Bad performance ruins long term experience

[cubebix9000]

No matter how far i progress into the game no matter how many hundreds of ships and stations there are, X4 never uses more then 20% of my CPU. So there is something wrong with X4 as its not utilizing my CPU properly other games do even Firefox uses 100% if it needs to sooooooooooooooo. i7 6700K 3.4ghz

[Buzz2005]

how do you check, if you alttab out of the game then its not an indicator of the usage since your out of the game

[zarrazee]

how do you check, if you alttab out of the game then its not an indicator of the usage since your out of the game

Try MSI Afterburner

[Panos]

comfortable 45 fps

Those words do not belong in the same sentence, at least not for a first-person game.

I can dig 45FPS in a dense asteroid field or a firefight, but on a mostly barren station with nothing whatsoever going on? That kind of miserable framerate on hardware that exceeds the recommended spec is not okay.
In X4 it's consistently not okay too, every time you dock, and it's CPU-bound beyond the ability of any currently available hardware to provide respectable (read V-sync 60FPS) performance.

considering how many things going on the background

In general, sure. But why so much more just because you have docked at a station?
If it's collision detection as some have suggested, that needs to be sorted out on the same level as the generally hopeless AI pathfinding. Why the hell are things colliding in the first place?

The game is within my XL2730Z Freesync range, so is smooth even at that FPS

[steve_v]

The game is within my XL2730Z Freesync range, so is smooth even at that FPS

I'm sure that's nice for you. I for one am not interested in boasting about my shiny hardware or in replacing the perfectly serviceable monitor I already have.
Freesync is nice, but it should not be necessary. The problem is not people's hardware, and it's certainly not people's monitors. The problem is that the game performs horribly while looking like a modded FPS from 2004.

If someone can provide a reasonable explanation as to why simply being on-station incurs a 20+FPS performance tax despite minimal graphics load and 2 idle CPU cores, I'm all ears.

[steph2019]

so now i'm removing satellites one by one (the ones not really usefull) to continue to play a bit and yes I have almost all subscriptions so yeah it was a bit redundant
well, it is a game/own mission in itself with perf still in between 1 to 10 fps
I don't do that every week as I used to play before but still ...I'm with you and will be happy to see the next enhancements.
My Specs are in a post above

cheers

Wouldn't it be nice if egosoft in their mercy had provided a command for us to order NPC ships under our command to "collect deployables"?

yep - I think i posted something similar somewhere (might be a command available with some conditions e.g. either you've done it once manually or if you have special building like e.g. space army camp somewhere )....- or deployable self destruct if you don' t care - but to come back to performance still we should'nt be forced to do that to get back some fps but as a temporary turnaround why not

[Arisk]

......

If someone can provide a reasonable explanation as to why simply being on-station incurs a 20+FPS performance tax despite minimal graphics load and 2 idle CPU cores, I'm all ears.

is script based some actions have to be calculated before others not so parallel like fps and dum Ai

maybe a neural net will work more parallel but we are talking a lot of cores and memory x5 maybe Vulcan can incorporate Ai/physics processing in a secondary gpu

[erago]

Hi, is there a way to deactivate satellites, the provlem i have which i didn't in 2.5 beta is my game us at 2-3 fps now sometimes less. Sone sectors have 200 plys stations, i my self have sone super sized stations with hundreds of production modules and thousands of ships. It was running ok but since the mass stations spawning and massive inceease in traffic the satellites seem to relat all the data constantly and are bottlenecking 2 cores the rest are fine gpu at 5% its an 9700k and 8gb rtx 2070 with 32gb ram and running of a wd black h.2 at 3400. Opening more cores up for use would fix it but also create problems i know so turning of the extensive satellite network would give me a chance ti nuke sectors removing the data problem, the universe is full up and i need to do a Thanos.

[steve_v]

Hi, is there a way to deactivate satellites

Only by laboriously collecting them yourself, which is likely to take 1.21 years.
Ego didn't see fit to give us an NPC ship command to collect deployables, there's a mod that adds it but I'm not sure if it works with 2.50.

Sone sectors have 200 plys stations, i my self have sone super sized stations with hundreds of production modules and thousands of ships. It was running ok but since the mass stations spawning and massive inceease in traffic the satellites seem to relat all the data constantly and are bottlenecking 2 cores

Satellites won't be helping, but it's the station spam that's killing performance. See here. As far as I can tell current status is many reports, no action.

[Kamuchi_]

The better question I have is why all the stuffis mainly using just one thread?

Spoiler

Show

There is another game called Stationeers, I help them a tiny bit with trying to find the underlying issue of what code is creating a bug on and off when I play the game.
There is one gigantic difference, they are using coroutines on pretty much every single thing and that game does some really complex atmospheric calculations under the hood that scares the crap out of me

Spoiler

Show

If any of the devs own it, have a look at it with dnspy

Yes, I dropped my core speed by 100mhz to reduce a tiny bit of vcore to stay under 70c as summer hit with a vengence and it's close to 30c inside
Also also, I know... but I just wanted the highest core speed as that's what games want, and I don't want the extra thermal heat so yes, multitasking with 20 games would suck?

So here is my questions devs:
Please use all our cores?

[mr.WHO]

Hmm.
I have 150h+ game save and I didn't really experience much of the slowdown other that look at the map in my home sector (with 200+ miners and freighters and 10+ mega-stations).

I must be lucky one.

[Falcrack]

Hmm.
I have 150h+ game save and I didn't really experience much of the slowdown other that look at the map in my home sector (with 200+ miners and freighters and 10+ mega-stations).

I must be lucky one.

I have an advanced 100% vanilla game, 6 days and 15 hours game time in. I have 317 satellites providing coverage to just about every station in the universe. I have 32 autotraders, and huge station complexes, with 3.5 billion credits in net worth. I should be having some serious slowdown issues, according to what some folks are saying here, right?

So what do I see with map slowdown? I go from 60 fps (the max it can get, probably based on my monitor refresh rate) standing on the platform at my HQ in Grand Exchange (I have no other stations in that sector), down to 56-58 fps when I open the map. Zooming in on Second Contact Flashpoint, my busiest sector by far with shipyards and vast numbers of shipyard supporting factories, my map fps goes down to 48-50 fps.

Maybe I just have a strong system (i7-7700K, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1060 6 GB), but I am really not seeing this supposed massive bad performance that come from having lots of satellite coverage. Maybe there was this issue in the past, but as of 2.5, this is a non-issue for me. I am not seeing the massive station spam in my game that some folks have been reporting, however. The economy is doing quite well, I'm not seeing these big economy issues that some people are complaining about.

[mr.WHO]

Maybe I just have a strong system (i7-7700K, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1060 6 GB), but I am really not seeing this supposed massive bad performance that come from having lots of satellite coverage. Maybe there was this issue in the past, but as of 2.5, this is a non-issue for me. I am not seeing the massive station spam in my game that some folks have been reporting, however. The economy is doing quite well, I'm not seeing these big economy issues that some people are complaining about.

I have very similar set-up and performance to yours. I got a slight bigger performance hit on the map (to around 35-40) - possibly because I have some filtes on (like destination lines for my ships).

I think that station spam bug that some people report might the the performance cause. I also heard there is soemthing similar but insted statinos you got NPC factions freighters spam.
I din't not played much with 2.5, so I didn't experience it myself.

[Buzz2005]

wtf you have perfect performance standing on a station

but the again i dont have many performance issuse, less fps then you, it goes down to 20 fps on stations depending on how busy they are but flying is always good ( i5 6500,16gb and 1070 8gb), I do use no fog mod that gives me a nice boost and all settings on high, even the LOD distance
and have that satellites mod so its 1 per sector

Im still baffled by your 60 fps on a station that I dont get even on a new start

[radcapricorn]

Im still baffled by your 60 fps on a station that I dont get even on a new start

He's talking about the HQ. I'm also getting 60 in most places at the HQ (on i7 6700K, GTX980Ti). But e.g. freshly started game at the Eq. Dock in Black Hole Sun, FPS is all over the place, mostly from 40 to 60. And, regardless of what station I'm on, simply entering a transporter room drops FPS to 30-35.

[Buzz2005]

oh ok, does the HQ have some modules built?or is empty

guess a better CPU is in the plans

[Falcrack]

Maybe I just have a strong system (i7-7700K, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1060 6 GB), but I am really not seeing this supposed massive bad performance that come from having lots of satellite coverage. Maybe there was this issue in the past, but as of 2.5, this is a non-issue for me. I am not seeing the massive station spam in my game that some folks have been reporting, however. The economy is doing quite well, I'm not seeing these big economy issues that some people are complaining about.

I have very similar set-up and performance to yours. I got a slight bigger performance hit on the map (to around 35-40) - possibly because I have some filtes on (like destination lines for my ships).

I think that station spam bug that some people report might the the performance cause. I also heard there is soemthing similar but insted statinos you got NPC factions freighters spam.
I din't not played much with 2.5, so I didn't experience it myself.

True, I have all filters disabled. So I'll posy some map fps results.
No filters on, 60 fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, 60 fps
The above 4 options make no difference as far as I can tell, but that may be because my system is maxed out at 60 fps. For the following tests, these options are all on

Looking at station properties filters, fully zoomed out:
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, 60 fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus station cargo, 50 fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus workforce information, 50 fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus docked ships, 50 fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus station cargo, workforce information, and docked ships, 50 fps

Station cargo, workforce information, and docked ships each dropped fps from 60 to 50, but the effect was not additive, ie, having any one of them on dropped fps by 10, and having all three on did not further drop the fps.

Next, the ship properties filters, fully zoomed out unless stated otherwise:
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, 60 fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus show orders, 20(!) fps
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus show allied orders, 60 fps (no fps drop when zoomed out, but fps drop down to ~20 when zoomed in to a busy sector)
Ecliptic lines, wrecks, mission offers, and civilian ships, plus crew information, 50 fps when zoomed out, 40 fps when zoomed into a super busy sector and all crew info can be seen

Every filter in the game on when zoomed into the busiest sector, ~12-13 fps, but this looks like a royal mess especially with all the crew info.

So in summary, some map filter options have a bigger performance hit than others. Show orders and show allied orders are the biggest offenders by far, but this is probably because it is very late game, and I have a lot of ships which would to show orders for, and I am allied with every faction, so showing allied orders will also show massive amounts of info.

Set your map filters correctly and you can save A LOT in terms of maps performance.

[Falcrack]

oh ok, does the HQ have some modules built?or is empty

guess a better CPU is in the plans

My HQ is empty except for a venture module.

What is you CPU/GPU?

[Buzz2005]

oh ok, does the HQ have some modules built?or is empty

guess a better CPU is in the plans

My HQ is empty except for a venture module.

What is you CPU/GPU?

I5 6500,1070 8gb, can you all test on a busy shipyard?

[Falcrack]

oh ok, does the HQ have some modules built?or is empty

guess a better CPU is in the plans

My HQ is empty except for a venture module.

What is you CPU/GPU?

I5 6500,1070 8gb, can you all test on a busy shipyard?

Your bad performance is probably more CPU than GPU related, since you have a better GPU than me (1060 6 GB). I have an i7-7700K, which is pretty good.

At my busy shipyard in Second Contact II Flashpoint, I get ~20-25 fps both in and out of the map. That sector has all my factories (a large hull/egine parts complex, a claytronics complex, a food/medicine complex, and a ship components complex) all in close proximity to each other.