Low fps when flying certain ships

[Alan Phipps]

Opening post starts "I am currently playing TC and ..."

OK, then I don't have the problem as you described you had in X3TC and I don't see any similar issue in X3AP either although that is less easy for me to check independently.

I'll fire up your saves in X3AP shortly.

EDIT: Now in vanilla X3AP. Save 4 gives 24fps immediately on load but rises to 50 fps if I move a very short distance further away from the station. Save 8 is 47fps docked, 18 fps immediately on undocking but rising to 24 fps when a short way from the station docks.

Frankly these figures do not surprise me as save 4 is in thick fog cloud effects while save 8 is at a laggy Aldrin mega-station close to the big Aldrin rock. Aldrin is well-known for this problem.

So I see your issue now but it is very localised to very close to the dock etc and is much affected by other external fps-killers such as thick fog effect or Aldrin mega-stations and the big rock.

Since fps recovers very quickly on moving, I really don't find this to be a game-breaker for my system at least.

EDIT2: CBJ gave some relevant info that I was unaware of ...

Alan Phipps wrote: "I don't see how being close to a station can make a particular ship model more or less troublesome to calculate or display."

CBJ wrote: "Oddly enough this can make a difference. When you fly close to an object the game changes "mode" in its physics calculations and goes from checking against a large and very simple bounding box, to checking against the geometry. While not technically related to the display of the ship or station, the effect is similar as the time it takes is proportional to the complexity of that geometry."

So there is an explanation at least, if not a complete resolution.

[Okkim]

Very interesting results Alan! Though those still don't explain the generally poor performance if anything except normal flying around is happening. For example there is often/always a huge fight in treasure chest when you start a new game and at the peak of the battle my fps drops to ~15 (well, I don't exactly know what kind of performance I should be getting when 40 ships are fighting).

There is also the issue of docking inside a station when my fps might drop to as low as 3 which makes it almost impossible to do manually. (for example the big boron and argon shipyards). However when I use the autopilot to dock my fps stays up. I guess this happens because the docking autopilot disables collisions or something. This also happens when I fly close to other ships.

Terracorp HQ (or any other HQ) in Home of Light is also extremely annoying to dock with since I get huge performance issues when going near it if I'm flying certain ships.

I should also mention that the save where I was flying the discoverer in the green fog near the outpost could have been near any military outpost in the universe and the result would have been the same. And if I had been flying a bigger ship like an m6 or m7 it would be almost impossible to even fly away from the station.

It also makes me wonder that if these performance issues are actually normal behavior why am I the only to complain? At least I've been unable to find other threads with the exact same issues.

And lastly I have to mention that I am thankful to all the people who have given their help to me.

[Alan Phipps]

I think we will have to put it down to:

a. Complexity of the geometry of the ship and station models when in very close proximity affecting cpu calculation load.

b. The effect of other cumulative issues upon fps making the slow-down even worse.

c. The ability of the user's system to cope well with the additional cpu loading.

Naturally there are workarounds such as use of docking computer/AI docking and use of an own ship autopilot command to undock the ship when the situation might otherwise be made difficult by this issue. While that is not ideal, it is pretty unthinkable that the X3 engine coding will be changed now.

One final thought from myself. Make sure that your graphics card is doing as much of the graphics processing as possible, and so relieve the game exe cpu core from having to do much pre-processing before hand-off to the gpu. You may have to play around with your relative graphics settings in-game, in the OS, and in the graphics card control panel to achieve the best balance.

It is usually recommended to set everything to application-managed in the control panels and then manage such things entirely in your in-game settings. However, it would not hurt as a trial to see if forcing the card to do more of the work helps out at all in this particular case.