Very bad FPS during combat (Windows Vista)

[Godmave]

Even disabling every single sound device didn't help me. So I'm inclined to claim that the bad fps in combat, especially with khaak, is not always a sound issue

At a earlier time trying a patrol mission, there where hundreds auf xenon ships (P,L,M,N), taking the sector apart, and there was not a single stutter. Now a few khaak interceptors paired with a bomber or two plus some sentinals have the potential to turn the game to a diashow Bring a corvette into the mix and even your guns fire only once in a while.

Seeing that this happens only after some time playing, my guess is that the baseload (managing all ships, etc.) rises steadily so that peaks like a combat "kill" the system.

[Kapakio]

The other CPU core is running everything else on your system. This could include drivers, and will certainly include Windows' own background tasks. I'd say 40% was quite high, but not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Ok, but why the second processor comes to 40% only when I'm playing??? What Windows' stuff could start to running just when the game is active???

Oh, and I was just to say that my problem was very similar to the other thread about sttutering, but then he said he didn't applied the last hot patch Not my case.

And I'll give a try tonight uninstalling the "live cam" thing. Something tells me that won't help thou

To the last post, I'll give a try with a new game also, to see what happens.

[Kapakio]

Well, just did the try unistalling the live cam and no change.

Still wondering why the other procesor is also highly utilized. In fact, the usage of X3TC.txt is always around 52 -55%. How come??

[CBJ]

Ok, but why the second processor comes to 40% only when I'm playing??? What Windows' stuff could start to running just when the game is active???

Two reasons: First, because with one process (the game) using up pretty much all the CPU time on one core, pretty much everything else will automatically be sent to the other rather than being distributed evenly between the two. Second, the game makes a lot of use of Windows and DirectX functionality, and through that driver functionality, which means any additional activity associated with threaded processes created by those things is likely to fall to that second core too.

I don't quite see why you think this is such a big deal. The game is single-threaded and will use one core. The underlying architecture will do its best to push anything else that's going on onto the other core. Unless you think there's something running on your PC that shouldn't be that is taking up additional cycles on that second core, I can't see why you are in the least bit concerned about it. And even if that were happening, the second core isn't running at 100% so it shouldn't affect performance.

[Kapakio]

I don't think is such a big deal. I was just wandering but you gave me the answer, the game uses a lot of the windows and directx functionality, and of course, that goes to the other processor.

Now I wonder if the 3GB switch will do the trick...

[VincentTH]

I don't think is such a big deal. I was just wandering but you gave me the answer, the game uses a lot of the windows and directx functionality, and of course, that goes to the other processor.

Now I wonder if the 3GB switch will do the trick...

I tried the /3GB switch on WinXP-32 SP3, and the game does not update the graphics when I ALT-TAB. It does perform a little bit smoother, which allows me to do some small combat that allows me to at least aim and shoot instead of having combat in a a slide show.

[Reece]

Since X3TC uses only one core

OMG that needs a major rectification..... No wonder I get crap performance in combat.

I guess that means you can have the best system on earth, and X3 will play choppy during large combat operations.

[John-David Mc Bride]

I think it maybe a problem with harddrives...

Older hard drives had more cable conectors,new drive have less connector(I mean more wire conecting=more data through-put)..New drives with less wire means less through-put=bottlenick,

I wrote a program for a robot at work and it made a 33% increase in speed of the robot,the robot still did the same movements but i got it to go faster because i took into account the speed of the processing(The time it take to process the program..)the programers may need to look at the order that things are process....

just saying....

Only thing i do is run this game on a pc that is not on the net and with no antiviras running and as many startup program stoped as posible,I get better framerates then....

[bumpinthenight]

I think it maybe a problem with harddrives...

Older hard drives had more cable conectors,new drive have less connector(I mean more wire conecting=more data through-put)..New drives with less wire means less through-put=bottlenick,

Are your referring to IDE vs SATA? Nah, SATA absolutely blows away IDE controller speeds. IDE is 133megabit/sec transfer rates while SATA2 is 3000megabit/sec. Plus you don't have to fold and otherwise wrestle with those nice and much thinner SATA cables, unlike the ol 40&80 line IDE ribbons

[John-David Mc Bride]

@ bumpinthenight

Yep...like i said..if they put the speed on to the bigger cable you would get more through-put..

If you have a 24 bit cable or a 8 bit cable,,,,which will give more thourgh-put /per clock speed ?Making it small and increasing clock speed is not the answer,there will come a point were it will not work...as fast

If a system has 64 bit processor and its drive has 8 bits...then the system needs to change the 64 bit data into 8 bit data to store it.....and change the 8 bit data back into 64 bit data to process it = bottleneck...

regards ..

[pjknibbs]

If you have a 24 bit cable or a 8 bit cable,,,,which will give more thourgh-put /per clock speed ?Making it small and increasing clock speed is not the answer,there will come a point were it will not work...as fast

Yes, but SATA is able to run many, many times faster than the old parallel IDE in terms of "clock" speed, so even though you're transferring fewer bits per clock, overall its speed is higher. Hardware manufacturers aren't in the habit of introducing new standards that are functionally worse than the old ones, you know...

[John-David Mc Bride]

If you have a 24 bit cable or a 8 bit cable,,,,which will give more thourgh-put /per clock speed ?Making it small and increasing clock speed is not the answer,there will come a point were it will not work...as fast

Yes, but SATA is able to run many, many times faster than the old parallel IDE in terms of "clock" speed, so even though you're transferring fewer bits per clock, overall its speed is higher. Hardware manufacturers aren't in the habit of introducing new standards that are functionally worse than the old ones, you know...

They make thing cheaper by reduesing the amount of material in them,so less copper wire....

Ok ,which is better for colour screens analog or digital ?

digital gives you 16 mill colours say

analog gives you Infinite colour.inbetween the 16 mill colours.but try making a cheap one .too much copper..

wot gives the best sound valve or transitor?

valve's give the best sound...

transistor are cheap to make...

so sorry have to say ,they make it to suit theirself and tell us the so-called good bits...

best regards....

[pjknibbs]

Ok ,which is better for colour screens analog or digital ?

digital gives you 16 mill colours say

analog gives you Infinite colour.inbetween the 16 mill colours.but try making a cheap one .too much copper..

Except you can't actually SEE more than about 16 million colours anyway, and even if you could, the graphics cards that are attached to your display--whether it's analogue or digital--will only display that many. Yes, an analogue display might be able to display colours "in between" those, but if the graphics card can't provide them, what's the benefit?

And SATA is arguably more expensive to produce than the old parallel IDE because it requires a high-speed serial chip at each end of the connection, which IDE didn't. Yes, you're probably saving fractions of a penny on the amount of copper used in the cabling, but that isn't the primary reason for SATA being adopted.

One last thing: manufacturers can do what they like to save money, but it won't do any good if nobody will buy the cheaper product because it's crap.

[frymaster]

Making it small and increasing clock speed is not the answer,there will come a point were it will not work...as fast

You've put your finger on the reason for the change there... PATA could not be practically increased in speed because with the increased number of wires, the problem of "skew" became much more pronounced. It turned out that the reduced hassle of using a serial rather than parallel link more than compensated for the reduced bus width.

[Kapakio]

Well, if you allow me comming back to the topic :

I did the test with the 3Gb switch and it didn't help. In fact, after playing for a couple of hours, the game came to almost a stop (about 10 frames per minute) and then I realized that the game was taking about 2.5 Gb of memory!!
So, this is definetly a memory usage problem of the game. It seems to take all memory available and then starts to paging after it reach the top. Not sure why the problem is worse in battles, but I guess ego whould have the answer.

With this, I think any more attempts to improve performance by tweacking the rig is useless, so I won't make any more attemps until ego release the patch.

[frymaster]

If your system can't allocate 3 gigs of ram to a process without it paging, it may not be worth setting the /3gb switch, but I think you'll still see the benefit.

what metric were you using to get that 2.5 gig figure?

As regards to how much virtual memory x3tc will use, it'll use up to its virtual memory size limit (but will never hit an out-of-memory error). So on a vanilla system, it'll use up to 2 gigs and then unload resources it reckons it doesn't need. On a 32-bit system with /3gb boot flag and modded exe, it'll use up to 3gb. On a 64-bit system and modded exe, it'll use up to 4gb. How much physical RAM that means it can use is up to the OS, of course

Basically, the game never throws data out of memory until it has to, which makes sense. Also, even if you do run out of RAM before the game runs out of virtual memory space, the OS will probably discard resource files before writable data, so while the game is technically paging (as in "the memory page is on the disk") it won't have had to write anything

[lupoluke]

I have very bad lag during fight..
It' s almost unplayable...
Maybe something like 4\8 fps
My specs:

PIV (single) 3.4
2gb ram
Ati 1950 pro 512
Complete installation. - patch 1.21.

[Kapakio]

If your system can't allocate 3 gigs of ram to a process without it paging, it may not be worth setting the /3gb switch, but I think you'll still see the benefit.

what metric were you using to get that 2.5 gig figure?

As regards to how much virtual memory x3tc will use, it'll use up to its virtual memory size limit (but will never hit an out-of-memory error). So on a vanilla system, it'll use up to 2 gigs and then unload resources it reckons it doesn't need. On a 32-bit system with /3gb boot flag and modded exe, it'll use up to 3gb. On a 64-bit system and modded exe, it'll use up to 4gb. How much physical RAM that means it can use is up to the OS, of course

Basically, the game never throws data out of memory until it has to, which makes sense. Also, even if you do run out of RAM before the game runs out of virtual memory space, the OS will probably discard resource files before writable data, so while the game is technically paging (as in "the memory page is on the disk") it won't have had to write anything

Well, I understand your logic, but I don't see how it explains the worse behavior with the 3Gb flag. And I'm just looking to the standard resource usage of windows vista to see the memory utilization of the processes.

On an additional note, after the failure with this test and comming back to the unmodded exe, I've been playing for a while and noticing that the performance is going down each day. Now even fights with 5 or 6 ships turns down dramatically the fps, and sometimes I'm having 2-3 seconds freezing in regular flying situations.

I'll try to continue playing as far as I can go, avoiding all combat situations. I hope the patch comes before I have to stop playing.

[Yazoo]

MrCrawdad wrote, "As you know, this game is primarily a single threaded game. I found that when running my AMD with cool and quiet enabled via bios my processor speed throttled down to a 5.5x multiplier at only 1250 Mhz. The fix was to change my power setting (temporarily) to high performance where the CPU was set to run at 100%. I now run the game at 1024x768 32bit color texture=high shader=high and all the other eye-candy turned on as well. Not sure of the frame rate, but definitely fluid. I mistakingly found the solution while running super-pi on another core while playing the game which prevented the CPU from idling.. "

For people like me who can turn on a computer reliably 3 out of 4 times, can you explain step by step how you change the power setting to run at 100%? I sure appreciate the help.

[Yazoo]

Also, I did go to the task manager and turned the priority of the game to high. I tried to turn it up to realtime but it wouldn't let me. This appeared to have moderated my combat slowdowns but not eliminated them.