Performance not impacted by Graphical settings

[Ranix]

What speed is your RAM running at Scoob?

It's only at 1600mhz - I have all four slots populated, so I don't think there's any overclocking headroom to be had, if that's what you were thinking?

hey Scoob, for comparison my RAM is running at 3200mhz

in space I'm fps locked at 60, but in stations I drop to 40-50. This stops instantly if I enter an engineering office or faction leader office. Also if there are NPCs in view I can notice a framerate drop. And I see slight framerate drops when I have the map open. This is greatly reduced in Silent Witness and the pirate trading station, I think because there is very little traffic in the sector.

in a faction leader's office if I look at the NPC and open the menu I drop to 39-45 fps. If I turn away, 60fps. If I open the menu while turned away, around 54fps

Are you running quad channel or dual channel? atm I'm running dual channel, but I have another pair of RAM sticks in the mail and will test quad channel @3000mhz if my PC is stable at that clock rate. My CPU is sitting @4ghz. If you're still having issues feel free to pm and we can talk RAM

[Scoob]

My old Sandy Bridge CPU is only using DDR3, not DDR4 like you. I could get faster RAM but, I'm actually fairly happy with where performance is now. It's certainly my CPU that's being worked hardest. I do see one thread working harder than all the others, but there are only three really busy threads when the game is running. It is odd, as Rebirth did show a much more even CPU load - perhaps I'll fire it up again and verify that - I stopped playing prior to the more recent updates. The big engine difference of course is that Rebirth was DX and X4 is Vulcan - I never tried the VR version of Rebirth, which was when the engine was migrated to Vulcan.

I seem to be getting similar FPS to you currently, in space it's a solid 60fps (vSync'd) for the most part. A large fleet or combat might see that dip slightly. Some stations can drop into the mid-40's and opening the map screen always causes a bit of a dip. Map screen in a station is as bad as it gets, but FPS in that situation isn't so critical.

Just dual channel RAM on my system - it's pretty ancient, but I'm still pleased how it's coping.

No plans to upgrade at the moment, I was thinking about it, but I'll hold off until next year now. Thanks for the offer to discuss RAM though

Scoob.

[Ranix]

I see roughly the same regarding only some threads working harder. I think it is because some cores are communicating with the memory controller and others are not, but this is just a theory at this time

[Ranix]

Just dual channel RAM on my system - it's pretty ancient, but I'm still pleased how it's coping.

Scoob.

Hey dude I got the quad channel running, at the same speed it was running in dual channel even. Didn't need to drop down. It looks like there is not much of a performance gain for this in X4, not one noticeable to the naked eye anyway. I'll keep messing with it but it looks like this game will run just fine with dual channel ram at the speed you're at for definite. Your 1600mhz is probably what each stick is running at so if you count dual data rates you'll have the same ish speed I did before this monkey business

[Scoob]

Hey dude I got the quad channel running, at the same speed it was running in dual channel even. Didn't need to drop down. It looks like there is not much of a performance gain for this in X4, not one noticeable to the naked eye anyway. I'll keep messing with it but it looks like this game will run just fine with dual channel ram at the speed you're at for definite. Your 1600mhz is probably what each stick is running at so if you count dual data rates you'll have the same ish speed I did before this monkey business

Always interesting to see what makes a difference. Some games, and certainly a few benchmarks, seem to love faster RAM - particularly on Ryzen systems of course, though I'm Intel currently. Due to it's age, there aren't really many options to get more out of my system, so next build will be all new, CPU, RAM, Mobo, even SSD's as I'm using SATA ones currently, new build will have M.2. I could re-use my GTX 1070, but if I'm doing everything else, it makes sense to update that too. I just hope pricing is a bit better once I go for it.

Other than the odd weird blip, my game is running ok currently. It's weird though how I can save a game, while having great FPS, reload it and FPS tanks. I recall earlier X games would do this, but there was a very specific cause. I was running a Dual Core at the time (AMD 4200x2!) and Windows XP. XP's scheduler was RUBBISH in that it didn't see distinct Cores, so, you'd run the game one time and the main executable and DX threads would run on the same core, causing poor fps. Run it again and they'd run on separate cores, showing great performance. This was the main advantage of Dual Cores back in those early days, the games themselves were single threaded, but as the DX thread was a spawned process, getting it on the second Core could make a huge difference...though some, none I encountered personally, didn't like running on two cores of course.

Scoob.

[bignick217]

Game appears to be all over the place from my experience.

i7 8700k (4.7ghz)
16gb ram (barely uses 6gb)
gtx 1080 ftw oc'd
NanD ssd 2500mb/s

Backhole sun Equipment dock im getting 20-30% gpu utilisation in places and 100% cpu utilisation on Core 2 but barley anything on core 1 and 20-30% spread over the other cores/HT's.. Framerate is in the low 40's and gets worse the longer i hand around the station.. initially starts off 60fps capped but performance seems to rapdily degrade for some reason.

Low/medium/high or ultra make no differnce to FPS here either.. the game is thrashing CPU hard, did they design this game for Superclocked i9 processors or something??

^This is exactly what I've observed. Was getting confused because I'm running an AMD R9 1950X with a 2080Ti and 32GB RAM @ 3200Mhz CL14 and running the game from an NVME Samsung 500GB 970 Pro. In space I'm pegged at 60fps. But in station at the very start of the game at 4K Ultra, I can hold 60 FPS with up to 2x SSA AA. But no higher. But within a short amount of time (I'd say about a half to an hour) the frames in that station just start to tank. Barely holding on to 30FPS but averaging maybe about 34-35. I started reducing my graphics settings to see what setting might be causing the issue. No matter what I changed, I never gained more than a few frames. Topping out eventually at about 40fps, but not being able to maintain it. And that was at 1920x1080, no AA and the Low preset. Now that is ridiculous. There is no good reason why this game should be running that bad on that setting on my system spec. There's just no way that can be considered acceptable.

What you're seeing is pretty much exactly what I'd expect. On your system the game will be CPU-bound, and as we've explained, uses two cores fairly extensively and the rest fairly lightly. This is actually the same profile as XR and XRVR. I know you say you saw a different profile on those games, but I can assure you that this is the expected usage pattern for all three games. Having a below-spec CPU will make a difference in this game, and it's the per-core performance for those two core threads that is important.

Are you serious? In this day and age they're only using two threads? Didn't someone say a few posts down from yours that they're using Vulkan for Foundations? Isn't it a bit wasteful and lazy to use a modern API like Vulkan to make a modern game for modern systems that are on average a minimum of 6 threads and up, usually 8 (4 core / 8 threads) (have been minimum 4 threads and up for the last 10 years / lots of 2500k's out there) and then not take advantage of the one massive advantage Vulkan brings to the table, ie superior utilization of multiple threads to better spread loads across them. As for X Rebirth... That game came out in what, 2013? Of course 2 threads was to be expected back then because most people were on dual and quad core CPU's. I was on an 8 thread 2600k back then, but most people were only up to quad. But today, no. Today, the absolute minimum most people have is quad. But most are rocking 6 or better. And even 6 threads is considered the absolute minimum for modern gaming, with 8 threads being the "recommended" minimum. Whether that's a 4c8t processor like the 7700k or a straight 6 core processor like the 9600k. With the R7 1600 and 2600 quickly becoming the most popular gaming CPU's today thanks to their bang for buck value. Which are 6c12t processors. But even they top out at about 4.2Ghz. My Threadripper 1950X (16c/32t) tops out at 4.2Ghz on up to 4 cores and it's struggling to keep the framerates up on stations much past 30. You can't tell me that my processor at 4.2Ghz (with XFR) is not enough Ghz grunt to push this game to acceptable framerates on an RTX 2080Ti. Hell, my system can run Assassin's Creed Odyssey at 4K Ultra with AA and maintain a solid 55-60FPS. There's no good reason why it shouldn't be able to do the same in X4 while on a station.

So no, I do not think that is "to be expected". Not in todays games. Using only 2 main threads in a game today, on PC, on today's hardware, on Vulkan, is just lazy and a complete waste of potential. I really hope the upcoming update makes some serious strides in improving the performance of this game.

[Tamina]

In professional business administration courses at university I learned that 9 women can give birth to a child in one month. Turns out it couldn't have been more wrong but that's business administration in a nutshell, anyway.

Take one employee and give him a task he needs 5 days for to complete.
Then you give the same task to two employees, this time. They have to plan and distribute the task first, then take extra effort to coordinate while working, then their tasks are not 100% accuratly split regarding time effort and they have to wait for each other until certain information are avilable before being able to continue; on top of that one of the coworkers needs longer then usual for different reasons (scheduled for other tasks or sick). All in all they need 4 days instead of the expected 2.5 days.
Then you increase the team size more and more. Eventually you need a dedicated project manager, team manager, group manager and the actual time needed increases way beyond the original time needed by a single person, not to speak of the total invested working time.

I imagine computers working on a similar level. If so, there is a very strong limit on how much you can parallelize.

[Player]

With over 400 hours of play and precisely after the 2.50 update, my game has become a slideshow. Where I previously had about 30 to 40 fps in the stations, now it's around 15 to 20 fps. Even in space the FPS is just 35. I lowered the resolutions and incredibly no impact on the FPS, it's still bad. I hope the next update can bring some improvement in game performance, otherwise it is game over. I7 8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070.

[taztaz502]

i got 1080 ti and 4ghz cpu i get 50-80 fps running around sometimes spikes when i'm flying or in combat which ends up in subtle freezes of the game, biggest performance hit for me is opening the map my fps drops to 5-15.

[scav_n_ger]

With over 400 hours of play and precisely after the 2.50 update, my game has become a slideshow. Where I previously had about 30 to 40 fps in the stations, now it's around 15 to 20 fps. Even in space the FPS is just 35. I lowered the resolutions and incredibly no impact on the FPS, it's still bad. I hope the next update can bring some improvement in game performance, otherwise it is game over. I7 8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070.

See if reducing the vision on every sector does improve your performance.
Load your save game and start eliminating your satellites.
How many traders and mining ships do you have?
See if eliminating habitation modules (if any are present) changes the performance.

[Player]

With over 400 hours of play and precisely after the 2.50 update, my game has become a slideshow. Where I previously had about 30 to 40 fps in the stations, now it's around 15 to 20 fps. Even in space the FPS is just 35. I lowered the resolutions and incredibly no impact on the FPS, it's still bad. I hope the next update can bring some improvement in game performance, otherwise it is game over. I7 8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070.

See if reducing the vision on every sector does improve your performance.
Load your save game and start eliminating your satellites.
How many traders and mining ships do you have?
See if eliminating habitation modules (if any are present) changes the performance.

Trade and mining 15 ships. 4 stations, 1 shipyard, 1 Wharf. More 20 ships on a fleet. Does eliminating habitation modules cause any problems for my stations?

I will try to reduce vision, but I don't have a large satellite network.

[scav_n_ger]

With over 400 hours of play and precisely after the 2.50 update, my game has become a slideshow. Where I previously had about 30 to 40 fps in the stations, now it's around 15 to 20 fps. Even in space the FPS is just 35. I lowered the resolutions and incredibly no impact on the FPS, it's still bad. I hope the next update can bring some improvement in game performance, otherwise it is game over. I7 8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070.

See if reducing the vision on every sector does improve your performance.
Load your save game and start eliminating your satellites.
How many traders and mining ships do you have?
See if eliminating habitation modules (if any are present) changes the performance.

Trade and mining 15 ships. 4 stations, 1 shipyard, 1 Wharf. More 20 ships on a fleet. Does eliminating habitation modules cause any problems for my stations?

I will try to reduce vision, but I don't have a large satellite network.

Eliminating workforce will cause a decrease in efficiency for all connected factories. But some "articles" on reddit suggested, that after getting rid of the workers, the game performance recovered to somewhat tolerable fps. I havent had the pleasure to test it myself.

Also, i personally noticed that the being close heavily trafficed dock areas, causes "collision avoidance" or pathing to go crazy. Especially when multiple freighters are already melted into a glitchball of hulls hovering around the dock area / entrance.

[CBJ]

For those having performance issues in busy games, it's really important that you post in Tech Support with both a savegame and your system details in the form of a DXDiag. That way we can see whether a) there are any specific situations or issues in your game that are unusual (and indeed whether any of the work we've done in between has improved those situations) and b) whether there are specific system configurations that struggle. The chances of there being improvements in performance for your specific case will be much improved if you work with us, though I should make it clear that as always in a game that doesn't artificially limit what can happen in any given area of space, there is always going to be some point at which things start to slow down. Like you, however, we want to make sure that point is as far away from a "normal" game situation as possible.

[Player]

For those having performance issues in busy games, it's really important that you post in Tech Support with both a savegame and your system details in the form of a DXDiag. That way we can see whether a) there are any specific situations or issues in your game that are unusual (and indeed whether any of the work we've done in between has improved those situations) and b) whether there are specific system configurations that struggle. The chances of there being improvements in performance for your specific case will be much improved if you work with us, though I should make it clear that as always in a game that doesn't artificially limit what can happen in any given area of space, there is always going to be some point at which things start to slow down. Like you, however, we want to make sure that point is as far away from a "normal" game situation as possible.

Done.

viewtopic.php?f=180&t=418644

[AquilaRossa]

For those having performance issues in busy games, it's really important that you post in Tech Support with both a savegame and your system details in the form of a DXDiag. That way we can see whether a) there are any specific situations or issues in your game that are unusual (and indeed whether any of the work we've done in between has improved those situations) and b) whether there are specific system configurations that struggle. The chances of there being improvements in performance for your specific case will be much improved if you work with us, though I should make it clear that as always in a game that doesn't artificially limit what can happen in any given area of space, there is always going to be some point at which things start to slow down. Like you, however, we want to make sure that point is as far away from a "normal" game situation as possible.

I have posted about whether or not people think the mods i run affect things. Somebody said no because the issues happen in vanilla too. I have just quit playing until a few patches into 3.0 or so. I tried to use all the ships I was building and stashing. The game slowed to literally 1 fps and stayed there. Half my fault and half not.

My question is If I disable the mods and make a so called clean save it is still no use to them due to the modified tag huh?

Being injured and having spare time on my hands, I might consider beta testing vanilla though. I like this game but it also drives me up the wall. I quit X3TC because it began as a fun 3D action game but as the empire grew it became a tedious micromanagement strategy game. The empire building goal does that. You end up like a pencil pusher instead of being where the action is.

[bignick217]

One thing I can note since my last post. While I mostly found changing my graphics settings didn't have an impact on performance, I did find that there was actually a "bit" of a performance difference with some settings, but I generally only got to see those differences once the game was restarted. Not just reloading a save. Actually killing the game and restarting it. At 4K Ultra (with glow turned off as it looked awful and cost me about 4-5fps in performance, with adaptive VSync no AA), I'm pretty much pegged at 60 fps in space and fluctuate between 32 and 40 fps on station (averaging 35). But I'm still pretty early in the game (I only have one ship, one capital freighter (only thing I could build as only the shipyard actually had engine parts) and I only just found the player HQ), so I can't really speak to how performance will end up once I get my economy up and running. The main point I'm trying to get across, is when you're changing graphics settings, make sure to restart the game to see the full effect, even if that effect amounts to not much in most cases.

[Imperial Good]

Are you serious? In this day and age they're only using two threads? Didn't someone say a few posts down from yours that they're using Vulkan for Foundations? Isn't it a bit wasteful and lazy to use a modern API like Vulkan to make a modern game for modern systems that are on average a minimum of 6 threads and up, usually 8 (4 core / 8 threads) (have been minimum 4 threads and up for the last 10 years / lots of 2500k's out there) and then not take advantage of the one massive advantage Vulkan brings to the table, ie superior utilization of multiple threads to better spread loads across them.

Software is not that simple to make. Making games that use multiple threads well is extremely difficult. Especially seeing how they have to perform well on anything for 4 thread to 24 thread CPUs to have decent market exposure. Additionally as you push more threads the single thread performance of modern CPUs drop due to lower boost clocks. Sure Tomb Raider or Assassins Creed use lots of threads very efficiently, but they were made by massive developers with AAA budgets unlike X4 which is made by a small development team on a comparatively shoe string budget.

Also the main reason to use Vulkan is that it has less driver overhead. As a result this also means better multi thread performance, but single thread performance still gains from it as well. It is worth noting that OpenGL can also do multi threaded command generation as well, although slower due to higher driver overhead.

I think you are overestimating how much modern games use multiple cores. Practically every game is bottlenecked by CPU single thread performance as that is just how games work. All the extra CPU cores are usually used for other calculations such as AI, physics or background simulation. This is especially the case for most indi or small development team games. Take a look at Civilization 6 as an example, turn time is entirely dependant on single thread performance and Civilization 6 likely has significantly more development resources than X4.

with 8 threads being the "recommended" minimum

This would cause significant performance problems with many people. Specially Intel I5 users only have 4 or now 6 threads.

With the R7 1600 and 2600 quickly becoming the most popular gaming CPU's today thanks to their bang for buck value.

Actually the R5 3600 is trending up while those chips will be trending down. The R5 3600 beats both of them massively with every respect. A R5 3600 will put you pretty close (10-15%) to a Core I9 9900K in most games.

My Threadripper 1950X (16c/32t) tops out at 4.2Ghz on up to 4 cores and it's struggling to keep the framerates up on stations much past 30. You can't tell me that my processor at 4.2Ghz (with XFR) is not enough Ghz grunt to push this game to acceptable framerates on an RTX 2080Ti.

You incorrectly named your processor "Ryzen 9 1950X" earlier in your post which makes no sense. Fortunately I saw this and deleted the response to that I was going to give...

Your CPU is kind of slow for games. Yes it has 32 threads but they are slow threads. First generation Ryzen was slow. To put it in perspective a Ryzen 5 3600 would likely give you ~30% more FPS.

GHz mean nothing really now due to physical limits. It is largely about IPC as well which is where both second generation and third generation improved. This is also why the Ryzen 5 3600 is a lot better for gaming than even a Ryzen 2700X despite having 2 less cores.

Hell, my system can run Assassin's Creed Odyssey at 4K Ultra with AA and maintain a solid 55-60FPS. There's no good reason why it shouldn't be able to do the same in X4 while on a station.

Assassins Creed Odyssey was developed on a huge budget by a huge development team based on an engine they have been pouring money into for around a decade. They would think nothing of throwing a few million more to get a 5% increase in frame rate. Of course it runs well on practically everything, it would be a joke if it did not.

Assassins Creed Odyssey is also fundamentally a lot simpler to simulate. It is not having to try and simulate an entire universe at all times. I doubt it even simulate anything outside of immediate view from the player. There is no dynamic economy and such, the game just needs to present stuff to the player that the player expects to happen when they approach. Even stuff happening around the player is simpler to simulate since it does not have to deal with the problems of 3D aircraft combat.

I do agree that platforms might not be optimized that well. But given how they are a small part of gameplay it is to be naturally expected.

So no, I do not think that is "to be expected". Not in todays games. Using only 2 main threads in a game today, on PC, on today's hardware, on Vulkan, is just lazy and a complete waste of potential. I really hope the upcoming update makes some serious strides in improving the performance of this game.

Most of Blizzard Entertainment games do this... Warcraft III Reforged might even use just a single main thread. Multithreading is not as easy as you might think.

With over 400 hours of play and precisely after the 2.50 update, my game has become a slideshow. Where I previously had about 30 to 40 fps in the stations, now it's around 15 to 20 fps. Even in space the FPS is just 35. I lowered the resolutions and incredibly no impact on the FPS, it's still bad. I hope the next update can bring some improvement in game performance, otherwise it is game over. I7 8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070.

Likely a result of the station spam bug that was introduced with 2.50. The NPCs are not meant to build 1,000 food factories.

i got 1080 ti and 4ghz cpu i get 50-80 fps running around sometimes spikes when i'm flying or in combat which ends up in subtle freezes of the game, biggest performance hit for me is opening the map my fps drops to 5-15.

Disable some of the overlay help. Especially friendly and own orders as well as crew information. These massively impact map FPS.

See if eliminating habitation modules (if any are present) changes the performance.

This should make no difference. Workforce is simulated in form of numbers and not at a per individual basis.

Eliminating workforce will cause a decrease in efficiency for all connected factories. But some "articles" on reddit suggested, that after getting rid of the workers, the game performance recovered to somewhat tolerable fps. I havent had the pleasure to test it myself.

Also, i personally noticed that the being close heavily trafficed dock areas, causes "collision avoidance" or pathing to go crazy. Especially when multiple freighters are already melted into a glitchball of hulls hovering around the dock area / entrance.

This will only increase performance if you are near the habitation module. The mass traffic is a big resource hog. If the station is OoS it should not make any difference to performance. With large factories habitation might even improve performance by reducing the number of production modules needed.

[bignick217]

My Threadripper 1950X (16c/32t) tops out at 4.2Ghz on up to 4 cores and it's struggling to keep the framerates up on stations much past 30. You can't tell me that my processor at 4.2Ghz (with XFR) is not enough Ghz grunt to push this game to acceptable framerates on an RTX 2080Ti.

You incorrectly named your processor "Ryzen 9 1950X" earlier in your post which makes no sense. Fortunately I saw this and deleted the response to that I was going to give...

Your CPU is kind of slow for games. Yes it has 32 threads but they are slow threads. First generation Ryzen was slow. To put it in perspective a Ryzen 5 3600 would likely give you ~30% more FPS.

GHz mean nothing really now due to physical limits. It is largely about IPC as well which is where both second generation and third generation improved. This is also why the Ryzen 5 3600 is a lot better for gaming than even a Ryzen 2700X despite having 2 less cores.

I'm giving you a fair bit of latitude with a lot of your responses. Some things you get right. Others you missed the mark, but were close enough. This one, you are way off and it needs to be addressed. I think I know my own processor better than you do. First off, I did not "incorrectly" state my processor initially as the R9 1950X. While Threadripper is the colloquially accepted name designation for all "Threadripper" processors, R9 is it's actual class designation. In the newest 3rd generation of Ryzen processors (Technically "Zen 2"), the R9 designation has been taken up AM4 class processors that exceed 8 physical cores, but in the first generation of chips, R9 was Threadripper's designation.

Second, are you out of your mind. No, it's not slow for games. Never has been. It is more than capable of handling everything thrown at it with good high framerates. Especially if you pair it with 3200Mhz RAM (and even better if you pair it with CL14 Samsung B-Die RAM modules) like I have (which speeds up the Infinity Fabric and in turn the die-to-die communication speed). What it is not good for, is ultra high framerates if you're wanting to push past 200fps for use with 200hz+ monitors at 1080p resolution. But at higher resolutions like 1440p, there is very little difference between the 1950X and other processors of it's generation and at 4K, the differences are virtually indistinguishable. It was Intel's IPC and Frequency advantage that allowed them to hang on to the ultra high framerate lead. A lead, they have been quickly losing over successive Ryzen generations. But in case you didn't notice in my original post, I don't game on this CPU at 1080p. I game at 4K. Which means I don't care about Ultra-High framerates. If I did, I would be playing competitive games like COD and other FPS games where that matters, and not X4 (A game I only want to maintain 60fps).

On top of that, if you had done your homework before speaking on this topic, you would know, back then, that the 1950X actually outperformed the 1800X, 1700X and 1600X in gaming in that generation in most games. Some by a little. Some by a considerable margin. There were only a few games where the 1950X ended up being slower, and that was usually do to an issue between the game and the UMA/NUMA memory configurations, which you could usually easily fix by simply changing a setting. The 1950X was actually so good while gaming, that when the 2nd Gen Ryzen processors released, while the AM4 chips saw a considerable increase in gaming performance, the 2950X only saw a marginal 5-10% improvement that only equated to about 5 additional frames per second on average. There were one or two outliers that saw a better gain of about 10 frames, but for the most part it was only a few frames difference.

Trying to use the R5 3600 (a processor that's only just released) performance today to justify your argument that the 1950X is "slow" for gaming because it's threads are "slow" is ridiculous. The 1950X has two full-fat 1800X dies on it that are clocked higher than the 1800X was. The 1800X only went up to 4.1Ghz with XFR, where as the 1950X goes up to 4.2Ghz. For you to call the 1950X "slow" would be the same as you calling the 1800X, 1700X, and 1600X all "slow" because they all use the exact same dies (with the 1600X simply having 2 cores disabled), where the 1950X got the best binned dies. Just what do you think Threadripper is? Epic? I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Threadripper is not comparable to an Intel Xeon scenario. And before you ask, I use my PC for more than gaming. I did not buy it jus for gaming. Oh and BTW, I've been building computers for about 20 years now. Trust me when I tell you that I probably know more about hardware and the way computers actually work than you do.

And what the hell do you mean that "GHz mean nothing"? GHz and IPC go hand in hand when it comes to determining single thread (or better said, per thread) performance. You can't have one without the other when determining performance. But you are right that we have pretty much hit the limit of Frequency. And IPC can only get you so far. IPC is all about efficiency and you can only make something so efficient before you start running out of ideas. That's why you see big IPC improvements in the first few generations of a new architecture, and then there after, each successive generation's "improvements" become smaller and smaller (diminishing returns). Intel has illustrated this concept for years. That's why you're now seeing an explosion of increased cores and threads in processors. Because it's now a lot easier to add more cores and threads, than it is to push frequencies higher. And that's why games are becoming a lot more multithreaded these days, because you can process a lot more instructions on two threads at 4Ghz than you can on one thread at 5Ghz. And you can do that while using less power and producing less heat because you're not overtaxing one thread when you have other threads just sitting there doing nothing, wasting resources. The term I heard one developer use is they are now needing to start programming wide instead of tall.

Do I think it's easy. No, of course not. But when you have a bunch of people complaining about performance issues (even people using "gaming" CPUs (even though there's technically no such thing as a "gaming" CPU)) and everyone keeps saying the problem is with the CPU even though these people have CPU's that have threads to spare while only 2 are being said to be getting slammed, it's not outside the realm of reason to think that maybe the developers should do something about it and maybe give a couple of those extra unused threads "something" to do. While I've been playing this game, my overall CPU usage barely ever hits 10% (usually sits around 8%). If the problem is as others have said and it's the CPU at fault because 2 threads isn't enough, then please by all means, use more of my cores. That's what they're there for! I doubt anyone else rocking 6 cores, 8 cores, 6 threads, 12 threads or 16 threads would have a problem with X4 using more of their processor resources if it meant the game would run better.

[Scoob]

Hi,

I would like to add that since my original post on this subject, game performance has improved a great deal. I do see somewhat more even load over all eight threads my CPU offers, though still with two distinctly busier threads of course. My hardware is unchanged since launch and bar the usual Driver updates and Windows update that have occurred during this time, it's still on the same overall software build.

I've even modified my game, which adds a LOT more ships and make the universe a lot more violent with constant fights going on in most border sectors between Argon and the Paranid factions. Xenon are much more aggressive and have been actively taking bordering sectors. Many more stations have been build, more ships are flying back and forth, plus there's my fledgling empire too, all adding to things.The universe is very very active.

However, despite this, performance is generally remaining pretty good. I get some CPU-related slow-downs in particularly busy sectors and some of those large fleet battles do tax things a bit. Aside from that, I've had to disable AA in certain sectors as it simply doesn't work with a particular "dust cloud" effect used by Egosoft - my GPU is the newest part of my system, a GTX 1070, and it's brought to it's knees in these sectors with ANY AA applied. Without AA, they perform perfectly.

I generally maintain 50-60 fps at mostly highest settings at 1920x1200.

I will say that it is a shame that X4 is so heavily reliant on one or two cores, though it is markedly better than at launch. I get that you can't just offload stuff to other threads, it's not that simple. However, that said, it's fairly uncommon to see a title that relies so heavily on just a couple of threads in this day and age. Pretty much every other game I play shows VERY even load over all cores and performs well. If the Universe is to grow - like it will with Split Vendetta - I worry that this single threaded element might be a problem. Clock speeds really aren't growing at the rate they once were, while IPC has grown a little, but only with AMD because they were so far behind beforehand. When people with 8th and 9th Gen Intel CPU's running an all core boost of 5ghz+ hit apparently CPU limitations, then something really isn't quite right.

I'm still on a fairly humble, but good, 2600k @4.6ghz with 32gb DDR3 1600 and a GTX 1070, all running from a pair of SATA SSD's in RAID 0. A solid, if older, rig but totally out classed by the newer hardware of many here. Yet they sometimes appear to be getting worse performance than me...doesn't seem right.

Anyway, just thought I'd add my experiences to show that things have improved for me, but that single thread reliance is still a thing, though much improved, and it does concern me going forward.

Scoob.

[AquilaRossa]

Scoob are you getting over a week of game days in and still getting that FPS? I am reading about people with 9900K and 1080ti caliber of systems getting bogged down to 20FPS when the map is open, or at a station. I had the same with a 2700X and a RX590, but eventually it ground down to even lower speeds than that. I quit X yesterday because I had built too much for it to be playable, but sure enough I am playing it today. I wanted to start a new game vanilla and try a few things. It was so nice getting over 100 FPS and still getting around 60 fps on stations again. But even in three hours of play the FPS began to degrade to about two thirds of that as the factions add more stuff. I agree with you about adding Split and more sectors when the game engine can not handle what is already there. They have either fixed it, they need to sell content to pay the bills, or hopefully both. We'll see i guess.

p.s. My last CPU was Sandy Bridge. I had it from new when they came out. 2500K. It was only more recently it even seemed worth upgrading. I got the 8/16 part because I need it for more than gaming. The 2500K was handling most games fine, but getting overwhelmed by my DAW software and all the plugins I use.

btw. I think we should not expect miracles from this next patch. Station spam is a problem and they can fix that. But the game not making full use of our cores is something that would require them to make big changes to their code. A big investment for a small company that i would be surprised if they can do soon.