Performance Loss Over Time, Temporarily Fixed Via Changing Display Mode - mod issue

[sterlingkerman]

Howdy,

I am encountering a performance loss issue that happens over time (5 to 15 minutes) where I go from an average of 60-100 FPS down to 15-50 FPS. All I need to do to fix this is change my Display Mode, and my FPS will go back to being 60-100. By changing, I mean I normally use Borderless, so I switch to Fullscreen (performance returns), and then I switch back to Borderless (performance remains). The performance loss still occurs even if I remain in Fullscreen or Windowed.

I am using a large number of mods that I expect to cause performance issues, but my expectation for such is that the performance loss would be consistent (I normally get 120 FPS in an unmodded version of the game), but this is too inconsistent to make sense. Why would switching my display mode cause the performance to return to decent, only for the loss of FPS to start up again 15 minutes later? It would make more sense for the game to be stuck at a low FPS because of all the mods I have; but the fact that the game's performance can be temporarily fixed by switching the Display Mod tells me that something else may be going on.

What I am asking for here is if anyone has experienced something like this before, and if so, what I can do to ensure a more consistent experience. I have tried using DLSS and different graphics settings to resolve this, but nothing prevents the slow degradation of FPS until I am forced to switch my Display Mode to fix it.

It is possible that it isn't so much switching my Display Mode that is resolving the lag, so much as it is that doing so causes a reload of the game's graphics engine (I presume that is what is happening when it shows the game's intro loading image before asking if I want to keep the settings).

I have also applied "-malloc=system -USEALLAVAILABLECORES" to my Launch Options to try and improve performance, but that didn't help.

What else can I try to resolve this?

I am running on 7.60 Beta, but was also experiencing this issue on 7.50.

System Stats:
i9-13900K
4070ti OC
64gb DDR4 3600
Windows 11

DxDiag: https://pastebin.com/62d6GAWV

[euclid]

As the very first sticky thread here in this forum explains, you need to try to reproduce your issue using an unmodified game. Simply disable all your mods and start a new game. If the problem still persist then please upload that saved game and post the download link together with a DXdiag and Vulkan info here.

In the case the problem cannot be reproduced in an unmodified game then it is likely that one of your mod is responsible. Just enable one mod at a time (backup the unmodified game) until you find the mod causing the issue. Then contact the mod author directly or in the mod's thread over at the Script & Modding forum.

However, in any case, please post your DXdiag and Vulkan info here. It might be just an outdated driver or a missing chipset update.

Cheers Euclid

[CBJ]

In addition to the above...

I have also applied "-malloc=system -USEALLAVAILABLECORES" to my Launch Options to try and improve performance, but that didn't help.

...that's not surprising, since neither of these command line options exist for the game and they cannot possibly do anything. I don't know where you got them from, but wherever it was, the advice was complete nonsense!

[Imperial Good]

Changing display modes returning performance sounds very much like it is GPU/VRAM related as changing display modes likely reloads and shuffles around quite a bit of data on the GPU VRAM.

I recall the next version, 7.60, having significantly changed VRAM management which might improve this issue. As such it may be worth giving the current public beta for 7.60 a try and seeing if the issue improves, or is made worse.

[sterlingkerman]

In addition to the above...

I have also applied "-malloc=system -USEALLAVAILABLECORES" to my Launch Options to try and improve performance, but that didn't help.

...that's not surprising, since neither of these command line options exist for the game and they cannot possibly do anything. I don't know where you got them from, but wherever it was, the advice was complete nonsense!

Another Egosoft developer replied to a Steam Discussion thread a couple years ago telling someone who was having performance issues to add those two command lines to their startup options. I suppose those command lines may no longer be in effect, since it was awhile ago.

Link to that discussion: https://steamcommunity.com/app/392160/d ... 0513116204

[sterlingkerman]

Changing display modes returning performance sounds very much like it is GPU/VRAM related as changing display modes likely reloads and shuffles around quite a bit of data on the GPU VRAM.

I recall the next version, 7.60, having significantly changed VRAM management which might improve this issue. As such it may be worth giving the current public beta for 7.60 a try and seeing if the issue improves, or is made worse.

I am actually currently using 7.60, and such was when I first really noticed the issue.

[sterlingkerman]

It's possible I may have resolved the issue myself. I think it had to do with my CPU thermal-throttling and drastically reducing performance as a result (game would run fine for a few minutes, then the CPU would start overheating, lowering performance by 50ish FPS; and the switching of display modes may have paused the CPU load for a moment allowing it to cool down, thus returning the performance until the CPU would heat up again).

I tried under-volting my CPU and reducing the ratio on my E-Cores, and immediately gained something like 30-50 FPS in my game, so my good performance average is now somewhere between 90-160 FPS. That was just some short-term testing, though, so I'll keep my eye on it and see if the issue does persist, it may just be less noticeable with my CPU running cooler and thus the game running better on average.

[CBJ]

Another Egosoft developer replied to a Steam Discussion thread a couple years ago telling someone who was having performance issues to add those two command lines to their startup options. I suppose those command lines may no longer be in effect, since it was awhile ago.

No, they have never existed. The person who posted that is an "official helper" rather than a developer as such, despite the tag by their name, and I have no idea where they got the idea to post that from! I will ask them to edit that post so that the misinformation doesn't spread any further.

It's possible I may have resolved the issue myself. I think it had to do with my CPU thermal-throttling and drastically reducing performance as a result (game would run fine for a few minutes, then the CPU would start overheating, lowering performance by 50ish FPS; and the switching of display modes may have paused the CPU load for a moment allowing it to cool down, thus returning the performance until the CPU would heat up again).

Right, yes, that would make sense. Thanks for reporting back!

[sterlingkerman]

Hmm, unfortunately it doesn't look like what I did completely solved the problem. My fantastic 120+ FPS only lasts about ten minutes before it starts to degrade down to 40 FPS, which is still 10-20 FPS better than what was happening before. Switching Display Modes immediately returns me to that 120+ FPS for another ten or so minutes. I've also been watching my thermals and using Intel Extreme Tuning Utility to watch thermal throttling, and as far as I can tell my current settings are preventing it from ever going above 90C, and it never shows as thermal throttling. So, something is still up, but I'm at a loss for what.

[Daemonjax]

Most CPUs will throttle in some way before hitting tj max.

For example, my 5700x3d will _begin_ to throttle above 60C (but I never hit 60C in games bc watercooling). Are you watercooling that cpu or at least have a decent dual tower cooler?

Do intels clock stretch at all? I dunno, but if newer gen intels can clock stretch, it can be slightly difficult to even see the throttling occur -- you'd have to use hwinfo64 to check for discrepancies in effective clocks vs reported.

But it could be a vram issue (using system ram) -- in nvcp disable cuda - system fallback policy so that it'll just crash instead of using system ram as vram when out of vram. Perhaps the driver is being too aggressive keeping vram free. 12gb vram should be enough to not oom crash in this game.

Degrading with time points to thermal throttling, but changing display mode indicates running out of vram (and using system ram). So I dunno. Could be a combination of both (sorta) -- high temps in case caused by high cpu temps, causing the gpu to throttle enough to affect fps... depends on your resolution I guess.

Take the side panel off your case.

Hmm... if it's thermal and cpu related somehow, then simply pausing the game for a bit should have the same effect.

And maybe windows scheduler is screwing up and putting some of the game's threads on ecores? Another variable.

[sterlingkerman]

I actually think I've solved it this time. Turns out it comes down to actually following the advice of the Technical Support forum before posting problems.

I think there is a memory leak issue with the VRO mod (Variety and Rebalance Overhaul), or one of the related mods I had installed alongside it (mods that depend on VRO). Running VRO, my memory usage would double within an hour, double what it probably should be (right now I'm sitting at X4 using around 12GB, but with VRO it would get as high as 24GB). Perhaps this is a bug in the mod related to something in 7.60 Beta. After disabling it, I had to create a new save; but so far, after two days of gameplay, I haven't seen the issue re-occur.

Now for excuses.

I was avoiding disabling all my mods, especially VRO, during this process for two reasons:

1. The performance degradation was occurring in my primary save, and I wanted to ensure that this save would be fixed and would be playable after troubleshooting this problem, and considering the nature of VRO, I couldn't use the save with VRO disabled. In other words, I couldn't test for the issue on that save if part of that test was removing VRO. It would've been smarter of me to have disabled VRO and started a new save, but if you recall, the issue takes time to occur, so that might've been a headache (and I may have assumed the issue was save specific). Still, my current findings prove that was a foolish mentality.

2. Expectation that an improvement to overall performance may hide the issue rather than solve it. I noticed when I fixed my thermal throttling problems that my FPS increased by 10-30 FPS on average, including when the performance issue would happen. So, instead of it dropping from a smooth 80 FPS down to an awful 30 FPS, it would go from 120 FPS down to 40-50 FPS. Knowing how VRO and the related mods I had installed were likely causing a major performance loss on their own, I was worried that removing the mods may drastically improve FPS, separately from the performance loss over time issue; and even though the issue may still occur, I wouldn't notice it as much because of the increase of FPS from removing the mods. So, I wanted to focus on finding the cause of the primary issue at the current state of performance. AKA, I didn't want to alter the static variables.

However, I finally decided that the performance loss was ruining the experience and that the save wasn't worth it. So, I restarted on a new save with all my VRO related mods disabled (ironically not to solve the primary problem, but because I assumed the improvement to performance from removing those mods would be high enough that the issue wouldn't be noticeable. This was a false assumption as my performance can still go relatively low around major battles and stations.). Lo and behold I have been playing for two days, and the issue seems completely gone. Using Co-Pilot to help me diagnose the issue, I discovered the lack of RAM usage compared to what I was using before, which is what has led me to the belief there is a memory leak issue happening (also was speculation by Co-Pilot), one that gets reset/temporarily fixed by reloading the game via something like a Display Mode change.

I do genuinely apologize for wasting developer and moderator time by not properly troubleshooting this problem. Disabling VRO and other major mods should've been my first reaction, but I was hoping to avoid that since disabling those mods would prevent me from continuing my save and from troubleshooting with that save. I'll try to keep this in mind for the future.

[CBJ]

Thanks for reporting back with your findings. We do try to explain that disabling mods does not remove their effects from a game, and can actually make things worse in some cases, but it's a message that doesn't seem to hit home easily. That said, there really wasn't much developer time wasted here, and we did at least get confirmation of specific symptoms and their causes out of it to help us when dealing with future reports.