[BUG] Any version - Planets slow to render when entering sector - Much improved in 4.10 b1.

[Pesanur]

They can add back the wormhole animation as a disguised loading screen while the planet textures are loaded.

[reanor]

The game does try to pre-load them shortly before you enter the sector, but there can be a lot to load and sometimes it can't get everything loaded in time. This is one of those things that should improve if you install the game on a faster disk such as an SSD. Even on an HDD you may be able to improve it somewhat by setting the game folder to be excluded from your AV software's checks, as this can sometimes slow down file access.

Update :

Now running X4 2.50 Hotfix 1 on This machine

8th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-8750H Processor (6-Core, 9MB Cache, up to 4.1GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
16gb DDR4 (2666MHZ) - Originally the machine came with 8gb which has been upgraded
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti - 4GB GDDR5 VRAM
128GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive - OS System drive, Clean install of Win 10 x64 1903
1TB WD Blue 3D NAND 2.5" SATA SSD - Originally the machine came with a HD which has been upgraded

Game installation drive is the WD Blue SSD
AV is windows Defender, set to ignore the X4 exe and the whole X4 Foundations folder aswell
The game is using the NVidia 1050 High Performance Graphics Adaptor

Just ran X4 Foundations 2.50 Hotfix 1, for about 4 hours.
CPU is occasionally peaking at 48% use, but mostly averages less than 40%, and does not need to use boost mode for this game so far.
NVidia GPU is running at a steady 35% use.
The machine is not even getting warm, and the fans have not had to kick into a higher speed.

TL:DR = The machine is running this game comfortably with plenty of grunt to spare in all departments.

Still experiencing the same issue, especially when coming out of a jump gate having enterred it on a highway.

Don't use external drives... And as a word of advise, considering that X4 is one of the heaviest games on reading data from the drive, and if your motherboard supports it, I really recommend to get SSD M.2 drive. They are a bit more expensive than regular SSDs, but a lot faster for reading/writing. Also, according to the PC stats you posted and the below is a result of the bottleneck calculator. You need a better GPU for your setup, you have quite a high data bottleneck

Average bottleneck percentage: 94.91%
This result is based on average CPU and GPU usage from different programs and games. It changes based on operating system, background processes activity and targeted applications. This result is not universal and changes based on differences in hardware and software enviroments. Please do not use this calculator primary as decision maker than as helping tool to understand performance correlations between different components.

Your graphic card is too weak for this processor.
Intel Core i7-8750H (Clock speed at 100%) with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (Clock speed at 100%) x1 will produce 94.91% of bottleneck. Everything over 10% is considered as bottleneck.

We recommend you to replace NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070

https://pc-builds.com/calculator/Core_i ... d0VZlu/16/

Follow their advise and get at least that GPU and you'll see a lot of performance increase. And of course the M.2 SSD wouldn't hurt either.

[alt3rn1ty]

Don't use external drives... And as a word of advise, considering that X4 is one of the heaviest games on reading data from the drive, and if your motherboard supports it, I really recommend to get SSD M.2 drive.

You quoted my post but apparently did not read it.

1. I do not have any external drives (well apart from the one USB drive I plug in occasionally to backup documents)
2. I have an M.2 SSD as my system drive.
3. The game is installed on the INTERNAL 1tb WD Blue SSD
4. As per the link in my post, its a laptop, GPU is not easily upgraded, but handles this game well enough

None of anything you mention has any bearing on this issue, the devs have already admitted it can be a problem, and this machine in all respects is above minimum spec, even for a laptop GPU which is less capable than a desktop card of the same model with more bandwidth.

And as I said earlier, given the promulgated specifications on the site I bought the game from .. https://www.gog.com/game/x4_foundations

.. I believe I have every reasonable expectation this game should work fine on the machine I have.

As far as the GPU being a bottleneck, thats why I run the game with lower screen res than native, and tweak down custom settings (from what the game engine recommends for this machine) to give a consistantly good FPS. This game series is (and always has been) heavier on the CPU needs than it is on the GPU. I concur that the GPU for X4 is more important these days. Edit : PS, the core clock frequency of the 1050 GPU you compaired with is a lot lower than the GPU in my gaming machine, which has excellent cooling (the laptop does not even get warm if I ramp up the game settings, and the fans are running at a quarter of their full speed in all my testing so far). GPU usage on this machine has never gone above 45% with X4.

Hence to me this issue is a bug with the game.

[Imperial Good]

I really recommend to get SSD M.2 drive. They are a bit more expensive than regular SSDs, but a lot faster for reading/writing.

This makes little difference over a SATA SSD. Most of the improvement comes from the random access latency and bandwidth, which even a SATA SSD does orders of magnitude better than a mechanical drive. The improvement from SATA SSD (AHCI) to PCIe SSD (NVMe) is nowhere near as great. Few applications have significant gains from PCIe SSDs and those that do are usually productivity related. It is unlikely a person could tell the difference between them from black box testing the game experience.

[alt3rn1ty]

Just for any more doubting Thomas's I made a video with MSI Afterburner running.

Just for the hell of it, I also ramped up the game settings to what it recommends for my machine (without any of my down tweaks to help the laptops life expectancy), lets give this GPU a bit of a workout ..

To see the glitch happening with planet loading, go to timeline 2 minutes and 15 seconds. MSI Afterburner lags a bit because it only polls every 1000 milliseconds, but at that timeline where the glitch occurs just after jumping through the next gate, you will notice that GPU use does not go above 60%

https://youtu.be/kLP_UE684W4

@reanor you will also notice the GPU core clock speed 1734mhz - A little bit faster than the 1290mhz 1050 you compaired with on the Bottleneck Calculator. And no, I have not OC'd the GPU.

As they say on the site "*This result is based on average CPU and GPU usage from different programs and games. It changes based on operating system, background processes activity and targeted applications. This result is not universal and changes based on differences in hardware and software enviroments. Please do not use this calculator primary as decision maker than as helping tool to understand performance correlations between different components."

[Imperial Good]

To see the glitch happening with planet loading, go to timeline 2 minutes and 15 seconds. MSI Afterburner lags a bit because it only polls every 1000 milliseconds, but at that timeline where the glitch occurs just after jumping through the next gate, you will notice that GPU use does not go above 60%

I was unable to recreate the problem shown in the video. I tried to recreate it by teleporting to a ship in the middle of Bright Promise (not near a gate) and then taking the highway to Trinity Sanctum III and the result was the planet was completely loaded the instant I entered the system.

In case it is related to caching I decided to flood my cache with as much data as possible in an attempt to evict data relating to Trinity Sanctum III. To do this I toured most of the universe with teleport. After doing this I tried the above procedure again and I was able to reproduce it kind of. The planet showed the white crescent for <<0.2 seconds before the planet fully loaded. This is nowhere near as long as the video shown and the white crescent was immediately visible as opposed to poping in like in the video.

Now practically no part of my system meets even the minimum requirements... Windows 10 OS. I run a stock I7 920 which hits about 2.77 GHz. RAM is 18 GB (3x2 + 3x4) of DDR3 memory @1333MHz with CAS9. GPU is a GTX 760 (4GB). HD used is a Samsung Evo 860 1TB AHCI SSD running at only SATA2 speed (motherboard does not support SATA3). As good as everything with your system is faster than mine yet I do not suffer the issue.

At this point it might be worth providing a save game with reproduction instructions. For example load in, ride highway in front of you to Trinity Sanctum III and the problem should be visible. This would help determine if it is game state related which would explain why it is no problem for my save but a huge problem with your save.

@reanor you will also notice the GPU core clock speed 1734mhz - A little bit faster than the 1290mhz 1050 you compaired with on the Bottleneck Calculator. And no, I have not OC'd the GPU.

This is because all modern GPUs are effectively auto overclocked from factory. They have a base frequency which is the minimum guaranteed operating frequency but will usually operate somewhere between that and the boost frequency. The actual frequency reached depends on limits such as power limit, thermal limit, current limit, etc. Different workloads will hit different maximum frequencies so something like Furmark or StarCraft II will hit a much lower GPU frequency than most video games do.

[alt3rn1ty]

The only dev input so far with this issue was CBJ ..

The game does try to pre-load them shortly before you enter the sector, but there can be a lot to load and sometimes it can't get everything loaded in time.

No devs have asked for a save yet, but have confirmed it can be an issue (see my bold in the quote), so I dont think a save is required, they already know its an issue among other game performance issues they concur need to be resolved in due course.

The game saves I am on now are also new since starting this topic (ie new game start, so the issue cant be just attributed to a confused series of saves .. unless that happens repeatedly and we dont know).

Instructions for reproducing = Jump in any ship as a passenger, select the ship in Properties on the map, then right click a destination that takes a huge cross x-verse journey which the ships captain will path on mostly highways .. And watch the glitches go by. It doesnt happen everywhere, and sometimes happens off screen if you are not looking in the right direction when you jump. But that video shows two good examples anyway, Trinity Sanctum and Pious Mists. There is another example in the OP

Anyway in case it is useful to someone here's a save https://www.dropbox.com/s/8vvtc35ong5bc ... ml.gz?dl=0

[nauttdog]

Continuing a discussion from another thread here because this thread is more relevant to the issue. I am experiencing this as of the most recent update 3.10. I have nailed it down to assets not getting enough time to render in. My guess is the devs have put some parameter in the game that lets it know to start rendering in the next system once you are within a certain range of a jump gate. My suggestion would be to increase that range -as any fast ship will cause the pop-in. For those of us who like immersion and to play this game that way, it is extremely disconcerting and bothersome to have planets popping in after you've arrived in the system. I would say its more important to get the planet in first before even the stations, and asteroids, imo.

Because I enjoy flying scout ships which are extremely fast, my temporary imperfect solution is to slow down before entering a jump gate in order to allow time for the game to register which assets to load in. This has worked, but clearly it has major drawbacks as I can't do that if i'm entering enemy territory.

[alt3rn1ty]

Did this get fixed ?

I just tried to reproduce it in 3.20 beta 1, new game, jumped on the main superhighway and went round it (both directions) 5 times continuously ..

In all the usual places I could reproduce this since the games launch, now I cant reproduce it. Planet textures are loaded smoothly and no hint of any visual glitching anyway that I can detect.


@nauttdog - Whats your machine specifications, just curious because its ironic the minute I find this fixed, there is your report on the same issue .. I note you are running 3.10, but in the fix list for 3.20 beta 1 which I am now running this issue is not listed as fixed, so I presume its been fixed either prior to 3.20 beta 1 .. or they stealth fixed it in 3.20 beta 1

[Alan Phipps]

I would assume that you have updated your graphics driver more than once since Aug 2019.

[alt3rn1ty]

I would assume that you have updated your graphics driver more than once since Aug 2019.

Yes, I wonder if that may have helped fix it too, but this was such a long term problem with many graphics driver updates prior to my first post here in this topic, it still surprised me.

This has been a bug since day 1 release of X4 for me - Haven't seen it mentioned, ~snip~

Having had the CTD at startup issue for so long (which was fixed in 3.10), and now having Split Vendetta installed, its been a while since I have been testing betas (actually in game that is, as opposed to just trying to start the game repeatedly without success in every beta that came along). The first time round the superhighway I wasn't looking for this issue, being a new game with 3.20 beta 1 I just wanted to open up the map a bit. But then I noticed something wasn't 'normal' .. Then it dawned on me, so I went round clockwise and anti-clockwise to see where all the previously persistant issues occurred, not even one occurrence.

So its possibly one of the recent NVidia Graphics drivers updates you think?
I have not seen any recent NVidia driver release notes mention X4

[alt3rn1ty]

Disregard my last couple of posts ..

Its not fixed.

Must have been because it was a brand new game and nothing much was happening in the X'verse

Now that things are developing, more happening in sectors, I still have the issue of planets rendering their textures a few seconds after entering the sector, even if Textures are set to Medium or Low (both have been tried since the issue came back today).

I think I will open this as a Bug report in the Dev section.

[Imperial Good]

Pre-loading for planets occurs when one approaches gates. Hence the amount of time the system has to load the textures and models is based on how fast your ship is. Assuming X4 is installed on a SSD A slow ship like a raptor should practically never experience planet pop-in as it gives the system plenty of time to preload. On the other extreme a fast ship like a modified Pegasus Vanguard traveling at over 20 km/sec will give the system practically no time to pre-load planets and hence they will have to pop-in when their loading is complete even if installed on some ludicrously fast NVMe SSD.

This is a compromise X4 makes so that players can fly very fast ships while also having no loading screens when doing so. Other games will either limit player speed to the rate that assets are loaded, or force them to endure lengthy loading screens while assets are loaded.

[alt3rn1ty]

Pre-loading for planets occurs when one approaches gates. Hence the amount of time the system has to load the textures and models is based on how fast your ship is. Assuming X4 is installed on a SSD A slow ship like a raptor should practically never experience planet pop-in as it gives the system plenty of time to preload. On the other extreme a fast ship like a modified Pegasus Vanguard traveling at over 20 km/sec will give the system practically no time to pre-load planets and hence they will have to pop-in when their loading is complete even if installed on some ludicrously fast NVMe SSD.

This is a compromise X4 makes so that players can fly very fast ships while also having no loading screens when doing so. Other games will either limit player speed to the rate that assets are loaded, or force them to endure lengthy loading screens while assets are loaded.

Could you please rename the post because "Seems Resolved" is no longer the case.

I have made a Bug report here viewtopic.php?f=192&t=426962

Along with a suggestion for devs to consider ie have the superhighways put the brakes on a little just before the jump gate allowing render time for the next sector ..

Its not a huge stretch of the imagination to consider the superhighway creators would anticipate good practice in slowing you down before a jump gate, to allow reaction time for collision avoidance at the last minute if another craft is entering the same gate on the same side of the gate, who is not using the superhighway, instead of slamming you into it at full tilt .

[alt3rn1ty]

Could you please rename the post because "Seems Resolved" is no longer the case.

Issue still happening with v4 hf1 released today.

[alt3rn1ty]

@Egosoft

(This site really needs a Firework emote for ancient bug fixes)

V4.10 Beta 1 HotFix 1

Current laptop specifications :

Laptop Dell G7 7590 : Win 10 x64
CPU 9th Gen' Core I7 9750H <= 4.5ghz,
GPU NVidia Geforce GTX 1650, VRAM 4gb GDDR5,
RAM Corsair Vengeance 32gb (2x16gb Dual Channel) DDR4 2666mhz,
Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 NVME 500gb + Dell 512gb SSDs' (both Internal)

Its not minimum spec', but being a laptop it is less capable than a Desktop equivalent spec machine, and so probably in the vicinity of medium published game specifications.

NVidia Drivers = 466.63 (I know I just noticed 466.77 is available, will update shortly before anymore reports)


This bug report issue is 99.9% solved with this beta.

I just had 45 minutes running my old save, flying in a Geometric Owl with a 3 Star pilot driving and me standing behind him, and commanding the ship via the map to "Fly to" various locations at opposite ends of the map. COH is installed and the map fully revealed, I am at the stage of helping the Yaki to get rid of the Xenon in their sector, so its quite an advanced game playthrough ..

The improvement to the games performance loading the next sectors game resources (planet textures) is remarkably improved.
Most sectors are instantly loaded with barely perceptible loading of textures in the busiest of sectors.

Having criss crossed the X'verse with my flight path, the pilot mostly using Highways and fast travel through gates, I have only seen one instance of a planet looking like a Polo Mint (White with a hole in the middle as previously shown in this topic), and on that one instance it was roughly for half a second (unlike previously when I could count up to 5 seconds on some occasions before the full planet textures had loaded).

Excellent job on refining the loading balance

Before trying this beta out I had noticed Bernd's topic here :

The following, seemingly unremarkable point is also very critical and requires a lot of testing. The new improved graphics engine should now be able to cope better with systems that are at the lower end of our hardware requirements. However, even with better systems, there are still customers where the game stops with "device lost" messages. Here, 4.10 will change a lot. Unfortunately, every change brings with it the danger of new problems. We are currently testing this intensively.

• Improved asset pre-loading on GPUs with high memory capacity.
  Improved asset streaming on GPUs with low memory capacity.

Will continue testing, but from what I have seen so far all I can say is WOW!, what a difference.