6.20 LAG / PERFORMANCE Performance is bad right from the start (workaround exists, but need fix anyway)

[MiriSpace]

Version: 6.20/English
Vanilla/unmodded
Main Menu and all gamestarts

CPU: i7-13700KF
RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000
GPU: RTX 2080Ti
installed on SSD
drivers are mostly current
no intergated graphics available

DxDiag: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AoHdF3Srgfufg2w1sw- ... n?e=pRKjes
VulkanInfo: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AoHdF3Srgfufg214TB0 ... 4?e=TdO2Ya
(Saved on my OneDrive; please notify if you don't need them anymore, so I can unshare)


When I start the game I only get 22 FPS in main menu.
When I then load my save or a new game the bad performance seems to stick (still around 22 FPS everywhere).

(Tested both Fullscreen and Borderless Window mode. I usually just use Borderless Window.
When in Fullscreen and tabbing out of the game and back in, there where short bursts of high performance before going back to 22 FPS, thus hinting that the game might not actually use the available power my system should provide but may actually be capable of doing so, so I tried changing some graphics settings back and forth...)

Changing graphics settings to low profile and then back to ultra profile seems to fix the issue most of the time (upon change to ultra or high profile, not necessarily every time, so I have to do it again until it works). I will then get more normal 80-144 FPS, depending on where I am and how much is going on around me.
Quitting the game and restarting it and suddenly I'm back to bad performance with 22 FPS again.
Curiously the profile changing workaround only works ingame, but not when performed from the main menu. Going from ingame with fixed performance back to the main menu and the menu will run fine with high performance too, though.

Something is really off here. Any ideas?
While it seems I have a working workaround this issue is highly annoying.


Update:
After using the workaround, so game runs with high performance (100FPS+)...
When saving the game and when GPU Utilization drops to about 20%-30% or below, the issue reemerges and I'm back down to a permanent 22 FPS again. I have to reapply the workaround again to regain normal performance.
(This gets even more annoying).


Update2:
This problem really seems to be tied to GPU utilization and GPU power management.
Using the Nvidia Control Panel to set power management mode for this application from 'optimal performance' to 'adaptive' seems to change the pattern in which the issue occurs.
For one there is a good chance the game will now start in high performance mode even on the main menu without using any workaround.
Though sometimes the issue still occurs while ingame. Particularly often while saving, but I've seen it happen at random without any apparant trigger. Saving might also alleviate the issue and put the game back into high performance mode.

Furthermore, when setting the power management mode to 'maximum performance' instead, the issue doesn't seem occur at all (as the GPU will be set to use maximum values at all time). Though I'm not 100% sure about that as I would require a much longer testperiod to be sure, instead of the short tests I conducted.
Even if this would solve the immediate low performance problem, it is not a viable solution in general as the 'maximum performance' setting prevents the GPU from reacting to the games actual requirements (as there basically is no power management anymore) and just run at full throttle all the time, which isn't how it's meant to work.


My conclusion:
All in all, there seems to be a problem in how the game and the Nvidia driver interact with each other with regards to power management. I hope you are in contact with Nvidia to resolve issues like that.
If you need me to provide further information or need my help testing/verifying solutions or to conduct other tests, please don't hesitate to contact me. I'll happily oblige.

I will continue to update this thread in case something else happens or changes.

[CBJ]

Just posting to let you know that we're not ignoring this, but that we don't currently have any suggestions as to what's causing it as it doesn't seem to affect most players, including those using NVidia hardware. Please do keep us informed, though, especially if you find any further clues as to what might be different with your setup.

A couple of questions:
- do you have any kind of developer tools installed that could be causing your Vulkan drivers to be running in debug mode?
- have you tried disabling the Galaxy/Steam overlays, both of which seem to be present on your system?

[MiriSpace]

@CBJ thanks for letting me know.
As I said I will update if I find anything new.
But from where I'm standing right now, there sadly seems to be nothing I can do anymore.
All I can actually hope for is that either you or Nvidia come up with solution. Problem here is, that (from how I understood it) it is you/Egosoft who needs to contact Nvidia so they can investigate or something. Trying to do that myself (again, from how I undestood it) would lead to nothing constructive. Though I'm not 100% sure, do you happen to have any information on that, though?


Edit:

A couple of questions:
- do you have any kind of developer tools installed that could be causing your Vulkan drivers to be running in debug mode?
- have you tried disabling the Galaxy/Steam overlays, both of which seem to be present on your system?

Galaxy never runs and it's overlay has never been active for X.
Deactivating Steam Overlay doesn't change anything (except me not having an FPS counter anymore), GPU still gets stuck in low performance mode.

I do have Visual Studio 2022 (Community Edition) installed (But none of the game dev or graphics related tool kits. I also would like to keep it, if possible...). Does the VulkanInfo say that these drivers run in Debug mode? If yes, how could I change that?

[CBJ]

Galaxy never runs and it's overlay has never been active for X.

Nevertheless it does appear in your Vulkaninfo's list of layers. It might be worth checking whether it's actually running as a background process or something.

Does the VulkanInfo say that these drivers run in Debug mode? If yes, how could I change that?

No, there is nothing specifically in your Vulkaninfo to suggest this, but it came up a few times before with people having similar issues. And I can confirm that having VS installed is not in itself a problem, unless you've explicitly enabled something to do with graphics debugging.

[MiriSpace]

Galaxy never runs and it's overlay has never been active for X.

Nevertheless it does appear in your Vulkaninfo's list of layers. It might be worth checking whether it's actually running as a background process or something.

Does the VulkanInfo say that these drivers run in Debug mode? If yes, how could I change that?

No, there is nothing specifically in your Vulkaninfo to suggest this, but it came up a few times before with people having similar issues. And I can confirm that having VS installed is not in itself a problem, unless you've explicitly enabled something to do with graphics debugging.

Uninstalled Galaxy, just to be sure... No change, though
I don't do stuff with graphics and never explicitly enabled something with graphics debugging (off the top of my head I wouldn't even know where to do/check that).

I had another idea and deactivated ASUS GPU Tweak III (only used it for monitoring, so no explicit GPU overclocking/tuning, just what came stock with the Graphics Card ...ASUS Rog RTX 2080 Ti OC, so there is supposed to be some slight stock overclocking). But it happens without that program, too.
(There is still HWInfo64, which I use to monitor CPU temps (does GPU infos, too), will try without it later. But I actually feel a bit uncomfortable without it, as my CPU turned out to be a bit more powerful than expected (already have the most powerful CPU aircooler available, usually there are no problems and games don't tend to utilize all the power available, but some tests revealed it can get very close to thermal maximum if maxed out, especially in combination with the GPU))

[MiriSpace]

Another Update:
You mentioning there might be something different with my system got me to the idea that it could be related to the hardware monitoring programs I use.
ASUS GPU Tweak III (GPU Monitoring) and HWInfo64 (monitors basically everything).

Just shutting down GPU Tweak seemed to have made the issue a bit more sporadic.

Not running both of them, I couldn't reproduce the issue at first, so I looked for a program that would only monitor the CPU.
I chose Core Temp and it seemed at first like I couldn't reproduce the issue with that either.
The reproduction method I used was spamming quicksaves, as that had been the most reliable method before. (I'm also back to default setting in Nvidias Control Panel)
Though one time the game started up in low performance mode, which puzzled me.

Well, long story short... with or without Core Temp I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on quicksave anymore (suggesting that this trigger became much rarer).
BUT I have been somewhat reliably able to reproduce the issue by hitting Windows key to bring up the Startmenu, then clicking on the second monitor so the game would be backgrounded. As is to be expected the game only renders with 10-11 FPS now.
Clicking back into the game, so it would run in foreground again, then left me with my GPU in low performance mode and the usual 22 FPS.
Repeating these steps put the GPU back into high performance mode with normal FPS (actually 130 - 144 where I currently am).

So, while it seems that GPU monitoring is exaggerating the issue, that's not the culprit.

My latest reproductions were condutcted with a freshly restarted system, with the only running programs being Razer Synapse (Keyboard), Logitech G-Hub (Mouse), Nvidia stuff, Steam and OneDrive (basically an integrated default Windows Service, well mentioning anyway) plus whatever Windows 11 runs by default on any system.

The problem may or may not be rarer now, I can't really tell.

So, I'm officially out of my wits now and additionally have no clue what else could be different about my system opposed to what would be considered standard.
Only thing I know is that I've never encountered a problem like that with any other software.

Thanks for your continued help, though. Hope someone has an idea sooner or later...

[Alan Phipps]

These are very long shots, but worth checking out anyway.

You have 2 sound devices and drivers on the go at the same time (Realtek onboard and Nvidia through your card). Disable whichever you don't use in Device Manager, Sound/Audio Devices (right-click on a device in the list for a disable/enable pop-up).

All of your reported Windows Error Reporting concerns MS Teams Update failures. Do you use Teams and/or have it running while playing? All the online update attempts and failures might be slowing things down. There might be something that you could usefully fix with Teams Updates anyway.

Good luck.

[Daemonjax]

Max Performance set in the NV Control Panel does NOT cause your GPU to run at 100% wattage all the time. To do that, you'd have to use an option in MSI Afterburner to set it to use fixed voltage all the time.

I'm pretty sure everyone who games on PC just either has (in Nvidia's Control Panel):

a) Optimal set for the Global profile, and Maximum Performance for each individual game's profile; or
b) Maximum Performance set for the Global profile.

Either way, you'll get the same wattage used at the desktop if link power management is disabled in bios and/or in the windows power profile (around 40 watts -- vs ~8 watts when the gpu is allowed to go into deep power mangement states).

Most people also disable link power management -- it's disabled by default on windows High performance power profile IIRC. Mine's disabled in BIOS.

Most people would use the High performance windows power profile.

Doing anything else is a bit weird (imo) and I would expect problems in some games' gpu utilization. I'm not touching Win11 until after they release Win12.

[MiriSpace]

@Alan Phipps
Huh, I never noticed that there were actual problems with Teams. It came with Win11 and I never actually bothered to even initialize it with my MS account (I can just guess that this is the culprit). I don't actually use it. I just have not been able to prevent it from starting with Windows. I then just forgot about it.
Well, I've initialized it now with my MS account and now I was finally able to access its' preferences and set it to not start with windows... didn't even find an option to update it, neither in program nor in Windows Update...
Hell, I just decided to simply uninstall it (thought it was also part of Office, so didn't want to mess with it, but it seems fine actually). Thanks for getting my lazy ass to do something about it
(I also wonder why these actually show up in my dxdiag, they probably shouldn't use the WIndows Error Reporting tag... next to nothing does anyway; it also was quite the chore to find those in EventViewer)

Anyway, deactivated the Nvidia sound stuff (HD-Audiodriver to play audio on my two monitors via HDMI/Display Port; an option I seldomly use as they both sound bad; usually I just use headphones anyway).
As you might have expected, the issue still persists though.

Thanks

[MiriSpace]

Max Performance set in the NV Control Panel does NOT cause your GPU to run at 100% wattage all the time. To do that, you'd have to use an option in MSI Afterburner to set it to use fixed voltage all the time.

I'm pretty sure everyone who games on PC just either has (in Nvidia's Control Panel):

a) Optimal set for the Global profile, and Maximum Performance for each individual game's profile; or
b) Maximum Performance set for the Global profile.

Either way, you'll get the same wattage used at the desktop if link power management is disabled in bios and/or in the windows power profile (around 40 watts -- vs ~8 watts when the gpu is allowed to go into deep power mangement states).

Most people also disable link power management -- it's disabled by default on windows High performance power profile IIRC.

Most people would use the High performance windows power profile.

Doing anything else is a bit weird (imo) and I would expect problems in some games' gpu utilization. I'm not touching Win11 until after they release Win12.

Thanks for your post.

Regarding Nvidia Control Panel Max Performance for the game:
So far it was never necessary (until now, for this game specifically) and my GPUs (over multiple computers) always just did what they where supposed to (I played around with that in the past, but haven't with this card though (meaning for the last 4 years or so), so I already consider that this may be the solution, if I can't actually find what's messing up the usual process (X would go full power on my GPU most of the time anyway)

I just did disable link power management and don't see any difference on desktop (about 25W in both cases, so far, so good), but on it's own (without max performance in control panel) it doesn't solve the issue.
But thanks for the hint. I will have to google now what it actually did in detail.

Regarding Windows High Performance Profile:
I never liked that it just sets cpu clock to its' maximum value at all time. And I've never seen a situation in a game (that actual needs cpu power) where the CPU clocks down to fast and thus makes the game run slow, laggy or stuttery.
But most other stuff in there isn't to consequential if I remember correctly, but I haven't dabbled with that in a long time either. Something other that's important except for processor and pci express power settings (didn't see anything while skimming)?
I will think about it again, if it's worth it.
But for what it's worth regarding the current issue, no, high profile doesn't solve the issue either.

So unless someone comes up with another solution I might just go for the max performance gpu setting (I just think it shouldn't be necessary for a game like X).
Hope you believe me that in 23 years of pc gaming, with pretty much all pcs except the first being self build, having a major issue like this where I wouldn't find the culprit or a fix is pretty much a first (there were hardware failures of course and minor stuff like rare/sporadic crashes, even audio issues and such, but nothing like this).
Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts, I will contemplate on the profile thing for some time.

[Daemonjax]

The High performance windows power profile also shouldn't force your CPU to run at 100% wattage all the time -- to do that, you'd need to edit the registry (or use a 3rd party program like Powersettingsexplorer) to expose the option to disable CPU Idling which disables C2 and higher cstates (or disable them in BIOS). Even then the c1 cstate will have a (relatively minor) effect. This is even more true on modern processors which use hardware pstates -- because it will disregard windows attempts at power management and just do its own thing mostly. You can verify this with hwinfo64, or just by looking at the difference in CPU temps between balanced profile and high performance profile -- the difference is negligable... because even though a cpu core may report to the OS it's running at a higher ghz speed, if it's in cstate 3 it's actually off (and the cache is cleared) and the speed reported is just an illusion because in reality the speed is 0 at that moment in time.

All these extreme power management features are really there for laptops -- you can actually disable c3 and higher (deeper) cstates in bios and get similar temps at desktop and cpu wattage used at idle will still drop down to as low as 3.5 watts (vs something like 0.8 watts) -- as long as you're not locking the cpu voltage. On laptops battery life matters more than performance, so every watt matters there -- at least for marketing purposes. Laptops also have a problem with heat dissipation,
so much that melted keyboards used to be a problem (maybe it still is, I dunno).

Even when taken closer to the extreme (cpu core voltage locked in bios, c3 and deeper disabled in bios, high performance windows profile -- btw a perfectly reasonable configuration for an overclocked PC that's on 24/7), temps at desktop (can't measure wattage directly via cpu reporting anymore when vcore is locked) will still be very similar because c2 cstate is still available. It's really only when c2 is disabled that temps shoot up, and you can infer wattage used going just by cpu package temps. c2 is good enough on desktop (imo).

But none of this is actually causing problems for you (dpc latency) -- I'm only mentioning it to help disuade you of your fear of using the high performance windows profile because it really doesn't do very much on its own. It does do stuff. It's just not extreme. Enthusiasts (like 0.01% of PC gamers) will create or modify a more extreme profile(s) -- most of everyone else (on desktop PCs) will use the High performance profile ALL the time.

[Imperial Good]

Max Performance set in the NV Control Panel does NOT cause your GPU to run at 100% wattage all the time. To do that, you'd have to use an option in MSI Afterburner to set it to use fixed voltage all the time.

Even fixed voltage will not cause the GPU to run at power limits. It will increase idle power usage but still will be nowhere near power limits. To hit power limits ("100% wattage") the GPU must be continuously scheduled with a workload that utilises most of its compute resources and functional units. This is why stress tests such as Furmark exist, since that loads the GPU with such a workload that most reasonably designed GPUs will hit power or thermal limits.

I'm pretty sure everyone who games on PC just either has (in Nvidia's Control Panel):

a) Optimal set for the Global profile, and Maximum Performance for each individual game's profile; or
b) Maximum Performance set for the Global profile.

"Optimal" does not seem to exist anymore even if tooltips make reference to it. Everyone should be using "Normal" unless they have a specific reason not to. "Perform maximum performance" should only be used in benchmark or extremely latency sensitive applications since it will discourage or prevent the GPU from downclocking for improved energy efficiency when mostly idle. Even most games should generally stick to using "Normal" since the only time there would be a difference in FPS would be when going from an easy to render scene to a more difficult to render one, in which case there will be a few hundred ms delay before reaching maximum performance. Twitch shooters can benefit from the lower latency aspect of perform maximum performance, but this is basically what Nvidia Reflex does anyway if the game supports that setting.

Either way, you'll get the same wattage used at the desktop if link power management is disabled in bios and/or in the windows power profile (around 40 watts -- vs ~8 watts when the gpu is allowed to go into deep power mangement states).

Most people also disable link power management -- it's disabled by default on windows High performance power profile IIRC. Mine's disabled in BIOS.

Most people should leave the setting on because it has very little down side to it and it saves them energy. Similar advice to above applies, where only the most latency sensitive, or performance critical applications need to turn it off except the benefit is even less.

didn't even find an option to update it, neither in program nor in Windows Update...

Might be a Microsoft store application. At least in Windows 10 those have to be updated from within the Microsoft store application.

So far it was never necessary (until now, for this game specifically) and my GPUs (over multiple computers) always just did what they where supposed to (I played around with that in the past, but haven't with this card though (meaning for the last 4 years or so), so I already consider that this may be the solution, if I can't actually find what's messing up the usual process (X would go full power on my GPU most of the time anyway)

Try running X4 with "-nocputhrottle". This disables background pausing, such as what happens if you deselect X4 to interact with something on another display.

In Nvidia control panel try changing the Vulkan/OpenGL present method to "Preferlayered on DXGI Swapchain". When set to "auto" it should default to this on Windows 10 and newer operating systems. However, someone in the past reported that X4 instead ended up in the legacy "prefer native" path. Windows 10 and newer depend heavily on DXGI Swapchain for applications to work correctly as the operating system is largely designed around it for application presentation. This includes aspects such as focus/power management, which is why I think changing that setting would be worth a try.

The symptoms you describe sound like the GPU, or CPU, governor gets confused when you change focus of the application. This might have something to do with some clever power management strategies modern systems employ where any application or display that is not focused get allocated less resources or energy impact than the application currently being focused. Swapping between applications and displays might not be restoring resource focus on X4, resulting in it getting reduced CPU or GPU time. This is exactly the resource management strategy used by Intel for their big-little processors such as the 13700KF where applications not in focus will try to be moved to the slower E cores. Running X4 on E cores could explain your GPU usage and clock speed collapse since X4 would be highly CPU bottlenecked so unable to feed the GPU with sufficient workload for it to justify running higher. The flaw with this theory is that a setting in the Nvidia control panel is unlikely to change that behaviour like it has for you, however given how hacky CPU and GPU governors now are it could be that Nvidia drivers do something to force P core usage when that setting is toggled. Or it could be that Nvidia just does something similar to Intel and tries to limit how much power out of focus applications can get, but gets it wrong...

One thing to try would be recreating the issue with a single display setup (unplug one of the monitors). It could just be one of the hundreds of multi-display bugs GPU drivers have suffered from over the years... If the problem goes away with single display setup I would attribute it to that, and that might explain why so few people encounter it, as even within multi-display users the way they use their displays might be different enough to avoid triggering the issue. In this case keep updating the graphic drivers and consider reporting the issue to Nvidia.

The High performance windows power profile also shouldn't force your CPU to run at 100% wattage all the time -- to do that, you'd need to edit the registry (or use a 3rd party program like Powersettingsexplorer) to expose the option to disable CPU Idling which disables C2 and higher cstates (or disable them in BIOS). Even then the c1 cstate will have a (relatively minor) effect. This is even more true on modern processors which use hardware pstates -- because it will disregard windows attempts at power management and just do its own thing mostly. You can verify this with hwinfo64, or just by looking at the difference in CPU temps between balanced profile and high performance profile -- the difference is negligable... because even though a cpu core may report to the OS it's running at a higher ghz speed, if it's in cstate 3 it's actually off (and the cache is cleared) and the speed reported is just an illusion because in reality the speed is 0 at that moment in time.

Same answer for GPUs above applies to CPUs. Even then, the CPU will not use maximum power unless all CPU cores are loaded constantly with a workload designed around maximum functional unit utilisation. If the CPU is just running NOP instructions it will use significantly less than its maximum potential power. On the other hand running AVX workloads will usually result in near maximum power usage. This is the condition stress tests like running Prime95 can show.

People should be running the adaptive performance profile to allow the CPU cores to down clock in light workloads unless they have specific performance or latency reasons. Similar reason to doing the same with the GPU, it saves energy and should not impact performance noticeably due to how fast the CPU and GPU can adjust clock levels.

All these extreme power management features are really there for laptops -- you can actually disable c3 and higher (deeper) cstates in bios and get similar temps at desktop and cpu wattage used at idle will still drop down to as low as 3.5 watts (vs something like 0.8 watts) -- as long as you're not locking the cpu voltage. On laptops battery life matters more than performance, so every watt matters there -- at least for marketing purposes. Laptops also have a problem with heat dissipation,

They are there because saving 0.1 watts on the millions of desktops world wide results in power savings in the order of megawatts, which is not an insignificant amount of power. They also usually have as good as no impact on performance as swapping of power states happens in sub mili-second time scales.

That said the modern OS design practice is "always on but super efficient". So a lot of the lower power C states do not end up being used, with the OS preferring to minimise CPU clock speed, voltage and active core count while running background tasks. In such a case having them enabled or disabled in the BIOS/UEFI should not make a difference.

so much that melted keyboards used to be a problem (maybe it still is, I dunno).

This seems unlikely to still be a problem if the correct plastics are used. The CPU will not get hotter than 100 degrees C due to thermal throttling, and that is literally inside the silicon substrate. The chassis will be significantly cooler due to thermal resistance between the CPU and the chassis. It still can get hot enough to burn people in a poorly constructed chassis, but should not be able to melt anything that made a sensible material choice.

[cobo83]

Dude this is EXACTLY the same issue I'm experiencing: 7800x3d, 4070 ti, 32gb ram, game is on ssd, win 11. It's the same issue except for me it reverts to low utilization very often, like 5 minutes or less with borderless window setting. Haven't tried fullscreen longterm but it was reverting with that too earlier. Something for me I noticed: when it goes into "low performance mode" its always stuck at 24 fps... thought that was a bit odd as it is you know movie and tv show refresh rate for many titles. Anyways I just quickly alt-tab twice when the issue crops up and it fixes it for 2-5 minutes until i have to repeat. Unfortunately I haven't found a workaround yet which allows for extended times where gpu is working as it should. I did set nvidia control panel setting to maximum performance for this title and globally.