[6.0] Very low performance after 6.0 update

[SniperNLN]

[deleted]

[chew-ie]

+1 for the excellent information provided

About your main question in the last paragraph - the game is heavily CPU bound and your CPU is the bottleneck. Thus you don't gain anything by going to the lowest graphical settings. You might have some luck deactivating a few DLCs and e.g. just play the new one. As soon as you upgrade your hardware, you can activate the other DLCs. Of course, this means you have to start a new savegame. But the Boron story is quite nice and exploring their realm provides a lot of opportunity to spend time

[Alan Phipps]

Have you verified your game installation since the release and hotfix?

Your sound area needs some attention. The ASUS Xonar sound device driver is non-WHQL and is well outdated, and the SteamStreaming sound device and Realtek onboard sound device both have outdated drivers. I would disable whichever sound devices you don't use in Device Manager, Sound/Audio Devices (right-click on a device in the list for a disable/enable pop-up). Update the driver(s) of whichever one(s) you keep.

See if that helps to reduce the cpu load at all. Good luck.

[SniperNLN]

You might have some luck deactivating a few DLCs and e.g. just play the new one.

I've tried deactivating ToA and KE with starting a fresh save - absolutely the same low performance as with all activated.

And I've just run your suggestion as well and it's still hardly playable. Maybe a 5 FPS improvement at times. While a downgraded 4.20 with SV and CoH runs 3 times better.

Have you verified your game installation since the release and hotfix?

Your sound area needs some attention. The ASUS Xonar sound device driver is non-WHQL and is well outdated, and the SteamStreaming sound device and Realtek onboard sound device both have outdated drivers. I would disable whichever sound devices you don't use in Device Manager, Sound/Audio Devices (right-click on a device in the list for a disable/enable pop-up). Update the driver(s) of whichever one(s) you keep.

See if that helps to reduce the cpu load at all. Good luck.

Of course I did updated the game fully, I'm juggling versions the whole day so after the downgrade test I switched back to the newest version and re-downloaded it again.

My Xonar does use an unofficial driver, yes, but it is still miles ahead of whatever trash Asus was providing. And sure it's old cause the device is old too, pretty sure Asus drivers would be even older.
And no, I can't disable those audio devices, I'm using them. And i don't believe there are any updates for those.

[Skeeter]

Sry to interrupt but yes sound cards like asus rarely get driver updates, my asus dg had what one or two driver updates and that was yonks ago when the card came out in 2014 or 2015 i think then no other drivers as scards rarely get em. We have to rely on 3rd party unified drivers for asus cards that were updated much more, but even that has been a few years since a update.

So even tho alot of dxdiag reports will say old driver for soundcards dont mean to say we dont try to keep them updated its just there is no updates to get.

[CBJ]

I'd like to second the comment above about providing excellent information. Thanks; it make it a lot easier to help people when they do this!

As previous posters have mentioned, graphics settings are likely to be mostly irrelevant when the game is CPU-bound, as it will be on your system. Exceptions to this might include shadows and the new environment probes option, where disabling these may help maintain performance, so make sure you give those a try as well as just choosing presets.

But this kind of behaviour where any possible changes to the game options yield absolutely no improvements what so ever just doesn't make any sense.

Most people have been reporting improved performance with 6.00, so there must be some reason why this doesn't hold true for you. One reason could be your CPU, which hovers pretty close to the bare minimum requirement for the game. With the newer versions making better use of more cores for various things, CPUs with only 4 cores and no hyperthreading will almost certainly gain less from changes that improve things for other systems. It shouldn't make things worse, but perhaps combined with other factors (e.g. on a system that also has slower memory), there could be edge cases where it does.

And no, I can't disable those audio devices, I'm using them. And i don't believe there are any updates for those.

It's still worth a try, not as a permanent thing, but as a test to see whether any of those drivers are contributing to the performance problem. If they are then you can decide whether it's worth keeping things that way or not.

[Imperial Good]

My guess is that the new Jolt physics engine uses more CPU time in total (as it does a better job at handling collisions) but scales better with core count so ends up performing better on modern, higher core count CPUs. This can be seen by your CPU being at practically 100% usage now, it is really pushing your CPU to its limits to get the most out of it unlike before with only ~70%. Unfortunately your CPU's most is not enough resulting in worse performance.

Someone with a similar generation processor reported that reinstalling X4 helped their performance with 6.00. Might be worth giving it a try.

[SniperNLN]

My guess is that the new Jolt physics engine uses more CPU time in total (as it does a better job at handling collisions) but scales better with core count so ends up performing better on modern, higher core count CPUs. This can be seen by your CPU being at practically 100% usage now, it is really pushing your CPU to its limits to get the most out of it unlike before with only ~70%. Unfortunately your CPU's most is not enough resulting in worse performance.

Someone with a similar generation processor reported that reinstalling X4 helped their performance with 6.00. Might be worth giving it a try.

The new physics engine being the culprit is actually what I was thinking myself too. I didn't what to bring it up myself to see other opinions first. It seems like the biggest change in terms of probable CPU load. Like, sure, more systems, more entities, more calculations, but along those additions also come new optimisations too. And thus it's pretty strange that just two patches with all the optimisations included suddenly bring more than 3 times degradation in performance.

Didn't have much time today to try stuff, but I put the game on the full reinstall just now, we'll see if that helps.


Edit:
And nope. Reinstallation didn't change anything. Nor did disabling any of the sound devices or all of them all together.

[InnocentiusLacrim]

I really think that it is not a regular CPU bottleneck issue. I had similar issues also with having 10+ fps when seeing an exploded K or a station. Rig is
5950X
64GB RAM
4070 Ti
Both CPU and GPU utilizations were around 10% and 8% respectively. If someone says that it is a CPU "bottleneck" and not a bug then the obvious solution would be for me to overclock my CPU to around 30 GHz to get 60 fps? in those situations? Something is seriously broken in the game engine as the 30 GHz CPU speeds are obviously beyond us at this point.

[CBJ]

That doesn't sound normal, nor does it sound like it's related to the OP's issue at all. Start a new thread and post the details, including your DXDiag and vulkaninfo as requested in the first thread in this forum. Please also include what settings you are using and where you are seeing the specific issue you're seeing. A savegame would also help.