[3.53] Sudden fps drops from 40+ to 5

[hisazul]

Regardless of what fps I had at the moment it suddenly plummets to 5fps and only after leaving zone(zone must fully unload and switch to OOZ) or watching a cutscene(npc boards/exits ships or stations) does it return to normal.

Now I cannot be sure about this but after a few accidental visual cues and just thinking about zones where this happens consistently I'm suspecting AI miners are the cause for this.

OL - Commerce Core - Last Stand.... it literally takes just a bit of hanging around that place for this to happen and there are always seem to be a miner nearby. I don't really stay in OL that often but there are few other zones with ice fields where this happened.

AL - ehhh... pretty much in every sector there is a zone with heavy miner activity but only a few seem to generate this behavior.

DV - before I built a construction shop in Darn Hot Air I used the zone as my parking lot, dozens of ship parked there for future use and I've sat in that zone for hours microing my stuff. After I build a station that uses a miner and gave it a miner it literally takes maybe 5 minutes before this starts happening. First time I started suspecting miners was when I happened to sit right next to an Onil that was breaking roids and watched it shoot a roid, roid explodes, my fps goes from 40 to 5 at the same moment where roid had a fancy explosion.


I suspect some asteroids use different explosion animation/fx because regardless of whats happening at Bad Lands it never happens there. I've had encounter with one of those over the board Riever spawns where 50+ Reives which look like a giant red ball. Then my 2 Arawns with full drone stocks take on that and I join in... things blowing up everywhere and then another super Reiver spawn joins in and there are almost always duo of Fedhelms that are digging around old broken mine station and yet my fps never takes a dip in that zone. Also on side note I don't think I ever experienced this while doing mining myself for nividium/spaceflies.



Edit:

Now I'm 99.9% sure this is caused by mining. I was doing Argon Secrete Service chain on last mission to kill the leader or what not in OL-EC-Great Basin. It features a decent ice roid population and my target was Lyranea(ughhh spelling) with Olmekron and Fulmekron escorting it with assorted fighters... I disabled engines etc on all of them and slowly stripped them, it was all peachy until all that was left is to break primary target and cap Fulmekron and Olmekron. Then instantly from 38fps down to 2. Slide show begins and I'm pissed to no end. Zone was empty... after fps dropped all that was added to the zone were 3 ****** miners. Somehow killed that Lyranea and cringingly went to cap Olmekron.

Fulmekron was fully stripped while Olmekron had some turrets still on it due to its nose being stuck in ice asteroid. Too laggy and too annoyign I just used my own mining laser to blow up the roid since it was a big one. Woe and behold after about an hour of 2 fps... instantly as soon as roid blew up im back to 32ish fps and it crawled back to high 30 soon after. Too many broken drones and roids for my 4 year old singe gpu rig to get to 40.

Now I'm aware of 3 ways to get rid of mining lag. Leave zone, telling someone to get on/off skunk/station/other ship/fire and using my own mining laser to break a roid. This can't be random coincidence at this point. Still haven't seen this happening while I'm in mining mode doing mining myself. No matter how big of a cloud of crap gets released at worst it's a short lived small fps drop. Problem with cloud/explosion texture that gets loaded when you are further away? Some problem with LOD algorithms? Something is off with exploding asteroids...

[XenonSurf]

The only useful thing in finding solutions related to FPS and Performance in general in XR would be IMHO to make 2 sticky posts discussing the settings of NVidia and ATI grafic cards, so that we all have objecive numbers to compare.

I've struggled a long time to improve performance with a special Profile of my Nvidia 8800 GTS, I found that especially having the Fullscreen adjustment set to Display (and not to GPU) will greatly enhance FPS in FP mode, but who knows if there are better solutions... The only way is comparing exact numbers, hence a dedicated grafics card threat.

Greets,
XenonS

[Requiemfang]

wonder if it's possible to turn the dust cloud animation for roids off. I've noticed the FPS drop when roids explode and spill their guts as well. It's that massive dust cloud that gets released when they blow up.

[donzi]

My observations on this seem to indicate GPU specs and numbers will only go so far.

I can mine with a Onil with 50 surface miners (usually some 20 or so get deployed at time but will go to max at times) while the miner is in fleet (or not) and I use the 'gather' command.

On the other hand, being in zone with the same Onil miner when it's controlled by station management seems to always produce the extreme FPS drop.

Granted I do have other situations where pure NPC mining or other massive activity (..thinks of Last Stand zone) sometimes produces extreme FPS drop and there are possibly other factors which I'd say would be minor (eg: explosion effects, etc) considering the very low settings I use. Additionally, this extreme FPS drop while IZ with a station controlled minor maintains despite what is being displayed on my screen.. station docked or crew quarters for example.

Code: Select all

  <fullscreen>true</fullscreen>
  <borderless>false</borderless>
  <res_width>1280</res_width>
  <res_height>720</res_height>
  <antialiasing>0</antialiasing>
  <vsync>true</vsync>
  <gamma>1.00</gamma>
  <capturehq>false</capturehq>
  <gfxquality>0</gfxquality>
  <!-- medium gfx preset -->
  <shaderquality>1</shaderquality>
  <legacyshaders>false</legacyshaders>
  <shadows>0</shadows>
  <softshadows>false</softshadows>
  <ssao>0</ssao>
  <glow>0</glow>
  <lodfactor>0.00</lodfactor>
  <viewdistance>0.15</viewdistance>
  <effectdistance>0.15</effectdistance>
  <distortion>false</distortion>
  <disableradar>false</disableradar>
  <radarquality>1</radarquality>
  <em_cutscene>false</em_cutscene>

..I know that more could be reduced in my settings, however in most every other situation I am fine.

Really seems to be zone AI overload on the CPU and/or RAM to me -- somehow linked to what scripts take priority with station mining ops. I see little connection with other such AI -- could be 100+ fighters and other NPC ships buzzing around on patrols and not produce noticable impact.

[hisazul]

I have flat ultra settings and even with that when I go xenon bashing to their sector with all the crap there plus my 2 arawns with full set of drones, 2 balors and 2 fulmekrons and everything exploding and then some... all that doesn't really amount to as much of resources as one would think, fps drop is minimal imo. Which is very admirable all things considering, they did some pretty epic work on this engine at this point. Any sector with AI controlled miners on the other hand... is a potential fps death trap.

The only other resource hog(miner nonsense doesn't hog resources it's just broken) I run into would be vram, it's not properly unloading everything or maybe it's not even suppose to. It unloads some... but consistently traveling between multiple systems you start with ~2gigs vram in use and an hour later you sit at over 3gigs.... in an empty zone. But that's a whole different topic entirely.

Atm I'd just like this roids/mining issue to go away. Avoiding asteroid filled zones is impossible unless you plat to live in maelstrom... nobody mines there lol

Also going by my gpu and other stats it doesn't do any extra strain to cpu that I can see. Gpu clocks get messed up due to load going 99% and fps dropping to the floor... clocks drop the almost desktop level lol... even voltage usage drops but that's to be expected.

[donzi]

Hehe, well that is where I ended up on my first go of the campaign, Maelstrom.

I'll be glad when I don't have to make special preparations before going where my station miners are..

Tried manual (tagging) mining some but it's gonna take something special for me to spend any more time doing that. Best I can tell is that may be required for spacefly harvesting and aside from that it's no more than a geeky, masochistic way to harvest regular resources.

[XenonSurf]

If you own a NVidia card, try out this which I have posted on SpaceSimCentral.com:

http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/49 ... s-for-v31/

My opinion is:

a) One has a great card? Then one reduces the settings...

Let the card handle AA and set AA=0 in-game, it will look better, also set "Enhance AA by the card" if you own a NVidia; no Vsynch, no Triple Buffer, 2 preloaded frames only; turn off all shadows, no more than LOD 30 and else 20.

b) One has a crap card? Then one is stucked


XenonS

[hisazul]

Has nothing to do with gpu, the issue lies with how game currently handles this issue.

And I have ultra settings and my single 4 year old gpu never dips below 26 even in the most absurdly busy settings. As in a few thousand ship wrecks, crap everywhere and dozens of caps duking it out. General performance is hardly an issue at this point. It's specific bugs that haven't been squashed yet that still make things annoying here and there.

[XenonSurf]

If you have a lot of mods loaded then caching operations will take u a lot of FPS away.
Dust and many objects in space will slow every card down, it only depends on how much (thus my 'great' and 'crap' argument).

I agree there's nothing to do about it, but waiting for patches (sorry I have skipped telling that before...)

XenonS

My active mods:
- Cap Ship Bridge
- Mission Computer
- BetterAutoAim
- AutomatedEmergencyJump

[hisazul]

Unless mods drastically change the density of npcs or change effects/textures there shouldn't be any severe increase in fps.. well you never know with these kind of things there are always ways to boggle the mind with something completely unexpected. When it comes to mods I'd be more wary of mods that severely change AI and have possibility of completely bottlenecking your cpu/ram causing lag to crawl from that direction instead of gpu side of things. A sloppy made AI mod that does absurd amount of constant checks and calls will cause more slow downs then 3trippling resolution of every single texture and then tesselating them on top of it.

Atm ship wrecks are done fairly well and they provide very little strain on gpu rendering capacity. A lot of fluff effects like little pebbles, smoke, etc don't really cause much extra strain unless your gpu is struggling to begin with. Zones that have small pebbles floating in massive quantities those pebbles are just 2d sprites for instant... and as such while a few thousand of them could be getting rendered while they are around... that's insignificant when it comes to current gpus.

Anyway... this was about ai asteroid asteroid mining causing an issue where fps permanently drops to snail pace until you leave the zone(or use a few other tricks to reset it) since it's so drastic that you drop from 40 fps instantly to 3-4, issue deserves some discussion.

[XenonSurf]

I will soon get in the Mining operations which I haven't played before, and I'm rather pessimist about my FPS, I'm already at the limit.

The gameplay of XR is awesome already. My biggest wish is Egosoft making improvements on the game engine that boosts performance.

XenonS