Some tips on performance

[Kingtoke]

I can play games like Eve Online with is great graphics with no issues.

*cough* blackhole systems *cough*

[tex-x]

Typical, even if you have a system that is more than double the ADVERTISED "optimum" system Egosoft still wants you to turn features off just to try and get this binary stillbirth running (below what it should be).

[odin_grey]

***Is confused!***
Ok, I did the whole benchmark thing, I run at about 32 FPS, then I go into the game and it is very laggy. Mostly when I use SETA, but I've had it to where very unpopulated areas are still laggy for me. What ever shall I do?

/Edit Ok, I went back and even checked in Presidents end with no khaak in it (the whole 5 AI scripts running at once) and even without SETA, it ran a bit laggy, with SETA, it actually ran slower than without it while it loaded...

Also, this just started recently, it was running extremely smoothly, then I bought 2 ships and another factory (equaling 6 ships, and 6 factories) then it got really bad. I left the game on and went to eat dinner, came back and it was fine again! About 2 hours of playing later, it went back to it's old evil self... Maybe it just hates me...

OH!, Specs are:

Athlon 2500+ 1.83 GHZ
512 MB DDRRAM
Radeon 9200SE 128 mb video card
115 GB free hard drive

[icecold951]

it seems as if egosoft is ignoring all the ati users. will you please tell us what we can do or what you are doing to fix this.

[odin_grey]

It's not that they are ignoring, it just that the don't know that there are replys here, this thread doesn't just jump to the top so they don't notice people posting.... Oh well, one of these days someone will notice us...

[Orlando Benjamin]

There is a way to make them notice us more quickly?

[mikesell]

I have tried all of the tips, but my system nevertheless slows down during combat situations, even against only one ship. frame rate should not be at all jumpy or slow for :

athlon 3200
1 gig 2700 ram
gforce 5900
a7n8x deluxe
all updates, drivers, etc.
services off

benchmarked against other resource intensive games such as call of duty and star wars galaxies, and the system blows these games away.

So the question remains, what is wrong with X2? Never encountered a game that I could not get to run optimally either through hardware upgrades or software upgrades. Since my hardware is already above optimal spec, what is a frustrated gamer to do?

[Orlando Benjamin]

I am start thinking that there is only one answer, the game engine was badly maked or programmed, whatever there is.

[White Tiger]

One thing I have found is, the bench mark test can give misleading results of what you will get in the game. For one, if I run the bench mark at 800 x 600 x 32, BM off, AA off, Shadows off, AQ on, I get about 62 fps. Now if I add AA to the test, my fps drops to 42. So you would assume this would mean a decrease in fps while playing the game? But with AA on, I have noticed my game play is smoother, with less slowdowns! Go figure.

AMD XP2400
512 DDR2100 ram
64 meg Nvidia MX440
AC97 on board sound card. ( cheap sound card I know. But no issues with sound in the game. )

[mikesell]

yes, i agree that the benchmark provides no guidance as to the slowdowns. at issue is a transitions from smooth gamplay (probably at least 30 fps to my eye) to laggy gameplay (e.g. 5 fps) during combat and in nebulae, i.e. a small portion of the averaging period.
The benchmark will smooth all that out and give you like 25 fps.
Of course when you are playing the game, you are not playing an average...meaning you have to take the 10 fps with the 30.

the search continues for how to make the game play better...the developers are awol (or the solution would require a complete overhaul of the game).

[Kosh_Naranek]

Yes it is a very odd frame rate problem in X2. I have played heaps of games (as I'm sure everyone elese has) on my system with equivalent or more complex graphics and they run just fine.
eg.

• Battlefield 1942 (very pretty, very complex, run great, - perhaps best litmus test on my system)
  Haegemonia (very similar with bump maps, particles, specular hi lights)
  Flight Simulator 2002 (very complex scenary, shadows, specular, mirrored surfaces)
  Age of Mythology
  Black and White (simply very cool and deserves the BAFTA it received)
  C&C Generals (bit of a memory hog)
  Indepence War 2 Edge of Chaos (great effects, great frames/sec)
  UT2003 (very pretty, useful benchmark)
  Neverwinter Nights (very sharp textures, CGI effects)
  Warcraft III (lots of unit AI)

Others have noticed in this forum that the frame rate drops when there are many ships in a system. I've seen this happen too. When it does, I deliberately turn my ship to face away to black space to see what happens. The frame rate did not change which is a bit odd, it should have gone up since all the craft are behind me and don't need to be drawn. Considering that the majority of the screen at most of the time is black space, and that space stations/ships are usually blobs in the distance/off screen, why is the frame rate so low?

Is the engine trying to draw things that are off screen? IWAR2 didn't have a problem with this.

Is it drawing too many polygons for objects that are too far away? Not much point drawing all that detail for the radar dish when you are too far to see it. Progressive meshes are handy for this. Flight Simulator has been doing this for years.

Maybe it's not a drawing engine problem after all, but X2's algorithm for calculating ship movement, AI etc is a bit slow? (can't imagine how though)

I'm sure Egosoft will locate the problem.

Kosh Naranek

[Mehrunes]

Not much point drawing all that detail for the radar dish when you are too far to see it. Progressive meshes are handy for this. Flight Simulator has been doing this for years.

X2 does this as long as you have AQC selected. BTW, all of the games you have posted have very little going on in the background. X2 has 129 sectors to look after, and there's always something happening in them, in addition to the one you're in.

Is the engine trying to draw things that are off screen? IWAR2 didn't have a problem with this.

You don't "draw things offscreen", but you still need to calculate movement, AI and continuously check for collisions. Of course, I don't recall having 100+ ships in one area in I-War2 without slowdowns either.

[SHADOWKAT]

if you have any comments or useful links concerning ATI performance please add them to this thread.

http://www.egosoft.com/x2/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20370

[Kosh_Naranek]

Not much point drawing all that detail for the radar dish when you are too far to see it. Progressive meshes are handy for this. Flight Simulator has been doing this for years.

X2 does this as long as you have AQC selected. BTW, all of the games you have posted have very little going on in the background. X2 has 129 sectors to look after, and there's always something happening in them, in addition to the one you're in.

What sillyness. All of these games must perform background AI in the CPU regardless of whether you have a high performance video card installed or not.

• Black and White had around 500 villiages running around performing various duties using complex AI without the frame rate dropping.
  MS Flight Sim runs a realistic flight model with real physics along with dynamic weather, scenery and traffic.
  Battlefield 1942 play scape is not that large, but there is sufficient activity happening there.
  Homeworld 2 has hundreds of ships in the same sector and it does just fine.

I love to do raytracing on my computer. It does a good job and that's pretty complex. Nothing like a few mathematical sqrt operations to ruin your day.

The point is, I get an acceptible 40+ frame rate in the benchmark, but anything from 6 - 30 in the game. This happens when I'm just sitting there in one sector with a fairly constant traffic rate during the period.

Maybe Egosoft can benchmark the application to find out where the CPU is spending most of its time

Are the AI scripts interpreted at runtime or are they precompiled?

Is the engine trying to draw things that are off screen? IWAR2 didn't have a problem with this.

You don't "draw things offscreen", but you still need to calculate movement, AI and continuously check for collisions. Of course, I don't recall having 100+ ships in one area in I-War2 without slowdowns either.

I don't recall ever seeing 100+ ships in one area. But what both I-War 2 and Freelancer had was a fairly constant frame rate irrespective of sector activity in the game.

[RaoulDuke4413]

I have:

2500+@3200+
1GB PC3200
120GB 7200RPM
Asus A7n8x-x
9800 pro

and I get the slowdowns as well. The framerate thing with X2 kind of reminds me of a similar problem I had in Gothic 2. Switching resolutions didn't seem to matter. The only thing that seemed to make any difference in the fps was changing the "draw distance" option. Strange.

[bunkey]

This game is very resource intensive, especially on the video card. I am running a GeForce FX5200 Ultra with 128 Megs and it is just barely working smoothly. I feel a FX 5600 Ultra or higher is really needed. You just may have to upgrade or update your video card to get the game to work.

[FLY135]

Black and White had around 500 villiages running around performing various duties using complex AI without the frame rate dropping.
Homeworld 2 has hundreds of ships in the same sector and it does just fine.

What sillyness. Comparing 3rd person games against 1st person.

[Kosh_Naranek]

Black and White had around 500 villiages running around performing various duties using complex AI without the frame rate dropping.
Homeworld 2 has hundreds of ships in the same sector and it does just fine.

What sillyness. Comparing 3rd person games against 1st person.

Who's comparing 3rd person to 1st person? I was comparing the performance of other 3D games to the disappointing performance in X2.

[Dread Quixadhal]

Black and White had around 500 villiages running around performing various duties using complex AI without the frame rate dropping.
Homeworld 2 has hundreds of ships in the same sector and it does just fine.

What sillyness. Comparing 3rd person games against 1st person.

Who's comparing 3rd person to 1st person? I was comparing the performance of other 3D games to the disappointing performance in X2.

Even so, Black & White has a fully positionable camera, which means it is NO DIFFERENT than a 1st person game, other than the default placement of that camera. If you were to position the camera just in front of your creature's head and follow it, you'd be essentially 1st person.

I think the point is, the same kind of lighting calculations, point-of-view (Z-buffer) calculations, and level-of-detail calculations come into play for both games. The villagers in B&W react to their environment, and as I recall your presence as well, hence they have to check to see what objects, what other villagers, and what other effects are in their range to determine how it influences their own activities.

X2 probably has more actors, but most of them will be out-of-sector, and thus should be simpler to consider, since some of their behavior can be represented via statistics rather than computation. From some of the descriptions in this forum, it sounds like an N^N problem, where every element is trying to calculate every other element, rather than model those outside the current scope.

If that were true, the game would be CPU bound, and would perform best on multi-processor systems... and on systems whose video drivers took less machine CPU power. ATI and Nvidia are comparable in terms of GPU performance, but has anyone analyzed how much CPU their drivers take when doing lots of updates? If the ATI ones take more CPU, there would be less for X2 to use in updating game elements.

[BJS]

when i first ran X2.. the framerate was good (30-40fps) but it would stutter in parts.. (tiny pauses)

If anyone else is getting this. DISABLE YOUR NETWORK.

It worked for me. There was no network traffic, no internet traffic, but for some odd reason it fixed the stuttering.

What's the best temp way to disable network traffic. I want to try this but I don't want to mess up my network settings. Thanks.