Now getting >90 FPS at 1080p - info on issue affecting high-end rigs [spoilers]

[myztkl-kev]

AMD T1100 BE @ 3.7 (LC)
2x 6870 HD (LC)
16GB Corsair Vengeance (AC)
GA-890FX

getting <30fps in Albion, and 50fps+ the other side of the gate.

That said, I would think that making an AUTOSAVE would come as a higher priority, to stop your fanbase [me included] getting too
At least that way we can PLAY the bloody game while you fix it, instead of doing the same collection of missions over and over and over again.

There's a quick save? and no need for ship insurance? its pretty easy to push F5 any time you wanna save. that being said, i wouldnt trust an autosave to save during a time that wont corrupt your save.

[Scoob]

The fact that the game is particularly laggy after loading a savegame for several seconds (i.e. when the loading thread is still at work), and then becomes smooth again, further supports the theory, I believe.

Actually, it's smooth for a while, then laggy for a little while longer, then back to normal. At least, that my experience of v1.14 so far. Happens every time I load a game. Worried me at first, but when I realised it goes after a little while, I stopped worrying. No particular hdd thrashing occuring during the judder though, so it's long done loading assets.

Scoob.

[Astyrrean]

See that's the interesting point.

Pretty much ALL high end rigs are getting 20-30 FPS @ 1080p/noAA in Albion and 40-60 FPS @ 1080p/noAA in DeVries. Exception is staring at empty space in DeVries or entering empty highways in DeVries, where >100 FPS can be reached.

Now the interesting thing is that the above is regardless of actual individual CPU or GPU configuration. Seems like another point supporting the thread synchronization hypothesis.

[Astyrrean]

The fact that the game is particularly laggy after loading a savegame for several seconds (i.e. when the loading thread is still at work), and then becomes smooth again, further supports the theory, I believe.

Actually, it's smooth for a while, then laggy for a little while longer, then back to normal. At least, that my experience of v1.14 so far. Happens every time I load a game. Worried me at first, but when I realised it goes after a little while, I stopped worrying. No particular hdd thrashing occuring during the judder though, so it's long done loading assets.

Scoob.

I have the same experience. Again, I think it relates to thread synchronization because resource utilization goes down not up in the "slow" period.

[Astyrrean]

Still haven't seen any Devs admit that this is the issue and that it is being worked on... bump.

That's because they are not ready to do that. They are building high-end rigs to replicate the issue on their end first. That is always the first step in software root cause analysis and resolution. And it is the correct approach.

Once the issue is replicated, the next step is to pinpoint the root cause. I think this thread should help in pushing the thread synchronization hypothesis (very) high up the list of possibilities.

Once a root cause hypothesis has been conjectured, a tentative fix must be developed. As I explain in an earlier post, the fix for this type of issue can range anywhere from trivial to next-to-impossible, depending on the section of code responsible.

Once a tentative fix has been developed, it must be tested on two fronts: first, it must be established that it actually fixes the issues seen by reporting users; second, it must be tested for regression (i.e. make sure the new fix does not break other stuff elsewhere). In threaded software manipulation, regression testing is particularly important as breaking code logic by removing synchronization items can happen really easily.

Only once all of the above is complete can the fix be made generally available.

This is not a quick&dirty fix. Expect it to take a few weeks at least, assuming developer focus on it (which, yes, it would be nice to have confirmed).

[cerberus448]

Thought I would jump in on this. I'm running a 4.5 Ghz 4770k, gtx 780, and 16 GB of ram. The majority of my gameplay is smooth, but there are 3 instances that cause me to start dropping major frames.

1. For some reason, the launch video when you first start the game will sometimes be very choppy, like <5 FPS and sometimes it will be perfectly fine. I've found that the most of my crashes during gameplay have occured when this happened at the launch.

2. Being on one side of a zone and facing EVERYTHING. Yeah, that will prob cause some frame drops but it persists even when I turn back away and will continue for a while or until I reload a save.

3. Heavy particle areas, the mining station where u deliver the 100 E Cells is probably the best example of what I'm talking about. Its not a constant frame drop to <5 but happens more often in these types of conditions, again as said in the previous instance, I move out or turn away and the frame drops continue. Another area that I see this similarly is in Devries zone Fervid Corona.

[Prexxus]

Thought I would jump in on this. I'm running a 4.5 Ghz 4770k, gtx 780, and 16 GB of ram. The majority of my gameplay is smooth, but there are 3 instances that cause me to start dropping major frames.

1. For some reason, the launch video when you first start the game will sometimes be very choppy, like <5 FPS and sometimes it will be perfectly fine. I've found that the most of my crashes during gameplay have occured when this happened at the launch.

2. Being on one side of a zone and facing EVERYTHING. Yeah, that will prob cause some frame drops but it persists even when I turn back away and will continue for a while or until I reload a save.

3. Heavy particle areas, the mining station where u deliver the 100 E Cells is probably the best example of what I'm talking about. Its not a constant frame drop to <5 but happens more often in these types of conditions, again as said in the previous instance, I move out or turn away and the frame drops continue. Another area that I see this similarly is in Devries zone Fervid Corona.

I was averaging a good 30 fps in Albion and 60 in Devries yesterday. Today when I load up the game like you said, the start up video is choppy as hell, and my game now runs at a maximum of 10 in Albion and Devries may be a bit higher but as soon as buildings load in or I hit a highway with things passing by quickly forget it, it all goes to shit.

[curt428]

I was averaging a good 30 fps in Albion and 60 in Devries yesterday. Today when I load up the game like you said, the start up video is choppy as hell, and my game now runs at a maximum of 10 in Albion and Devries may be a bit higher but as soon as buildings load in or I hit a highway with things passing by quickly forget it, it all goes to shit.

I believe the opening video issue can be solved by disabling V sync in-game and enabling it using NVIDIA Control Panel or equivalent. As for the rest of the issues described, welcome to the thread.


@Astyrrean - First off I want to say how much I appreciate you helping to bring this problem and it's possible causes (and solutions) to everyone's attention. As you can tell I'm frustrated, and would like make sure this thread stays active enough so that we can get some official word that this is being acknowledged and worked on. The Devs must understand how important this is. I just want to hear it.

As with everyone here, I just want to play the game. We've heard all the negativity and we still want to play. We're the ones that need the attention right now.

EDIT: And I know it may take some time, I just want to help move it forward.
If there's anything I can do to contribute I would be more than happy to help.

[Xani89]

Hi! Thank all of you for attempts to find the source of performance problems.

For me each framerate lag is the spike on the graph of HDD usage (4 mb/s read, average). Do you see spikes on HDD usage graph when you moving around any big city? Can resource swapping be the source of problems?

My rig:
AMD APU 3,7 Ghz x4, 8gb DDR3, 2Tb HDD, NVidia GTX760

[Astyrrean]

All here are trying to understand.

In my case the HDD access doesn't seem to be an issue but I've not monitored it too much in detail.

Another hypothesis which someone was exploring with a mod was micro-traffic-related (i.e. the civilian ships traveling around the stations). Given that there is a huge more number of these in Albion than in Devries, it could be a viable hypothesis too.

Then again are these (gazillion civilian ship-objects) individually linked to pathing thread(s)? If so, that could also be the issue.

Cheers,

Astyrrean

[Xani89]

Another hypothesis which someone was exploring with a mod was micro-traffic-related (i.e. the civilian ships traveling around the stations). Given that there is a huge more number of these in Albion than in Devries, it could be a viable hypothesis too.

Yes, it can be. Example from my session:
1) I loaded last savegame in DeVris near the first city, and saw 30-40 fps (using fraps).
2) After 5-10 seconds I saw that city traffic just appeared on screen, and total performance was ruined to 10 fps.
This behavior can be repeated.
P.S. Sorry for my English.

[curt428]

I feel like the micro traffic mod doesn't solve the problem, but just helps relieve part of it. I tried the mod and didn't gain anything considerable, but it did help.

[Il Khan]

Hello, I've been following this thread and think there are more than one problems with the code causing low FPS.

First we have the already mentioned low base framerate when we are in some systems where there are many ships and the AI and CPU calculation may be a bottleneck, but keep in mind that there are also more Advertisment lights and screens etc. there which might be an additional cause.

The reason I state this is that I see very low framerates even in stations where there are such screens with animation, I took the liberty to upload a demonstration to youtube. There I think we clearly see that when you turn to face a new display the framerate drops significantly. I think the end of 1 FPS is due to another one of the problems tough, read the description for more info. Are these animations rendered with CPU and not with GPU or what's going on?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=691CaJY ... e=youtu.be
*Edit* Made a longer/better demostration video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wntYWZU ... e=youtu.be
especially take a look at 1:19 where the game consoles have 20 FPS, they shouldn't be that demanding.

Then we also have the occational period of 1 FPS when some calculation / execution of the code seem to have gone horribly wrong, or something unexpected might have happened and the AI might stop working alltogether, ships stop firiring at you in the middle of a fight and such might occur when this happens.

[curt428]

I think all the things we can observe in the game that appear to drop the fps are just examples of the root cause, and not the cause themselves.

Where certain things like screens and cars and fog would normally drop our fps from 60 to 50, instead it drops from 20 to 10.

There is something behind all the things we can observe with our naked eye, and I think Astyrrean is on to it.



It's time for Egosoft to start fixing their code.

[Astyrrean]

Incidentally, I take issue with this update that Bernd posted:

*UPDATE* - Available memory can affect performance

Looking through DXDiags in the last few days we have seen a number of oddly balanced machines. Machines with very powerful GPUs (680 / 780 etc), but with only 6GB of ram for example. While this is above our minimum system requirements, it is a combination that does not work well. Unfortunately X Rebirth behaves very different from a first person shooter in terms of performance. Since we have a lot of background AI and pathing tasks crunching heavily on memory intensive operations, sometimes this can conflict with the memory intensive graphics calculations. If the performance of the game suddenly drops it may be because your machine is swapping memory. This is only one of many possible causes obviously.

As it happens, I do have a 690 and I do have 6 gigs of RAM. That is far from an unbalanced setup as my data in the OP shows re: Memory usage. It is a combination that works very well. It is your threading synchronization (or other code issue) that does not scale in its current state.

Please do not disseminate false and misleading information. We are all in pursuit of facts and solutions. The above does not help.

We ARE working on other performance improvements, but it is important to understand that with any "above midrange" system you are far more likely to be memory or CPU bound than that you are GPU bound (this also means in these cases graphics settings have no effect).

Could you elaborate on the angle you are taking? Is it the one recommended in this thread? I have no issues being CPU-bound. I have no issues being GPU-bound. I have no issues being memory-bound (if such a thing exists by the way, it more likely is on the VRAM side of things because you should know well that your LAA x32 executable can only address 4GiB of RAM no matter what you throw at it, which btw it doesn't even fully utilize).

The fact is that all high-end rigs are neither CPU nor GPU bound, as the swarm of posts on this and other threads confirm. If you are committed to truly finding the solution, I believe you should start by acknowledging that fact.

I, as most (if not all) here, want to help, but as we do so ask for respect for our intelligence in the process.

Astyrrean

[Lise]

Incidentally, I take issue with this update that Bernd posted:

*UPDATE* - Available memory can affect performance

Looking through DXDiags in the last few days we have seen a number of oddly balanced machines. Machines with very powerful GPUs (680 / 780 etc), but with only 6GB of ram for example. While this is above our minimum system requirements, it is a combination that does not work well. Unfortunately X Rebirth behaves very different from a first person shooter in terms of performance. Since we have a lot of background AI and pathing tasks crunching heavily on memory intensive operations, sometimes this can conflict with the memory intensive graphics calculations. If the performance of the game suddenly drops it may be because your machine is swapping memory. This is only one of many possible causes obviously. We ARE working on other performance improvements, but it is important to understand that with any "above midrange" system you are far more likely to be memory or CPU bound than that you are GPU bound (this also means in these cases graphics settings have no effect).

As it happens, I do have a 690 and I do have 6 gigs of RAM. That is far from an unbalanced setup as my data in the OP shows re: Memory usage. It is a combination that works very well. It is your threading synchronization (or other code issue) that does not scale in its current state.

Please do not disseminate false and misleading information. We are all in pursuit of facts and solutions. The above does not help.

Astyrrean

What the what is Bernd smoking. In what universe can a 32 bit .exe with an LAA flag use more than 4 GB of RAM. If he wanted his game to use 6GB's of RAM, he should've made it a 64 bit native .exe.

I have 8GB of RAM with my GTX 680 2 GB model for the record, and have as lousy performance as everyone else. And I'm not running 8GB's because I needed it for anything, I'm running it because RAM is so cheap why not.

[Brachra]

Yeah, it kinda saddened me when he wrote that.
I mean
my 760 + my 8GB of ram?
thats by no means "Unbalanced".

and the fact that i've never seen rebirth use more than like 2.8 or somewhere around there. what is he saying, if i had 32GB of ram that 2.8 would be used more efficiently? no..

Not a single game I have ever played
including BF4 (which RECOMMENDS 4gb of Vram) or Rome II Total war (on full settings) uses my 2GB VRAM OR my 8GB of Sysram...

So what he is saying makes absolutely no sense at all.

[Arandrell]

4Gb for X-Rebirth + ~1-2Gb for windows and background processes. So the 6Gb figure isn't all that strange...

He also stated that they spent more time optimising for lower end systems, presumably because higher end systems are more capable of brute-forcing most of the pretties, especially if you are willing to take a temporary graphics hit until they have jumped up and down on all the bugs.

[Astyrrean]

4Gb for X-Rebirth + ~1-2Gb for windows and background processes. So the 6Gb figure isn't all that strange...

He also stated that they spent more time optimising for lower end systems, presumably because higher end systems are more capable of brute-forcing most of the pretties, especially if you are willing to take a temporary graphics hit until they have jumped up and down on all the bugs.

You do know that X-Rebirth does not nearly use up close to 4GiB right?

The rest is true, and that's fine, and fine by me. It is an honest to-the-point observation and a legitimate development choice. What is not fine by me is the factually incorrect statement above. And the lack of acknowledgement that the game is presently neither CPU, GPU nor memory bound on high-end systems but rather bound by a code issue.

[Arandrell]

What i personally take from the statement is something more like "I have just sifted through 100+ DXDiags over the last few days attached to the statement 'I can run game X at full resolution with no fps loss, why can't i run X-Rebirth the same way?' and noticed that they are built to give max performance in FPS games. Unfortunately, X-Rebirth works differently under the hood and here is why..."


The second statement, about performance improvements, is a nod to the coding issue, while reiterating that having a bleeding-edge GPU is unlikely to impact FPS as much as might be expected. Because the bottleneck is the utilisation of the CPU and memory by the code.