[7.10 H3] Massive cyclical fps drops - Resolved

[Darthhenning]

So I've come back for some space capitalism, unfortunately the performance is not cooperating.

I am running Windows 11 with a 7800X3D and a 4080 (not super), 32GB DDR5 Ram and everything is on an nvme drive, so the hardware should not have any issues, yet when I go into any gamemode (I tried new save, tutorial missions and several timeline missions - behaviour is the same in any and all situations), fps starts at 165 (capped at my monitor's refresh rate) and then suddenly drops to like 20-30ish, stays that way for like 10-15 seconds, goes back to 165, rinse, repeat. A cycle usually takes like half a minute. It's obviously hardly playable. The problem starts immediatly after loading any scenario. It happens even when doing absolutely nothing (loaded up timelines and just stood there in my room for 10 seconds and it started). It does not seem to occur in the main menu at least.

I tried a few things so far.
I looked at some performance tools and I suspect some GPU issues here. Everytime the drop occurs, GPU utilization drops off a cliff from like 85+% to like 10%. At first I suspected maybe overheating, but the worst temperature I got was 70° with 83° hotspot, which is completely fine. CPU temps did barely reach 80° (at least on the cores the game was using, the others were chilling at <50°), which is fairly high, but it is X4 after all - and it's still nowhere close to throttling.
I tried lowering grafic settings to "low", it changed nothing apart from the game looking bad. In general it doesn't seem to relate to any load at all, since tutorial scenarios are pretty much empty space with only the relevant objects for that scenario around.
Another observation I've made is that changing grafic settings when fps is currently low will cause the game to refresh to apply the changes, which immediatly resets fps back to max until the next drop hits. Doesn't matter what setting I changed as long as it causes a refresh (which is why I think this is a GPU thing).

Additional notes:
Grafics driver is up-to-date, BIOS is not - unfortunately never BIOS version really don't work with my RAM, so I had to rollback to the factory version.
No save file attached, since I don't have a save file from this version yet - the problem occurs in every mode basically immediatly.
I did not have any of these issues in any other game.
I also did not figure out how to attach the dxdiag in this forum - it's been a while. So I put them on google drive: dxdiag and vulkaninfo

Any help is appreciated. Questions obviously welcome

[CBJ]

The first question is whether or not your game is modified. Some mods may affect performance in the way you describe.

The second question is whether you have looked at other applications running on your system using Task Manager to see if any of them are stealing processor cycles during the times when the game becomes slower.

I would also recommend updating your various sound drivers, and disabling (at least temporarily) any sound devices that you're not using.

And finally, make sure that you have no game overlays running.

[Darthhenning]

I am running vanilla X4. I also did a file verification via Steam just in case something was corrupted in some way - it wasn't.

I was running mah tools and there was nothing going on other than X4 and taskmanager\HWmonitor.

Sound devices could be an interesting one, I'll have a try with that.

I did try with and without steam overlay, it did not have an effect. But I just realized that the NVIDIA overlay is a thing, I am gonna deactivate that and try that as well.

[Darthhenning]

I believe I found the issue.

After some more testing and investigating, I noticed that the fps when the drop occured was the same as when I just tabbed out (I was playing on borderless window). So I started suspecting a focus issue, which would be consistent with the observation that refreshing or even simply tabbing out and back in fixed everything for a short time. It also explains why GPU utilization just randomly drops to nothing - if windows believes the window isn't focussed, why use resources on it?

Long story short:
This windows setting was disabled for me. After enabling it and doing a quick test run the game was smooth and no weird fps drops occured. I will go with it for now and see if it stays that way. If not, I will report back.

[CBJ]

Interesting result. Thanks for reporting back. If someone else comes up against this, we can point them back to here.

[Casishur]

A similar problem can also occur if the CPU has an integrated graphics card and a exteral graphics card is installed.
This can occur when the software or driver of the external graphics card is updated. The bios then switches on the onboard graphics card if the monitor goes out briefly during the update. You only notice this when you connect the monitor to the onboard graphics card. It can be deactivated in the bios.

This happened to me 3 years ago and I was surprised at the low fps.


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[Darthhenning]

Alright, so it didn't solve the issue completely after all, but now it's fairly rare.
It does seem however, that the issue now mostly occurs in certain sectors - Sanctuary of Darkness being on of them - where it happens like once every 15-30 minutes, while I rarely get it more than once per hour otherwise.
It also doesn't fix itself anymore, so I have to tab out and in (which takes like 1 second) to go back to normal.

I will try around with some different settings and stuff to see if I can find more.
Another tip from the depths of the internet was that Gsync if enabled might have issues with borderless window - just wanted to mention that here while we are at it. Unfortunately because it happens so infrequently now, I can't really tell what helps until it doesn't happen at all anymore.

[CBJ]

If something is still stealing the focus then you could bypass the performance issue by using the -nocputhrottle command line option. The downside of this is that the game may make the PC a bit unresponsive if you genuinely do change the focus, and there's no guarantee that control input will actually go to the game when whatever is stealing the focus does its thing.