Crap performance / no matter the settings

[werewolves?]

Well, we have similar systems... In terms of both being AMD/ATI.

It's not just an ATI thing, my GT 635M works almost the same despite of settings, the difference between 1920x1080 high and 1366x768 low is around 5-7 fps, which is really weird. (usually get around 15-25 fps) My desktop with gtx 570 runs around 40fps on both high and low, with a difference about 5-10 fps...

No clue what the issue is...

In the station tunnels I can easily get double the fps I get everywhere else.


I think it the huge ambient sun etc which take a lot to render. In comparison my GT 635M renders AP in full HD high quality at stable 60fps. Though obviously that world is much smaller and much emptier.

Have you got a programme like CPU-z? Can you play the game and look at cpuz at the same time? I'm interested at what speed your CPU is running at in game, for some reason as a default on my system it will run max clocks during loading, then drop to the minimum during gameplay. With CPU throttling disabled I'm getting excellent performance compared to you at 1080p on a two year old laptop...

[Bobucles]

Guys, everyone having this problem can you please conduct an experiment - I am thinking there are flaws in the AI coding at the moment.

You can test this by flying about 45kms away from any stations or highways - you should see FPS jump from 10 to like 80-100 FPS instantly.

Oh yes. There are definitely spots where parking your ship causes the game to drop to 2-5FPS. Get some distance (or even get closer to a station) and the rate goes back up. Doesn't make any sense. Some kind of script must be flipping out or something.

[MasterBata]

I fixed all my performance problems by turning off (or reducing) CPU throttling, the CPU was the bottleneck.

Doesn't help me, my CPU ran @ full 3.4ghz with throttling disabled.

Guys, everyone having this problem can you please conduct an experiment - I am thinking there are flaws in the AI coding at the moment.

You can test this by flying about 45kms away from any stations or highways - you should see FPS jump from 10 to like 80-100 FPS instantly.

I have a good system and this is exactly what happened for me.

The faster we hone in on the problem, the quicker Egosoft can fix it!.

I did that - when I moved away from crowded area, suddenly I got frame increase from 30 to 90fps. When I turned back, facing the station, frames dropped from 90 to 30fps precisely in the moment Betty said "entering Steady Mole"

[kleX]

I don't know if this is specifically what is happening, but you can be limited by your CPU even when it appears to be under-utilized. I read somewhere that this game is multithreaded, but not to a high degree. So there may still be one important thread that is hitting the ceiling of one CPU core; and due to the way CPU scheduling usually works, the load may appear to be spread across multiple underutilized cores. So a total CPU usage of 25% on a quad-core could mean one thread maxing out one core's worth of CPU and hitting a ceiling, no matter how it looks across the cores in task manager/performance monitor.

I'm curious if anyone has confirmed performance scaling with CPU clock being adjusted up and down.

i recognized exactly that.

In some rare situations one of 8 cores goes crazy at 90-98% load while the other 7 are totally bored (0-20%) -.-". Even if i go out of energy saving mode (1,2-> 4,4GHz).

Usually i run at a smooth frame rate (40-60 fps) almost everywhere but a few places, which seem to be caused by some AI scripts.

I got worst performance when a just boarded destroyer rendered invisible in front of me while i was trying to dock at it ... only thing that helped was a reload xD
Other performance drops happen if ships are flying through stations, and/or become stuck inside station parts. but that's easily fixed by going OOS.

[BigBANGtheory]

Yeah there is definitely a problem.

I went from an AMD 6950 with low but passable average framerate to a R9 290x with a better but still unexpectedly low frame rate considering the resources plus stutter and dropped frames. Going to add this to the tech support forum.

[dsoden]

In my case there appears to be something going on with the shader setting. I ran across this when I had a sudden framerate drop and decided to lower settings but forgot that I'd already lowered them in a previous experiment. I turned everything back up just to see how bad it would get and everything smoothed out.

I started playing around and found that any time I get a framerate drop, I can go in and change the shader quality and it will fix it instantly. It doesn't matter if I set it low. norm, or high. As long as I change it (and/or change it back) it clears up the issue. I couldn't even guess why but I'm now running all settings max and doing this occasionally when needed. i7 and gtx780 btw.

[nathanpinard]

I think one thing that will solve a lot of issues is turning off the post processing effects. (glow and other effects) That tends to kill a lot of systems, even high end if intensive.

Also view distance doesn't effect everything, only certain objects. Not sure if I would argue that view distance should effect everything, but it WOULD help some systems if it applied to all objects.

Things would just pop in which could kill the immersion.

[MasterBata]

I think one thing that will solve a lot of issues is turning off the post processing effects. (glow and other effects) That tends to kill a lot of systems, even high end if intensive.

Also view distance doesn't effect everything, only certain objects. Not sure if I would argue that view distance should effect everything, but it WOULD help some systems if it applied to all objects.

Things would just pop in which could kill the immersion.

Oddly, in many cases reducing details to minimum does not have any effect. Moving out of sector (or zone, or whatever now it's called) does, so it looks like one of the biggest problems is scripting or AI or something to do with managing the stations/ships.

Not sure what you mean about immersion, this game has police cars (I mean ships) that go WOOP WOOP in freaking outer space!!

[dzhedzho]

Well, we have similar systems... In terms of both being AMD/ATI.

It's not just an ATI thing, my GT 635M works almost the same despite of settings, the difference between 1920x1080 high and 1366x768 low is around 5-7 fps, which is really weird. (usually get around 15-25 fps) My desktop with gtx 570 runs around 40fps on both high and low, with a difference about 5-10 fps...

No clue what the issue is...

In the station tunnels I can easily get double the fps I get everywhere else.


I think it the huge ambient sun etc which take a lot to render. In comparison my GT 635M renders AP in full HD high quality at stable 60fps. Though obviously that world is much smaller and much emptier.

Have you got a programme like CPU-z? Can you play the game and look at cpuz at the same time? I'm interested at what speed your CPU is running at in game, for some reason as a default on my system it will run max clocks during loading, then drop to the minimum during gameplay. With CPU throttling disabled I'm getting excellent performance compared to you at 1080p on a two year old laptop...

My desktop one i7 2600k runs different speeds but I have set it not to drop under 3.4ghz (though for most other games 2.3 is enough), and can engage "turbo mode" from time to time. I'm pretty sure that's not the bottleneck...
The laptop - not sure I'll have to check. i7-3630QM should be able to handle it.
The laptop, not sure I'll investigate, I'd blame the GT 635M, but the change of settings having no effect is unusual...

Ok, the weirdest thing, GPU runs at 50 - 90% uses only 600MB (either that or 600 on top of the dedicated (far cry shows using only 200MB and x3 only 128, any good tools?)), CPU runs at 3.2 GHZ one core spikes between 50-90% , FPS 15-25 fps depending on location.

[gardenersassistant]

I decided to do some methodical comparisons to get some idea of what difference various settings make to performance, at least on my rig – no doubt it will vary between PCs as to what changes have most effect. (My PC is Core i5, 8GB memory, Windows 7, and a passively cooled Radeon 7700 with 1GB).

I used a two-screen setup and ran X-R on the larger screen, using FRAPS to show frame rate, and using the other screen for Task Manager, CPUID HWMonitor, GPU-Z and a text file in which I wrote the current settings. I wanted to capture screen shots showing both screens, with X-R running full screen. I couldn't manage this but I discovered that (for the one set of settings where I did a comparison, 1920x1080 with 2xAA) the frame rate was the same for full screen and windowed. So, all the info was collected with X-R running windowed.

I have looked at 16 sets of settings so far. There is a summary table here showing their frame rates.

I have also uploaded the screen shots here in case anyone has any interest in interpreting the CPUID/GPU-Z/Task Manager results. (I only realised part way through that I had left “Fullscreen On” in the descriptive text file and I didn't have the heart to redo so many tests, so that entry is wrong in every case.) (There are full size versions available, but flickr doesn't make it easy to get at them. More info on that if needed, or alternatively they are available for easier viewing full size or download here on Dropbox.)

I noticed, as has been mentioned previously in this thread, that the GPU was working pretty much flat out while the loading screen was showing (I couldn't get a screen shot of that). This strikes me as rather odd – is there a clue in this about what is going on with graphics generally? (I have no idea. I can see that the graphics card was almost fully occupied for almost all the examples, while the CPU was not, which I suppose suggests a graphics card bottleneck. But why so while loading, when almost nothing is happening on the screen?)

Having compared some of the different settings for their visual effects (and taking into account their impact on frame rates), I think I'll try turning the Shader Quality up to High and the view distance down to zero; increasing the Shader Quality provided a significant visual improvement to my eye in the example I used, while reducing the view distance didn't seem make much difference visually. And overall, those two changes combined gave me a slightly higher frame rate. How well this will work in general use I have yet to find out.

[MasterBata]

Nice work with testing all those settings... Generally confirms many findings - in a busy sector graphics is not the bottleneck, it must be something else...

As I mentioned before, moving away from the station for about 50km will get you out of the sector and you will see huuuge improvement in fps.
Funny thing is that in this environment gfx settings do make a big difference, but the only thing rendered is the cockpit

[dzhedzho]

Aslo noticed that between 0 and 100 LoD/View distance I get only few fps difference. Shaders seem to make bigger difference especially in devries

[dzhedzho]

While I solved the issue on my desktop, my laptop is still struggling.
Got low memory warning twice. 8GB (obviously XR uses around 3.7 only) ram and 8GB pagefile.

So much about "4 should be more than the game needs"