am getting into an area where the asteroids are the framerate drops. Usually for a few seconds its really bad (15-20 fps) then it speeds up again but is noticible worse than before (40-50fps). Once I leave the threshold and am in open space the framerate bumps back up(70-100fps).

[aquatica]

Just a sidenote:
The Hotfix 3 did *something*. My FPS skyrocketed from what it was; my current game had around 35-50fps anywhere before HF3, but with HF3 it's 85-160 easily.

Some places have way worse FPS but in general there was a huge improvement, at least for me. I'm curious if this is due to the trader issue that was fixed, so CPU is free to do actual simulation and not get stuck on those AI traders failing to cancel reservations (or something similar)?

I still get the occasional stutter out of nowhere and getting myself involved in large battles is bad for my performance, but imo - getting better I guess?

[Panos]

I've upgraded my PC 3 times since I first played X4, and I didn't upgrade it for X4 but just in general.

I have a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (really wanted the 5xxx series but could not find them anywhere when I got this one)
32gb RAM
RTX 2080 Super
Samsung 970 EVO SSD

For the most part this game runs great. The only time I have frame-rate issues are around asteroids, the ones in second contact flashpoint 2 seem to be the worst. The game will run at a decent framerate (60+ fps) but once I am flying through the asteroids the frame rate will drop to 15 fps for a few seconds and then hold around 30 fps for a while.

Pure speculation but:

1. When moving from low attention to high attention, I think it uses a lot of processing when there are lots of asteroids loading into high attention. This is why it drops to 15 fps for a few seconds (its loading Low attention into high attention) This I feel would be the CPU portion but then there's just rendering them which is quite taxing in 3 machines I've used to play this game.
2. The asteroids tax my GPU. My 2080 Super gets to 100% while the framerate is low around the asteroids. Not ALL asteroids do this but the ones in second contact flashpoint 2 for sure.
3. lowering graphics settings improves framerate around the asteroids in SCFP2, but it still drops.
4. There are other systems that are heavy with asteroids that cause similar issues as well, its not just SCFP2 but SCFP2 is the absolute worst.

I've had this issue with all 3 machine setups that I used to play this game. It's always the asteroids and its always the ones in SCFP2. The asteroids there have taxed my 1080 and my 2080 the same.

I know the game is CPU intensive, but I think the asteroids have a lot more polygons then most asteroids I've seen in other games. Also I dont know at all how the collision detection works but if its trying to mesh with all the faces on the asteroids then that would explain why they lower frame rates too, even though that would be CPU. I highly doubt that is the case, I'm sure the collision mesh or whatever has less faces than the asteroids because GAWWD DAYUM them X4 asteroids have a toonnn of rendered faces on them.

Elite Dangerous for one, has some nice looking asteroids, but their shapes are very similar to eachother and none usually as deformed as X4
Everspace has some really nice looking asteroids as well, and those are also simpler in shape and when I examine them closely I can clearly see where the polygons are, and I suppose a lot of the effort was in texture tesselation and shaders and not polygons. But really when looking at X4 asteroids, I dont even know where the damn polygons are most of the time, I'm really curious what the triangle / face count is on those things. I wish there was an option to not only lower texture detail on those asteroids, but lower the damn face/polygon count, and only the asteroids so I can have a nice looking game with some low-poly asteroids chillin in the background that I barely notice.

Again, I think the asteroids in X4 have more polygons than most modern games, more triangles if you will - which leads to more faces which have textures drawn on them. I wish there was an option in the graphics settings to just lower the graphics settings of the asteroids and not everything else. But I really think the designers should scrap the ones they made and make new ones with less polygons and complexity, and just use other techniques to make them look good like tesselation, shaders, textures, etc. I feel that too much complexity was added to them and really when you have a ton of asteroids in a picture, not each one has to be perfect and have so much detail. Not to mention some of the asteroids in X4 dont really look that great, the ice ones are my favorite but some of the brown and dark grey ones look pretty bad. I will say that some asteroid groups coupled with volumetric fog look realllly good.

But SCFP2 needs work. The weird white smoke particles that are really big look bad, the different asteroids look bad, it just looks bad and runs bad.

I also wonder if only NVIDIA or windows systems are struggling with the asteroids and the devs are playing with AMD / LINUX systems perhaps? IDK does anyone here have great framerate in SCFP2 when flying around all the asteroids?

Activate CPPC and CPPC Preferred Cores on the BIOS for the 3900X
With good cooling you should be hitting 4650Mhz on 2 cores playing this game and 4550-4600 the rest on CCD0

[SpaceCadet11864]

Hey Panos,

After updating bios and just using auto-overclock it set it to max 4750Mhz and the game is running a ton better now. Words cannot express my gratitude, thank you so much.

EDIT: the asteroids still make it cut framerate but its a lot less noticable.
EDIT2: It wasnt at 3000 it was at 3999