Would you start a new game with mods right now?

[Reaperxvii]

OK my friend told me the CPU is not the problem hear ?? it is still best on the market

What someone else said, the AMD FX 8000 series were...well garbage in my opinion. If you have the budget and know how to build a pc look into a 10600k or 5600x (3600 or 3600x will also work as 5600x are out of stock).

Can you take the topic someplace else please... This forum/thread is about game questions, not who has the best hardware processor etc.

It wasn't about who has the best hardware? It was more along the lines of performance issues with mods, the culprit being an old CPU. I simply didn't want OP to get an idea that mods were to blame for said users low fps. Though it did get side tracked when we started talking about what to upgrade too.

[Scoob]

No, but the way the universe is simulated creates problems for multi-threading and timing issues between cores, apparently. (I don't know anything about it other than to repeat what I've been told.) There is a fair amount of multi-threading going on but there are still limits to how much parallelization is possible when every calculation is interdependent.

It seems to me that a background stuff - i.e. things going on in other sectors, the general economy etc. - have little impact on things. For me, it's all about what's going on in my current sector. If my current sector is particularly busy - let's say a large scrap is going on - then I'll see ONE thread pushed sufficiently harder than any of the others, which can eventually lead to a bottleneck. If I leave the sector, moving to a quiet one, with said scrap becoming an OOS one, then performance is just fine.

It appears to be what going on in the current sector - which will be the only sector that's "live" so to speak - that has the potential to really hurt performance by maxing out a single thread. If the in sector stuff could better use multiple cores, then things could well be better. It's not really that simple though. While Egosoft have improved things hugely, that FX-8370 is a particularly weak CPU when it comes to X4's needs.

While X4 does place some load on multiple threads, I can readily limit it to just THREE threads without seeing any obvious performance impact. I had experimented to see if keeping things within a CCX - to reduce inter-core latency - helped the game run. Note: latency on my CPU (3900X) is ~30ns intra-CCX and ~70ns inter-CCX. Doing this, It did appear to be somewhat smoother at first, but that was before numerous updates to the game as well as Windows scheduler changes. Now it doesn't make any difference that I can tell. I do still limit the game on CCD 0 (CCX 0 + CCX 1) but that was more about being able to reserve CCD 1 for other stuff, such as video recording...which I've not really done any of for a while lol.

As an aside; there was a test save going around a little while ago, where the player had a MASSIVE empire built. Thousands of ships, hundreds of station - some massive - with lots of stuff going on. Loading the game saw the player in a sector with a busy mega station, we're talking 10 or so fps here (not GPU-limited), which was unplayable. Move to a less busy sector however, and game was totally fine for me - a vSync-limited 60 FPS. This was an extreme example in an older version of the game when performance wasn't as good as it it now. It still showed however how things were all about that one, heaviest thread.

I've no doubt a 7ghz Quad Core (let's pretend a 3300X with an impossible OC) would run X4 far better than an eight core 5800X @ 4.8ghz - or whatever they can do multi-core.

As a final comment, I was using a 2600k @ 4.6ghz until a little over a year ago. It ran most of my games almost as well as the 3900X does now - bear in mind my 60 FPS vSync - as I have the same 1070 I was using before. The exception being X4. X4 also being the only title that heavily relies on one dominant thread, whereas other titles I play seem to spread the load better, with numerous busy cores. This is what I observe. To be clear, the 3900X has eliminated cases where I'd previously have a fairly solid FPS, but experience odd micro-stutter from time to time - not talking about X4 here - Unity-engined games in particular.

Performance issues have been a not insignificant problem since X4's launch, with otherwise solid CPU's struggling in some situations due to utilisation. So, I think it's valid to talk about performance with various hardware and the impact mod might have on a planned long-term game.

I will reiterate that Egosoft - at least on my specific hardware, I can't speak for others - appear to have improved things nicely, particularly with v4.0 - and I see these single-thread-limited scenarios less frequently than I did.

Scoob.

[aurumgallente]

I can't imagine how to play any of X games without mods because Egosoft simply doesn't do games, it does mod constructors. They always fail at making normal game balance, there is always somebody who writes scripts better than Egosoft developers (few years after release), there is always interesting extra content for every X game. Mods solve most of problems of X games.

There is a large variety of mods you can choose, most of them do not conflict. You can assemble a game you want and it could be very different from another person's modded game - ship packs, game rebalancing, textures, video filters, QoL fixes. Only you can choose what should be changed/added to the game and how much.

[Rastuasi]

The game is still changing, mods are fun, but do not listen to those saying it's impossible to play without them. I have 9000 total hours in the game across 4 system systems with my largest save being unmodified and past 5000 hours (not sure on exact as not home). My longest running modded game is 600, but must of the time those mods break the save when updates come out, this includes VRO, FE, XR Ship, etc.. basically all the main ones people love.

[Scoob]

I've spent a lot of time vanilla - mostly in the early days and so I could provide feedback, usually during Beta phases. For me, Egosoft's idea of balance doesn't mesh with mine. Hence why I've always modded certain aspects of X Games. Usually shields, hulls, ship speeds and projectile speeds, to get my own preferred balance. Thankfully, over the years, other modders have shared the same preferences, so I've often been able to use another mod, that's been far more developed than my own relatively simple tweaks to the underlying numbers. With X4, VRO is THE mod for me, and it's genuinely hard to play without it now - though I expect I will for a bit in future Beta's. For 4.0, I actually just wanted to play, so started a modified 4.0 game as soon as I could.

Actually might get some time to play this evening, I've a station to build - Hull Parts are an issue in EVERY game I play. I've given the economy 30 or so hours to fill the void, but EVERYWHERE is starving for this one resource right now - which makes station building a problem - but I will come to the rescue as always

Scoob.