Vheissu wrote: ↑Fri, 19. May 23, 01:06
So after some more travelling - General fps is buttery smooth but there are still strange stuttering slowdowns in and around stations. It goes from 60+ fps to almost nothing for a second or two and then back to normal. Happens most often while turning or moving. Occurs every.. 5-20 seconds? pretty often.
I'll move on to the other fixes suggested and see if anything helps.
The only time I've had a situation where the fps has dropped so drastically as you describe, it turned out to be a weird Windows paging file issue. Basically, for whatever reason, Windows was paging out data when the game was using more than about 8 GB. Normally, this would not be too much of an issue as the paged data would not be needed for the current scene. However, in my case, Windows was incorrectly paging out data the game needed NOW, leading to huge fps drops every few seconds. Literally, several seconds of smooth gameplay, several seconds of unplayable judder, repeat.
As I had the tools available to me, I monitored the system while this was happening and could see that currently needed data was being written to the page file, then read back right away - heightened drive access observed, X4 data present in the page file being read back. I had a save that exhibited the issues upon loading, so I had a good test case to examine. As my first test, I tuned OFF my system's Page file entirely. While this is perhaps not advised, for various reasons, it was the quickest way to test. Upon loading my save, everything was perfectly smooth once more. I could see that Windows
wanted to page stuff out, but as there was no page file available to it, it effectively "paged" it to RAM.
The solution - well, a work-around really - I eventually settled on was to restore the Page file, but at a minimum level of 256MB so certain features that rely on it still worked AND raise the game's Priority to "High". Raising it to high leads X4 to effectively use more RAM - which obviously has to be available, I have 32GB - avoiding the excessive page file use.
The Windows issue was eventually fixed via regular Windows updates, and I've never seen such extreme Page file thrashing since in any title. However, I still run that minimal page file and the game at "High" priority as it appears to give the most consistent performance. I don't notice any stutter when near stations either, however, there WILL be some stutter when I teleport to a station as there's a few seconds delay, then some stutter and potentially slight overall FPS reduction as the wandering NPC's on a station spawn in. Once they're spawned though, things do tend to settle down. They do have a noticeable performance impact if I'm going by pure fps, but I generally limit to 60 FPS and I don't often go below that.
I set up a small script to automate launching the game with High priority:
Create a .bat file in Notepad called something like "X4 Foundations (High Priority)" or whatever you like.
Add the following:
Code: Select all
D:
cd Games/X4 Foundations
Start /High X4.exe -showfps
Save the .bat file.
Broken down that's:
D: - change to D: Drive where my Games folder is (I have the GoG version)
cd Games/X4 Foundations - change to the game folder (obviously this, and the drive letter above, need to be YOUR game drive and folder location)
Start /High X3.exe -showfps - Start X3.exe with HIGH priority and display the game's fps in the bottom right corner (can be assigned to a keyboard shortcut)
Next, you create a shortcut to that .bat file - call it what you like - but set that Shortcut to run as administrator.
Place the shortcut wherever you like and use that to launch the game. Path will be different for Steam version, and Steam will need to be running
unless you use the NoSteam.exe available from Egosoft.
which lead to me pulling my hair out figuring how to troubleshoot a laptop that only booted to a black screen.
