1.50 Texture and UI dropout, and why current answers are unacceptable

[Kadatherion]

Egosoft should have simply said that the game does not run with less than 3 GB of VRAM in the Steam system requirements. Then the people who now have these problems would have saved their money and not buy this game. When a game has no good memory management and is hardcoded to 3GB, a simple note in the system requirements avoids discussion with customers.

The steam page mentions two cards that have 3GB of VRAM (and their equivalents) as minimum requirement. While I agree they could have been even more clear about that point for the tech illiterates, there's no denying it was plainly stated that with inferior cards you'd be under the minimum requirements. Is the game probably poorly optimized, for what actually is in it? Heck, sure it is. But if I make a car that only runs on rocket fuel, it's my own damn business, if you want to use it then be sure to have rocket fuel, I don't give a damn if you demand to be able to use it with gasoline. Is it a bad business choice for me to have rocket fuel as a requirement in 2018? Probably, but that's my business, not yours. You were warned.

[andreas2099]

The normal buyer thinking that a GTX 960 are faster than a 780 GTX which is just outdated. In 3dmark you have more points with the 960. X4 is the only game this year that just crashes when the VRAM is full. Other developers implement a reasonable memory management. Take a look at Star Citizen, this game is for next gen hardware but runs on this card at medium without crashes. For me it is not a problem to just order a RTX 280 Ti, I have enough money. The point is that this year I played a lot of AAA games that were running with this card. If all games has this problems i accept that my hardware is bad. But when it is only one game then the developers should take a look at their code.

[Kadatherion]

I'd argue how the normal buyer should then study a bit more about what he's running under the hood, but the comparison with Fraud Citizen, really, makes every reasonable argument moot. I concede.

[Damocles_]

Should not be too hard to write a little automatic "downscale" tool, that opens the textures in the gamefiles, shrinks them by 50%, and saves them to the archive again.

Of course this would shrink all textures found, unless there is some blacklist, that ignores certain textures (or any texture below a minimum size)

With the textures scaled to 50%, in theory, the game would only require 25% of the graphics memory. It should still look acceptable for this type of game then.

[albanana]

Should not be too hard to write a little automatic "downscale" tool, that opens the textures in the gamefiles, shrinks them by 50%, and saves them to the archive again.

Of course this would shrink all textures found, unless there is some blacklist, that ignores certain textures (or any texture below a minimum size)

With the textures scaled to 50%, in theory, the game would only require 25% of the graphics memory. It should still look acceptable for this type of game then.

You might want to check out this app here (uploaded new version today): viewtopic.php?f=146&t=409184

This scales down textures (atm by removing the highest-res mipmaps, depending on the settings). It can remove high-LOD meshes as well. I'm currently thinking about how to rescale textures that only have one available resolution (the bigger ones all have mulitple ones), so there's still room for improvement

[Damocles_]

Should not be too hard to write a little automatic "downscale" tool, that opens the textures in the gamefiles, shrinks them by 50%, and saves them to the archive again.

Of course this would shrink all textures found, unless there is some blacklist, that ignores certain textures (or any texture below a minimum size)

With the textures scaled to 50%, in theory, the game would only require 25% of the graphics memory. It should still look acceptable for this type of game then.

You might want to check out this app here (uploaded new version today): viewtopic.php?f=146&t=409184

This scales down textures (atm by removing the highest-res mipmaps, depending on the settings). It can remove high-LOD meshes as well. I'm currently thinking about how to rescale textures that only have one available resolution (the bigger ones all have mulitple ones), so there's still room for improvement

Yes, thats the type of tool that will help a lot of players.
... And something that shows Egosoft could have done them by themself, if they wanted to.
... but they did not want ... spite?

[letwolf]

they dont want to support poorer players, I think.

[Warnoise]

The normal buyer thinking that a GTX 960 are faster than a 780 GTX which is just outdated. In 3dmark you have more points with the 960. X4 is the only game this year that just crashes when the VRAM is full. Other developers implement a reasonable memory management. Take a look at Star Citizen, this game is for next gen hardware but runs on this card at medium without crashes. For me it is not a problem to just order a RTX 280 Ti, I have enough money. The point is that this year I played a lot of AAA games that were running with this card. If all games has this problems i accept that my hardware is bad. But when it is only one game then the developers should take a look at their code.

The problem is, why would i buy a 2k$ graphic card for a meh game with meh graphics like X4?

If there were amazing graphics with breathtaking details and stuff like that, then yeah maybe, but currently i see 0 reason for one to invest for a new graphic just for a meh game. Egosoft are really giving their competitors all the advantages in the book.

While I think OP complaining about not meeting the min requirements is wrong, I do see where he comes from if we look at the quality of the game.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Funny how some people cry about having not enough money to buy a PC powerful enough to run this game...

The thing is that even with a decent spec PC (64GB RAM, 11GB VRAM) there are resource management issues and crashes/hangs. Also, while the minimum specification is 970/780 the minimum VRAM is not explicitly stated - only Vulkan support is (at least in the Steam store).

The Software Quality of X4, even with 1.50 is still dire and below the par for Egosoft based on past experience. Even on my high end setup there are issues.

The resource management aspect is critical to any software product IMO and Egosoft would be ill-advised to not address the issues in play - if it allows people with lower VRAM levels to play X4 as well then that is a bonus in my books, Egosoft should also consider carefully how they declare the minimum specifications and ensure ALL the relevant criteria are explicitly stated.

[Tristavius]

I always feel torn between both sides in these debates.

One one side, a 2GB card is now very, very old (I'm guessing maybe a Nvidia 600 series, or whatever the ATI equivalent was then?) That puts it circa 2012, which is now 6 plus years old. I remember a time not so long ago you could drop serious money on a gaming PC and 18 months later you could forget playing new A list titles. I used to have to upgrade more or less annually. These days things do last longer. I bought a gaming laptop in October 2013 and it was still managing all but the most graphics based titles of 2018, all be it on low/medium. Finally replaced this year 5 years to the day. Laptop wise looking back the last few lasted: 18 months, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. PC more complicated due to partial upgrades.

Somewhere along the way though developers have to draw the line and say they won't support something any longer. Really, if you have 6 year old tech, you can probably replace it with 3 year old tech for almost nothing - I see 2-3 year old parts online all the time for 20% or less of the price.

In this case the developer has given minimum requirements - there's really no way anyone can complain.

That being said, it must be very frustrating to not be able to do what you want, and doubly so as it really feels like X4 with a bit of optimization should be functional better across the board. It frankly doesn't run perfectly on my new Razer (Nvidia 1070) nor on my Desktop (Nvidia 1080Ti) and the graphics while nice, aren't actually ground breaking.

[letwolf]

I have gtx 690 ( its dual chip 680), and it is still pretty decent, having the performance score in between 1050 and 1050ti. It has 2+2 gb vram. This card costs ~100 usd at used market. I can buy the rx 560 with 1 chip and 4 gb vram, this will cost ~150 usd. But in terms of performane, rx 560 is much much worse than my gtx 690. The sole advantage is more video memory PER CHIP. all other characteristics much worse. To make a real upgrade, for example 1060 with 6gb, this will cost near 250 usd. Given that ALL other modern games (battlefield 1, Witcher 3, World of tanks, EVE) works perfectly on mid setting,given the high horsepower of dual gtx 690 chip. So I need extra ~ 150 usd SOLELY FOR X4. Its a quite investment. And knowing the fact, that graphics in x4, likely BELOW AVERAGE level for 2018, I ask myself: WHAT,F***, FOR?