A theory on the random lag some people have

[gandy|UKCS|]

This really is a theory on the lag some people have so please only treat it like that.

Today i moved all my parts for my pc back into my antec 182 case and as part of that i like to monitor the temps while playing a game just to make sure there is no issues with temps. I installed the latest build of gpu-z ( version 0.3.1 ) and while i was playing i tab to desktop to check something and i noticed while i was playing X3:TC my gpu core had been dropping to 500mhz from 750mhz and had been doing that for a while.

Now i know TC is not that demanding on a gfx card and it seems it can be so little demanding my card drops into idle mode and then back to full power mode when its needed. Looking at the red bar on the app i could almost place the lag spikes in time with.

So my theory is.. is it possible that when my card goes into idle mode and then back to full power mode could that be causing the lag while playing TC.

also would anyone know how to stop my card going into idle mode so i can test more. I have an ATI HD4870.

[Deleted User]

When the card changes from idle to working mode, then of course it causes some kind of lag, because it doesn't go that fast to work with the data the gfx card received while using the working mode and then switch to idle mode. There is some kind of data traffic congestion then. Is your gfx card overclocked? I only had this problem as I overclocked my card, but never else.

[gandy|UKCS|]

na i run my pc at stock.

with the switching between modes in theory it can happen hundreds of times a minute as it meant to be an on demand feature for modern gfx cards.

I will get some logs to post.

This just could be a mad theory of mine btw but if i can disable the idle mode on the gfx card it would make a great test even if it proves nothing to stop the random lag.

[g04tn4d0]

From what I've observed over the years, the freezes appear to have nothing to do with bottlenecks or power savings modes. It's just a side-effect from the way their game engine is designed. Probably just caching/uncaching stuff as things enter the sectors and/or as the player looks at them... or it might be from all those scripts they have running in the background; maybe one of them is getting hung up on something or going runaway for a moment. Who knows? But it's been a signature (and ongoing complaint) of EgoSoft games from the start. I have X2 and X3R, can load it up, get hundreds of frames per second, monitor & verify CPU & GPU usage is not pegged, and yet still have micro-freezes off and on. No other game (and I have played hundreds) does this. With every new version of the X series, EgoSoft tacks on more kewl features, increases the details of the models, what-have-you, and these micro-stutter become increasingly more pronounced.

Of course, in their defense, no other game on the market is trying to accomplish what the X-series does. It's literally a space-combat game running inside a real-time strategy game, running inside one of those Something-Tycoon games. When you take that aspect into account, you can't really wag too many fingers at the designers as its not like they have any other examples -past or present- to look off of when creating these obnoxiously complex games. I mean, really, they're making it up as they go along. Problems get solved however they can figure it out. There's no one out there doing a 3-way, multi-genre space combat empire economy simulator that they can get a hint from.

[Dungeoncrawler]

Guess it could be affecting some players. However, I monitor cpu/gpu clocks/temps/etc on my second monitor while playing and my clocks do not fluctuate. I still have issues with this problem. I defrag on a weekly basis, run registry cleaner whenever it indicates a need (set for weekly I think), and have a second pc for web-browsing so I don't have excessive software (virus scanner, etc) running on my gaming rig. I've got a sli rig 280gtx SC and four cores running at 3.0GHz. Trust me, its something to do with the game. HOWEVER, very confident that Egosoft will eventually patch this thing to near perfection just like they did with X3:R. More importantly, this is simply my opinion...

Dc

[perpiotrredman]

i noticed while i was playing X3:TC my gpu core had been dropping to 500mhz from 750mhz and had been doing that for a while.

You could be onto something, but we can't tell if this is the cause or result. If the issue causes the application to pause, the video card may throttle down to 500MHz because there's nothing to do. Conversely, of course, something may cause the video card to throttle down, which causes the slowdown.

You should be able to circumvent power management by overclocking using a third-party tool so that the video card ALWAYS runs at a set speed. If you still get the problem, then the power management on the video card is not to blame.

I also use a (single) 4870 with 512MB of video RAM.

[perpiotrredman]

Probably just caching/uncaching stuff as things enter the sectors and/or as the player looks at them...

Yes, cache misses. During one extreme moment, I got a small pause every time the docking music was about to play - very obvious.

A RAM disk could probably help against that though.

[gandy|UKCS|]

have you seen the price of them.. they are not cheap even though they are as old as dos.

[frymaster]

Probably just caching/uncaching stuff as things enter the sectors and/or as the player looks at them...

Yes, cache misses. During one extreme moment, I got a small pause every time the docking music was about to play - very obvious.

A RAM disk could probably help against that though.

the game already "caches" as much as it can (ie it never unloads resources from memory until it hits the 2gb process limit, only then does it really clean up).

I suspect the best use of any remaining RAM, certainly on vista, is to leave it alone... that way it should be used on disk cache, speeding up access to some of the rest of the resources.

I am also 99% certain that at least some lag issues are caused by the 2gb limit being reached faster on certain machine configurations (possibly caused by larger system dlls - like sound and graphics - in certain configurations)

I am also not certain that one set of symptoms only have 1 set of causes, so at least some issues could be caused by this gfx card clock adjustment thing (I don't get these issues so it's difficult for me to check)

[th3flyboy]

When the card changes from idle to working mode, then of course it causes some kind of lag, because it doesn't go that fast to work with the data the gfx card received while using the working mode and then switch to idle mode. There is some kind of data traffic congestion then. Is your gfx card overclocked? I only had this problem as I overclocked my card, but never else.

What I wonder is, would that affect factory overclocked cards such as my BFG tech GTX 280 OCX.

[perpiotrredman]

have you seen the price of them.. they are not cheap even though they are as old as dos.

SuperSpeed Ramdisk Plus costs USD 34.95 for 32-bit versions of Windows (and can use memory between 3 and 4GB) but for 64-bit versions, it costs 69.95 instead.

I tried mounting 2 of my 6GB as a RAM disk, which Windows then tried to use for "ReadyBoost". The X3TC "pausing" may have become shorter every time it happens (or I was imaginging it) but it was still just as common, it still happened just as often.

the game already "caches" as much as it can (ie it never unloads resources from memory until it hits the 2gb process limit, only then does it really clean up).

Do we know that for certain? That sounds like rather a wasteful strategy, considering what happens when it reaches such a hard memory limit. EgoSoft certainly have all the data available to precache items that are going to be used; ships OOS that will enter the sector shortly, bases that are present in the sector you are currently in transit to, missiles carried by ship in the area that may be fired and so on. Preemptively unloading objects to make room for other objects, just plain makes sense.

I have 6GB of RAM, as mentioned above, in a 64-bit edition of Vista. I was not aware the 2GB-per-process "limit" was still imposed when running 32-bit applications under Vista 64. Although, the game's resources are just over 7GB.

Remaining memory in Vista is not getting used for a disk cache. If it were, you would only very rarely see free memory in Vista and I believe you too have noticed that you do have free memory.

Another SuperSpeed product, "SuperCache", can use RAM as an additional hard drive cache, but that product is not available for Vista.

What I wonder is, would that affect factory overclocked cards such as my BFG tech GTX 280 OCX.

Yes, factory overclocked cards will still feature power save modes versus high-performance mode, it's just that the BIOS has been tweaked so that the high-performance mode is higher than usual.

What you need to try is a software overclocking program that locks the card into that high-performance mode, or a new clock speed, constantly.