Performace Questions

[dismaltommyrot]

Hi,

So i do find the games FPS drops a lot as time goes by, which is understandable as more and more "things" are happening but my question really is, my PC is on the high end, and when i observe the demand on my pc its not not even 50% under load but im getting performance issues ingame. Not the ram, the cpu or the gpu is running anywhere near their limits.

Could someone perhaps help with some advice as to the reasons behind this.

Regards

[CBJ]

It's very hard to answer your question specifically with no information about your system, but in general the limiting factor is the CPU, with a secondary limiting factor of memory bandwidth. Looking at an overall figure of "50%" load is very misleading, for reasons I most recently explained here.

[Imperial Good]

ts not not even 50% under load but im getting performance issues ingame. Not the ram, the cpu or the gpu is running anywhere near their limits.

The performance indicators that you are presented with are not indicative of what is causing bottlenecks and so can mislead people.

• CPU time is reported as percentage of time all cores are scheduled. This does not directly factor in how fast the cores are running, or how much performance each core can potentially bring. For example, HT or SMT virtual cores share cycles with their partner core meaning that 50% reported utilisation could be closer to 98% total CPU utilisation since scheduling to the HT/SMT cores would approximately halve the speed of another core.
• More cores does not allow a task to be completed faster. Data dependencies might prevent logic from executing in parallel, especially in a way that is independent enough for separate CPU cores to benefit from. This is why most games end up single thread bottlenecked, since some part of their logic that cannot be made to run in parallel causes the bottleneck. As core counts increase, it will be expected that percentage of all cores used by a game will likely decrease outside some specific situations.
• Not all cores are made equal. Modern processors often have faster "performance" cores and slower "efficiency" cores. As far as utilisation reported, both count the same despite the performance cores typically executing a lot faster such as 2x as fast.
• Memory usage is amount of memory occupied. No reporting is given for memory bandwidth used. Reporting for CPU cycles lost due to memory access delays are also not exposed. Data crunching games like X4 or Factorio often end up having CPU performance limited by how fast the CPU can be fed data. This is why they benefit well above average from the 3DvCache of AMD's recent X3D processors, since the reduction in stalls waiting for memory access allows the CPU to run logic for a significant percentage more of cycles.
• The reported percentages do not factor in how fast the CPU or GPU cores are running. Halving clock speed will approximately double the percentage.

[dismaltommyrot]

ts not not even 50% under load but im getting performance issues ingame. Not the ram, the cpu or the gpu is running anywhere near their limits.

The performance indicators that you are presented with are not indicative of what is causing bottlenecks and so can mislead people.

• CPU time is reported as percentage of time all cores are scheduled. This does not directly factor in how fast the cores are running, or how much performance each core can potentially bring. For example, HT or SMT virtual cores share cycles with their partner core meaning that 50% reported utilisation could be closer to 98% total CPU utilisation since scheduling to the HT/SMT cores would approximately halve the speed of another core.
• More cores does not allow a task to be completed faster. Data dependencies might prevent logic from executing in parallel, especially in a way that is independent enough for separate CPU cores to benefit from. This is why most games end up single thread bottlenecked, since some part of their logic that cannot be made to run in parallel causes the bottleneck. As core counts increase, it will be expected that percentage of all cores used by a game will likely decrease outside some specific situations.
• Not all cores are made equal. Modern processors often have faster "performance" cores and slower "efficiency" cores. As far as utilisation reported, both count the same despite the performance cores typically executing a lot faster such as 2x as fast.
• Memory usage is amount of memory occupied. No reporting is given for memory bandwidth used. Reporting for CPU cycles lost due to memory access delays are also not exposed. Data crunching games like X4 or Factorio often end up having CPU performance limited by how fast the CPU can be fed data. This is why they benefit well above average from the 3DvCache of AMD's recent X3D processors, since the reduction in stalls waiting for memory access allows the CPU to run logic for a significant percentage more of cycles.
• The reported percentages do not factor in how fast the CPU or GPU cores are running. Halving clock speed will approximately double the percentage.

Thank you Imperial Good, it is very informative, but I wont lie, a lot of this is beyond my payscale so to speak, PC is my hobby not my work.

For the sake of argument, here is my PC specs.
*Ram-32GB DDR4
*CPU-i7-10700k @3.80GHz
*GPU- RTX 4080 Super
*SSD M2
*Windows 10

This is such a great game and I have tons of fun playing it, I went ahead and bought X3 just to show how much I appreciate the team that makes X4. It is just such a pity that near "mid" game (or late depending how you see it, Ie, you start building your own ships from your shipyard and start taking out the Xenon) it starts to become unpleasant to play due to performance hits. Even if i sit in a very far away system, the map is at 30FPS and the game is at best 60 but when you get into the action it drops also to 30, 20 sometimes 10, when you zoom into the map near your factories, it actually stutters and refuses to zoom in, you have to wiggle it to get it to zoom in more. I droppped my settings to medium and it didnt actually improve anything, it just makes my eyes bleed now.

I really love this game and I'm sitting at just under 600 hours now. I just wish there was a way to improve the performance at the end game. Or maybe there is something wrong with my setup or my settings or God knows what. But any fix to this would be great.

All the love and respect

[Imperial Good]

CPU-i7-10700k @3.80GHz

This CPU has more cores than X4 can consistently load so will be single thread bottlenecked. The CPU is also starting to show its age compared with more recent Intel and AMD processors which have significantly higher single thread performance.

Although the map is 2D, it is quite complicated to render due to all the meshes involved (2D graphics render similar to 3D graphics) and data that needs to be iterated through. To improve map performance you can turn off various overlays. Especially player and allied orders is extremely demanding in well developed saves as the thousands of paths need a lot of resources to show. Probes and satellites can also cause such performance issues if you deploy hundreds of them and have their overlay enabled.

[dismaltommyrot]

CPU-i7-10700k @3.80GHz

This CPU has more cores than X4 can consistently load so will be single thread bottlenecked. The CPU is also starting to show its age compared with more recent Intel and AMD processors which have significantly higher single thread performance.

Although the map is 2D, it is quite complicated to render due to all the meshes involved (2D graphics render similar to 3D graphics) and data that needs to be iterated through. To improve map performance you can turn off various overlays. Especially player and allied orders is extremely demanding in well developed saves as the thousands of paths need a lot of resources to show. Probes and satellites can also cause such performance issues if you deploy hundreds of them and have their overlay enabled.

Okay, i'll give that a go, thank you.