1.50 Texture and UI dropout, and why current answers are unacceptable

[TNixon]

I (and a lot of other people) are experiencing problems with textures dropping out and UI options disappearing. For me, this problem has become *significantly* worse with the 1.5 patch. Where I would previously have to restart the game every couple hours or so because the game became completely unplayable due to missing UI, after playing with 1.5 for just a few hours, I now have to restart about every 30 minute. Something has gone seriously wrong, and I sincerely hope it's not "extra" textures for the online function, that I will never use. (I doubt that's it, unless the game's texture management is very poorly coded)

Yes, I am aware that the "minimum" standard for the game is a video card with 3GB, and the reason that these problems occur is because there's not enough texture memory. I am also aware that the standard response is "your video card doesn't meet the minimum requirements", but here is an explanation of why I think that answer is BS, and also believe that it's absolutely ridiculous that 3GB of texture memory is the absolute minimum spec:

First, and foremost, because I know exactly how straightforward it would be to create an "ultra low" texture setting, by reducing most of the textures to a quarter of their existing size. Are they going to look as good? Of course not. But you know what looks really horrible? Walking into a bar and having so many textures missing that you can't even figure out how to get up the ramp to the second level. You know what's even worse? Not being able to even see UI options because they are blacked out. It's also extremely likely that in a game this size, there are textures that could easily be shrunk by 16x or more with little to no loss in fidelity. I am quite familiar with how detailed many texture artists want to make a texture that is never going to be more than 20x20 pixels on the screen.

Second, because 3GB is a *lot* of textures to have loaded all at once. No offense intended, because X4 is a pretty game at times even on the lowest texture setting, but there is nothing in this game that should require large amounts of texture memory at the lowest detail settings. It's not *that* gorgeous. And if devs are saying "we can't possibly reduce the visual fidelity any lower than this without sacrificing too much of the artistic vision", then their priorities are significantly off, because actually being able to play the game should be the first and foremost priority, far above how good it looks at the lowest detail settings.

Third, because 2GB cards are still extremely common. Just look at how many video questions in this forum are posted by people with 2gb vram. Many mid-level "gaming laptop" cards 3 years ago still had 2GB. The game performs just fine on my video card (960M), except for the texture memory problem. I turned down the resolution to 1280x1024 in hopes of saving a hair of vram (knowing that it probably wouldn't make much of a difference, only about eight megabytes, which is equivalent to one fifth of one percent of the "required" 3gb), but even at my monitor's base resolution of 1920x1200, the framerate was just fine most of the time. At 1280x1024 it's super solid except in the densest of visual fields with asteroids and visual effects and streamers and everything. The performance of the video card is not the problem, it is purely a VRAM issue. Again, if this was an artistic decision, priorities were off. Mid range cards and systems that are only three years old should definitely have been included in any reasonable minimum spec.

Fourth, because there is no eviction of unused textures from video memory to make space for new ones. How do I know this? Because the problems appear over time after playing the game and going places. The more time that passes the worse it gets. Honestly with a lot of the visual artifacts that appear, I'm surprised it doesn't just crash, because there are objects obviously referencing memory that they shouldn't be. This one is actually a little bit shameful, because it's a very obvious memory leak. If textures are never unloaded from memory when they're no longer being used, then the graphics are going to fail on *everybody* at some point, it's just a matter of time. (unless the total size of all of the textures in the game is under like 16gb or something, which seems extremely unlikely given that the "minimum" spec is 3gb) Alternatively, maybe there is some attempt at managing VRAM and unloading older and unused textures to make room for new ones. If that's the case, then you can just consider this a very strongly informed bug report that your texture management is horribly broken, and textures are not being released when they should be. *Maybe* it's purely a fragmentation problem, but that seems extremely unlikely given how many even large-sized textures (which there should be pretty close to zero of at the low texture setting) can comfortably fit in 3gb (or even 1gb).

And finally, because no other game I've played in the past year, no matter how new, has had a problem even remotely resembling this. I've bought probably 15 or 20 games in the past year or so, and this is the only one that I haven't been able to find settings low enough to run successfully. I know the stock answer here is "how well other games do is irrelevant" but that is simply not true. If every other game out there runs fine on 2GB cards (just with lower quality), and you cannot, that is absolutely relevant. It means you are *way* behind the curve on making things work correctly. If I were to tell you that basically every single other video gaming company out there managed to solve a problem that you couldn't, how does that make you feel? It should make you feel pretty bad, especially given that many of the previous points have demonstrated it's not a massively difficult problem to solve...

I realize all of these things are things that would have been much easier to apply at the beginning than they are to patch now, but there are definitely things that can be done. Retrofitting a texture management system wouldn't exactly be trivial, but it's a very tractable problem, fairly straightforward, and definitely a very well understood one. Making a "extra low" texture setting for 2gb video cards would definitely be a tedious task (because some textures simply cannot be reduced, but the number of those is generally pretty small).

The thing that concerns me the most is that there's a refusal to admit this is even a significant problem at all, much less an effort to try to fix it. It is a problem, and you should have known it was going to be a problem. There is literally no reason this game should not run perfectly fine on 2GB of VRAM. Or 1GB. Or 512K even. Close-up-in-your-face is not nearly common enough to require so much memory at one time. 95% of the time is spent either looking at the map or a star field.

Fix it? Please? Soon? Or for the love of all that is good, at the very least stop making it worse?

[letwolf]

+1 for that!
I have 2x2 gb cards on SLI and all games run good except... x4!!
Its ridiculous that on 3gb game can run at high settings and 1920*1080,but on 2gb you cant play it even with lowest settings and 1280*1024! difference in texture sizes in 4 and more times, and difference in resolution in 1.7 times

I guess there are some code like that
...
if(get_video_memory() >= 3 GB)
{
// rich person detected, run okay
...
}
else
{
// poor <PERSON> detected, generate random texture crash
textures.getRandomTexture().delete()
randomGameCrash()
....
}
{Let's not be having that sort of language here, ta - esd}

[mike2k4u]

this post is about bi**hing and complaining

sorry i didnt read everything you wrote but i got your drift "all other games are better"?
go read and check other game developers releasing games and patching it 1 year after.....

"I realize all of these things are things that would have been much easier to apply at the beginning than they are to patch now, but there are definitely things that can be done. Retrofitting a texture management system wouldn't exactly be trivial, but it's a very tractable problem, fairly straightforward, and definitely a very well understood one. Making a "extra low" texture setting for 2gb video cards would definitely be a tedious task (because some textures simply cannot be reduced, but the number of those is generally pretty small)."

wont be trivial? are you freaking kidding me? it means texture replacement = game will re-downloaded itself core game files needs to be replaced etc etc....

your so smart i guess your graphical developer? or just a programmer? if you say its so "easy" to change game engine

sell those 2 SLI cards and buy a new card its what i did and never looked back..... (i had 2 R9 280x with 3Gb ram and OC'ed ootb)

i must say the next thing ppl who say SLI with 2 Gb video cards (they DO NOT STACK TO 4 GB)
run all modern games with no problem are lairs i had 2 Xfire video cards and games looked and worked like cr*p

[TNixon]

Three things:

First, do you understand what the words "not trivial" mean? I understand it's not super easy. But neither of the suggestions are particularly difficult either.

Second, A new "ultra low" texture set would only require new files, and they would be significantly smaller than the already existing textures. And frankly, not clearing out unused textures from vram is a memory leak, which is a pretty catastrophic type of bug. To be fair, I'm only guessing that's what's happening based on the behavior, and there are a few glitches that suggest it *could* be something else, but it is a very educated guess.

Third, please dont try to explain to me how things work when you clearly dont understand what's going on in the guts of the systems. I've been developing games for a living for 20 years, and do actually know what I'm talking about. A PC game requiring 3gb of vram when so many recent midrange cards only have 2 is basically bordering on absurd.

[TNixon]

Also, I didnt say "all other games are better". Obviously I really like this one, although I'm quite frustrated that a somewhat livable problem became significantly worse with the 1.5 patch. I start seeing things drop out now as soon as 10-15 minutes in now, where it would take a couple hours before.

I did say that pretty much all other games solve this particular problem gracefully because it's not a particularly difficult one to solve, and the solutions are known and straightforward. And that is absolutely true.

[letwolf]

I never said "there are games better", I very like x3 tc and so have big hopes for x4. but 3 gb VRAM seems such artifical, maybe even hardcoded requirement, that is even reminds me of probably cartel/mafia pact between game developers and hardware developers - first of them make games with artifically unnatural high requirements, second of them sells a lot of new hardware, video cards especially - profits shared

it's a business, nothing personal

p.s. graphics seems nothing like "3 gb and you okay, 2.99 gb and you completely off board"

[FlynTie]

I never said "there are games better", I very like x3 tc and so have big hopes for x4. but 3 gb VRAM seems such artifical, maybe even hardcoded requirement, that is even reminds me of probably cartel/mafia pact between game developers and hardware developers - first of them make games with artifically unnatural high requirements, second of them sells a lot of new hardware, video cards especially - profits shared

it's a business, nothing personal

p.s. graphics seems nothing like "3 gb and you okay, 2.99 gb and you completely off board"

There is no such thing as hardcoded requirements! No developer on this planet would willingly lock certain people out by implementing a certain requirement and especially not a small developer as Egosoft with something around 20-30 people.

[Kamuchi_]

So they put minimum requirements for the game and people with less then the minimum requirements buy the game and then bitch that they don't meet the minimum requirements and demand that something needs to be done about it because of the minimum requirements being minimum requirements.
Ya'll stupid??

[letwolf]

Your arguments are not accepted. If that , in any game there will be no Settings/ultra/high/medium low and so on. always run on ultras or gtfo buy new hardware? No, there is no only game with that. You can run Skyrim on 560 ti OR 1080ti and it will work BOTH CASES without crush, difference only graphic quality.
I have 2x2 gb twoSLI cards and many many people have modern notebook with 2gb card and they all screwed!
nor me, nor they cant play on even lowest setting due to crashes

[Kamuchi_]

Your arguments are not accepted. If that , in any game there will be no Settings/ultra/high/medium low and so on. always run on ultras or gtfo buy new hardware? No, there is no only game with that. You can run Skyrim on 560 ti OR 1080ti and it will work BOTH CASES without crush, difference only graphic quality.
I have 2x2 gb twoSLI cards and many many people have modern notebook with 2gb card and they all screwed!
nor me, nor they cant play on even lowest setting due to crashes

That's why it's called minimum requirements genius.

[ApoxNM]

Seriously???

You post a wall of text because you bought the game dispite not meating the min. requirements and now complain about it, becuase it's not running properly.

Are you really serious?

My rig exceeds min. requirements and runs fine. If it didn't I would actually have real reason to complain, but not you sir, not you.

[letwolf]

Your arguments are not accepted. If that , in any game there will be no Settings/ultra/high/medium low and so on. always run on ultras or gtfo buy new hardware? No, there is no only game with that. You can run Skyrim on 560 ti OR 1080ti and it will work BOTH CASES without crush, difference only graphic quality.
I have 2x2 gb twoSLI cards and many many people have modern notebook with 2gb card and they all screwed!
nor me, nor they cant play on even lowest setting due to crashes

That's why it's called minimum requirements genius.

You seriously just cant realize what Im talking about. Just go ditch daddy's wallet for a pair new 2080ti and forget about this topic.

[lavak9]

I (and a lot of other people) are not experiencing problems with textures dropping out and UI options disappearing. For me, this problem is still not there with the 1.5 patch. Where I would not previously have to restart the game every couple hours or so because the game became completely unplayable due to missing UI, after playing with 1.5 for just a few hours, I still don't have to restart about every 30 minute. Something has gone seriously well, and I sincerely hope I get "extra" textures for the online function, I will use. (I doubt that's it, unless the game's textures are not visible upon extraction)

Yes, I am aware that the "minimum" standard for the game is a video card with 3GB, and the reason that these problems do not occur is because there's enough texture memory. I am also aware that the standard response is "your video card meets the minimum requirements", but here is an explanation of why I think that answer is BS, and also believe that it's absolutely ridiculous that 3GB of texture memory is the absolute minimum spec:

First, and foremost, because I know exactly how straightforward it would be to create an "ultra HD" texture setting, by increasing most of the textures to a triple of their existing size. Are they going to look as good? Of course. But you know what looks really horrible? Walking into a bar and having so many textures not be HD that you can't even figure out how many fly eggs are laid on the ramp to the second level. You know what's even worse? being able to even see UI options because they are not in tiny ultra HD 4K text. It's also extremely likely that in a game this size, there are textures that could easily be increased by 16x or more with little to no loss in download speed. I am quite familiar with how detailed many texture artists want to make a texture that is never going to be more than 200000x200000 pixels on the screen.

I can't keep it up, it's just too long

[jimbob82]

I've been saying about this since the 1.10 patch when I realised they had set a 3GB min spec (You know because they listed hardware requirements by name and not by specs on steam).

On low settings this game has about 70-80% gpu load on a gtx 950 (Im talking fighting fairly large battles with an empire of 100+ ships and 4 megafactories doing their thing in the background) and I dont think for a second this game couldn't be optimised under the hood for much better performance (if you lower the resolution to 1600x900 the game has about 50-60% load on the gpu). Yet it will still crash 3-4 hrs after playing due to the game trying to use more Vram than the card has. The game starts at 1.1gb Vram and quickly climbs, even if you quit back to the title screen dont expect it to free any resources. Why this bug is being obscured by false minimum specs is beyond me.

The devs have stuck their 3GB min spec on the game, thats just to be accepted when the game clearly does nothing that warrents some of the highest min specs of any game on the market? I'm sorry but the ever increasing performance of the latest hardware is no excuse for sloppy software design. If Foundations really did offer somthing that required the hardware it is requesting then I would not have a single complaint and accept the fact I had to upgrade before I could play. But to expect people to upgrade hardware and respect minimum specs that are inplace due to shortcuts and poor design choices rather than what the game actually offers? Asinine. The reason this game does not work flawlessly at mid settings on the card I mentioned is not a hardware limitation problem, its a developer ineptitude problem.

Compare the game with Rebirth (512mb vram) - Foundations, subjectively isnt that much better in terms of graphics, infact in some areas the graphics are dated and a step back(this is from watching streamers with the settings jacked up), the game with the settings turned down actually looks and plays worse than Rebirth in nearly every department.

Inb4 X5:CowboyBuilders? - the latest bunch of community mods repackaged into a whole new game with slightly beter graphics, 16GB vram - min spec.

Do I expect anything said by others or myself on this to make the slightest bit of difference? Nope. I expect in the next few patches this game will be unplayable to 2GB cards and still buggy as hell to everyone else.

TL;DR?ADHD?DontGetThePointsMade? New version of Freelancer announced, doesn't look or do anything that much better than the old Freelancer but you need a 6GB card to play due to bugs being masked as features. - Acceptable?

[otto_deluxe]

So, after skimming across this thread, a few things came to my mind:

1. A few years ago, (like 2-3 years) I got me a cheap-ish stop gap graphics cards (GTX 960 reboot from PowerColour) for roughly 200€, so it should be around 80-100€ now, and it has 4 gb of VRAM. I know it is an "extra cost", but it's not like it's 1400€ like a RTX 2080Ti. If you find one used, the card costs just as much as the game. If someone spent the time spent raging here on the forum working over hours, that fictional person would have already made that money. Plus, sell your own cards. Even if you only ask 20€ a pop, that's still almost half the price already paid off.

2. In terms of VRAM, 2x2 != 4. It just isn't. Both cards need most of the textures and meshes, so you're still limited by the max vram per card. And modern engines use the gfx cards for more than just textures and meshes. There can be hundreds of complex-ish shaders loaded, physics are tracked, some in-game audio is post-processed, maybe they use cuda for some other calculations, some games run AI on your gfx card (even if it's not neccessarily X4) - the cards are much more versatile than ever and get more diverse tasks than ever, so they need more memory than ever.

3. If you can get 2x2 gb cards, why not get a single one of the next tier next time? SLI/Crossfire has so many restrictions anyway.

As for constructive criticism/a hint

4. I have not tried it yet, but there are tools that allow you to use regular RAM as paging VRAM. Yes, it is slow as all hell, and textures will visibly strwam in from time to time, but it should fix crashes. I have to use that option on ENB when palying modded Skyrim SE and Fallout NV and 4. I don't know which tools are compatible, but there should be one out there that works.

5. Most (somewhat) chipsets allow you to use regular RAM as VRAM directly in the BIOS/UEFI settings. Just flip 1-2 gb over to your gfx card as shared memory, problem solved. My mobo doesn't, but it's 9 years old. Any 5-6 year old board or later should have that functionality. Different vendors call it differently, so you might have to have a look around, but this could help reduce your problems.

[andreas2099]

I think that the problems with the VRAM are also due to the fact that the Vulkan Engine was used for X4. OpenGL or DirectX does the most work for the developer. When a game needs more VRAM, the textures are swapped to the RAM. In this case the game lost some FPS but have no texture errors or crashes. But Vulkan needs some extra work for a good memory management. Here in the forum the 960 GTX with 2 GB VRAM was already called potato hardware. But I can play Star Citizen on medium with this card. Games like Witcher 3 and Shadow of Tomb Raider running on high settings. If X4 had the graphic quality of Star Citizen I would say OK, my hardware is bad. But the graphics of X4 is not much better than Rebirth. And Rebirth is playable with 1 GB cards.

[radcapricorn]

Both Mr. Dunning and Mr. Kruger are looking at you.

[OneOfMany]

+1 for that!
I have 2x2 gb cards on SLI and all games run good except... x4!!
Its ridiculous that on 3gb game can run at high settings and 1920*1080,but on 2gb you cant play it even with lowest settings and 1280*1024! difference in texture sizes in 4 and more times, and difference in resolution in 1.7 times

I guess there are some code like that
...
if(get_video_memory() >= 3 GB)
{
// rich person detected, run okay
...
}
else
{
// poor <PERSPN> detected, generate random texture crash
textures.getRandomTexture().delete()
randomGameCrash()
....
}

In the current Politically Correct universe words like <REMOVED> may be jumped upon by those who feel you have used a common term to belittle or ridicule them. Fortunately though there are some institutions out there who have resisted this trend, which is why my local supermarket is still able to sell Cheesy Puffs.

{It's not "PC" to not use language you know can be upsetting to others, and I highly doubt the psuedocode was detecting cigerettes - esd}

[TNixon]

But Vulkan needs some extra work for a good memory management.

Key point here. If they were not willing to do that work, they should not have used Vulkan. Because the result is just, well...it's sloppy.

[Ravel1]

Funny how some people cry about having not enough money to buy a PC powerful enough to run this game...
As i know for a fact and from person experience, that even poor people can buy a decent PC, as long as they work, not even full time jobs.
The only people i know of that cant afford a decent PC (or much of anything ales) are unemployed, disabled, or just kiddis that their daddy didnt gave them his credit card.
Now i am currently unemployed and disabled
but i have a brand new 2018 kawasaki versys motorcycle, LG G7 mobile phone, a PS4 PRO filled with all the new titles, a powerfull PC with a 2k monitor, and i have money to spare
which brings me to a conclusion, that its not about how much money you have, its about how you menage your life