UPDATED: Bernd *was* spreading false/misleading info; Latest post much better!

[foamwolf]

In short you know better than the programmers of this software, just because you say so, but your system doesn't run well with your perfect setup while my system with a 670 and 16GB RAM has no problem. But sure, you are right and the benefit of the doubt shouldn't even be a consideration.

The game can use at most 3gb of ram only, so anything above that should be able to run the game baby smooth. Your 16gb means pretty much nothing.

[Astyrrean]

And let me get this straight. I am a huge fan of the X3 series and of Egosoft.

I have bought the game, as I have X3:TC/AP. I have not requested a refund or issued a chargeback as others have.

That being said, if someone issues what I can factually argue are false and misleading statements, why is there such an emotional reaction versus me specifically?

Prove me wrong. Prove that your performance drop is due, as Bernd hints, to memory swapping - that is easily monitored. Prove me wrong, or, please, entertain the idea that I might not be wrong.

[Zothen]

Try re-reading that statement. And if unclear, re-read it again. Eventually you'll figure out I am stating exactly what you mentioned in your post.

Then, please, explain to me how on this earth 6GB can be a limitation when:
A) a (LAA-flagged) 32bit application running within a x64 OS can only address 4GiB
B) said application does not even use those full 4GiB
C) Windows itself uses no more than 1.5-2GiB
D) Actual runtime data shows physical RAM utilization below 70%

Maybe I am a fool. But if I am a fool, I am such a fool that I don't even understand why I should be a fool.

Dang, indeed misread. Took a 4 for a 2. Im taking back the fool, ofc! (Note to myself: more careful when reading at late night.)

Bernd also wrote on 17 Nov:

4) Performance improvements: It seems ironic that most customers who are particularly dissatisfied with performance are those with the fastest computers. This may partly be because we made no special attempt to optimise for fast PCs. It even seems as though the most extreme high-end PCs barely have higher framerates than mid-range ones. We will be tackling this issue aggresively and will be stocking up on high end hardware for tests, to try out things like SLI and hex-core systems. Of course optimisations will also benefit other systems. Tips for configuration are in my post on the Steam forum and in the Egosoft Support forum.

This looks pretty much like theyve not optimized their threading. Badly coded this can indeed suck up lots of performance.
But there are indeed countless other options you can **** up the performance on faster systems than your "target system". Hard to say without a look into the code, but also not a proof of a intention to mislead.
He said "they dont know" yet. I doubt this is not the truth.


"oddly balanced machines" between very fast GPUs with 6GB RAM.

This is indeed possible, because of the memory swapping. Ive never hit such limits myself, but its possible that it can "not work well".
He did not give enough info what causes the issues besides swapping. This is even different between AMD and nVidia GPUs.

[Shush]

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

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

You have no ties to the development of X Rebirth, or knowledge of it's codebase right?

It's mind boggling to me that you are able to make these statements with a straight face, I am assuming you're not an outright troll; are you?

Lets face some facts, you know a little about software engineering, you may even have a degree and work in the field. But you know absolutely nothing about game development and developing game engines.

Your other posts about multi-threading and performance, or lack thereof, whilst containing appropriate buzz words are purely misguided speculation and conjecture by someone who has never written a large multi-threaded real time graphically intensive application.

How do I know all this, well I have been writing Game and Visualisation Engines since before hardware acceleration even existed and using API's like DirectX, OpenGL, Renderware, OSG, etc for over 15 years. I am currently working with OSG writing shaders for high end distributed hardware.

And guess what, I would never have the audacity or condescending belligerence to call out another developer in the ways you have even if I did have access to their code.

For you to sit their and pretend that you have all the answers or that you are going to single handedly remotely solve all of X Rebirth's performace issues is laughable.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

[Astyrrean]

Im taking back the fool, ofc!

Appreciated.

Hard to say without a look into the code, but also not a proof of a intention to mislead.
He said "they dont know" yet. I doubt this is not the truth.

Again, maybe I am not clear in my writing, but nowhere in any post even remotely do I write about an intention to mislead. The statement itself, I argue, is false and misleading, and I still stand by that!

[Astyrrean]

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

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

You have no ties to the development of X Rebirth, or knowledge of it's codebase right?

It's mind boggling to me that you are able to make these statements with a straight face, I am assuming you're not an outright troll; are you?

Lets face some facts, you know a little about software engineering, you may even have a degree and work in the field. But you know absolutely nothing about game development and developing game engines.

Your other posts about multi-threading and performance, or lack thereof, whilst containing appropriate buzz words are purely misguided speculation and conjecture by someone who has never written a large multi-threaded real time graphically intensive application.

How do I know all this, well I have been writing Game and Visualisation Engines since before hardware acceleration even existed and using API's like DirectX, OpenGL, Renderware, OSG, etc for over 15 years. I am currently working with OSG writing shaders for high end distributed hardware.

And guess what, I would never have the audacity or condescending belligerence to call out another developer in the ways you have even if I did have access to their code.

For you to sit their and pretend that you have all the answers or that you are going to single handedly remotely solve all of X Rebirth's performace issues is laughable.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

Once again, I fail to see where I make a claim on having answers. I have facts - which appear to disprove a statement made by Egosoft, which leads me to my claim of making factually false and misleading statements, which I stand by. Again, I offer you too to prove me wrong and I will take it back and apologize.

And I have a hypothesis about a possible root cause. It may very well be wrong. Do you have a better one?

I write as a customer and fan, not as a fellow developer. May I?

[Shootist]

Then, please, explain to me how on this earth 6GB can be a limitation when:

ok. Try this. When the game is using 3.4-3.5GB, the O/S another 1.4GB and the other odd bits that might be in the background, Browser, notepad, that sort of thing, using another 800MB, the O/S is going to start swapping active memory to disk.

When that happens, a "limitation" occurs that under the same circumstances, won't happen with 8GB of installed RAM.

[Astyrrean]

Then, please, explain to me how on this earth 6GB can be a limitation when:

ok. Try this. When the game is using 3.4-3.5GB, the O/S another 1.4GB and the other odd bits that might be in the background, Browser, notepad, that sort of thing, using another 800MB, the O/S is going to start swapping active memory to disk.

When that happens, a "limitation" occurs that under the same circumstance, won't with 8GB of installed RAM.

Sure if you're playing X-Rebirth (which incidentally does not use in practice nearly as high as 3.5 GB of RAM - check data in separate thread) with Adobe Photoshop, a media encoder, a youtube video etc open in the background, that will likely happen.

In that case, yes, memory size will be a bottleneck, no arguement about that.

[hisazul]

Then, please, explain to me how on this earth 6GB can be a limitation when:

ok. Try this. When the game is using 3.4-3.5GB, the O/S another 1.4GB and the other odd bits that might be in the background, Browser, notepad, that sort of thing, using another 800MB, the O/S is going to start swapping active memory to disk.

When that happens, a "limitation" occurs that under the same circumstances, won't happen with 8GB of installed RAM.

You sir are talking logic. You should by now know that both mobs and trolls are immune to it.
Also you need to be gentle when you tell people their win764bit os alone chews probably 2 gigs of that ram. Now considering the other rubbish that they most likely run... and in the end they will state as the fact that the left over 1-2 gig of ram is PERFECTLY FINE AND OPTIMIZED.
In short... the only thing that you will accomplish when trying to apply logic, is cause your brain cells to commit suicide.

[Musicker]

Just for information's sake (to help Egosoft hopefully) I have a system with an i7 at 2.66Ghz, with a 1TB RAID 0+1 (4 500GB hd) for the main system drive (yea I know, I need to spring for SSD soon) 18GB of DDR2 RAM (yea it's almost 4 years old) and a GTX 570 video card with the standard 1280MB of GDDR5 memory.

My game has for the most part been flawless at 1920x1080 and pretty much everything maxed - it slows down and chugs at certain, seemingly random points, but who knows what that is. Mostly I have been happy with the performance even with my very mediocre system. I know with Egosoft's history of supporting their games (been a fan since X2 came out) we'll see vast improvements in gameplay, features, and performance in the future.

[Dungeoncrawler]

Kinda don't see the logic when enthusiast builds are struggling to run this. I have a 6 core running @ 4Ghz, 32gb of ram, and a pair of titans that can't maintain a steady performance threshold.

[nomae]

I would encourage anyone having this issue to turn off their swap file and try running the game again. Windows will use a swap file LONG before it actually runs out of memory, it just is not noticeable under most conditions until it has to use the swap file for active files.

If your high end computer is well balanced, it won't need a swap file in the first place, and you will likely see small performance increases elsewhere.

When you try this, one of three things will happen.
1. Your game will stop experiencing the FPS slowdown you're seeing, and you'll have identified the problem.
2. Things will crash, and you will consider getting more ram and your computer will benefit from it.
3. Nothing will happen, and your game will still lag, indicating that you are not having a memory bottleneck. In all cases, you will learn something important.

[Shush]

I would encourage anyone having this issue to turn off their swap file and try running the game again. Windows will use a swap file LONG before it actually runs out of memory, it just is not noticeable under most conditions until it has to use the swap file for active files.

http://www.tweakhound.com/2011/10/10/th ... thout-one/

[piiman]

In short you know better than the programmers of this software, just because you say so, but your system doesn't run well with your perfect setup while my system with a 670 and 16GB RAM has no problem. But sure, you are right and the benefit of the doubt shouldn't even be a consideration.

When you say you have no problems please explain? Does it run at 60 FPS or for that matter at any FPS without constantly changing? I have an i5 OC to 4.2 MHz, 680 and 8 gigs and it can run anywhere from 40 to 2 fps. Also do you not have the bugs others are reporting?

The game certainly seems CPU bound as I can run it at any resolution from 1080p to 5760x1090 and I get the same FPS.

This game doesn't seem to have any more behind the scene number crunching than other X games had, in fact I would say it should have less.

Maybe an option to not have 3000 tiny ships flying around in circles would be a good thing. Because that's the only thing that has increased big time over the other X games that I can see.

[werewolves?]

Kinda don't see the logic when enthusiast builds are struggling to run this. I have a 6 core running @ 4Ghz, 32gb of ram, and a pair of titans that can't maintain a steady performance threshold.

Perhaps try checking the nuclear reactor that must power that thing.

[Mauzi!]

Funny discussion, but why so heated ? It's not like the performance matters at all if all you can do is pretty much nothing in this game despite having been promised a "gameplay depth that X fans learnt to expect".

So, why's everyone arguing about performance here, does it really matter if you are bored to death ingame at 15fps or 60fps ? It's not like improving performance will turn this console crap into an X game ever.

[Ratez]

So I can play other high demand games with youtube etc open in the background but X:R doesn't allow us to do that and it is our system's fault the game is not optimized properly.

Is this what people are really saying on the other side of the argument?

I mean any decent company will test their game on a wide-array of systems of different performance. No money is not an excuse for a game that has pre-orders.

[curt428]

Then, please, explain to me how on this earth 6GB can be a limitation when:

ok. Try this. When the game is using 3.4-3.5GB, the O/S another 1.4GB and the other odd bits that might be in the background, Browser, notepad, that sort of thing, using another 800MB, the O/S is going to start swapping active memory to disk.

When that happens, a "limitation" occurs that under the same circumstances, won't happen with 8GB of installed RAM.

Entertain this then:

I have a Phenom II X4 3.6Ghz CPU

I have a GTX560 Ti 1GB GPU

...and 8GB of DDR3 RAM

At the lowest possible settings (even as going as far to use 1024x768 resolution) I am experiencing this issue.


Say what you will about the limitations of 6GB of RAM, which may raise a flag for you, but this is happening on systems across a broad range of specs, including those with excessive amounts of memory.


Astyrrean is trying to help, not troll. He wants to play, just as I and thousands of others want to. He is trying to provoke the Devs to be a little more transparent so we can work together to solve the issue.

How is this so hard to understand? It's frustrating for all of us, but ultimately, we want to play!

[Ratez]

Then, please, explain to me how on this earth 6GB can be a limitation when:

snip

i7 3770k 3.5ghz
8gb ddr 3 ram
gtx 670


I guess I need to upgrade my PC. I have to restart the game sometimes due to lag. My ancient technology isn't up to par for this and it is clearly my fault.

[orcinus]

When that happens, a "limitation" occurs that under the same circumstances, won't happen with 8GB of installed RAM.

I'll just leave this here...
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=352503

1.15 has all of a sudden caused a drop in frame rate on my system.

1.14 I was getting 20-25 FPS now I am getting 5 - 7 FPS... I'm actually hitting ZERO FPS at times!!!

WTF?

It's totally unplayable for me now.

My Win7 64 Bit, 8 Gb Ram, Nvidia GTX 690