Game does not run past cca 60 fps without DLSS

[Hotwire999]

Hi Egosoft team, please could you take a look at my specs and save, and let me know, what could I do to make my game run better? When I played it years ago, on my old 2080 RTX, I think it ran better than it does now on 5070Ti now, idk what happened. And it seems like most of the graphics settings have nearly no effect to lowering my FPS, I put everything down to Low/off, except textures which i put on medium, but FPS in an empty sector doesnt go above around 60fps, in stations I am lucky to get 30 FPS. I played with DLSS till now, but frankly, with it enabled, the game just moves weirdly, and it got to the point when it really annoys me, I would like to be able to run the game decently without DLSS if possible.

Version and language (e.g. 8.00 Hotfix 3, English, etc.). --- 8.00 current version, English
Whether or not your game is modified using any third party scripts or mods (see note below). --- unmodified
The game start you originally selected for the game in which the problem occurred. --- project genesis
Exact nature of the problem, where and when it occurs and what you were doing at the time. ---low fps all the time
Any possibly relevant changes you have made to your game, system, or software before the issue occurred. ---no changes, game runs like that since I have installed it, I just played with DLSS on till now
Where appropriate, additional symptoms, error messages, links to saves *, screenshots and crash dump files (see this Wiki entry). ---no crashes or errors, game is very stable, thanks for that, link to save file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oj-jDd ... sp=sharing
Your system specifications in the form of a DxDiag report and vulkaninfo (see this Wiki entry).** --- vulkan: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hREBmP ... sp=sharing --- Dx: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_5Ehf8 ... sp=sharing

I really hope there will be a possible resolution to this, or if there is some hard bottleneck in my specs, please do let me know (even though, I have seen people with far worse specs having more fps than me).
Thanks in advance!

[Imperial Good]

To confirm, this happens with brand new starts, like 5-15 minutes after the beginning?

Make sure your RAM is running at 3200 MHz. Make sure CPU boosts as expected when under load. Make sure CPU is not overheating. Try disabling HDR in case it is related to that. Make sure variable refresh rate is enabled if your display supports it. Make sure X4 is running in windowed fullscreen (or equivalent mode) and not the deprecated (on Windows 10 and 11) exclusive fullscreen mode. Make sure your desktop resolution is set to native, and that your desktop refresh rate is set to the maximum supported by the display.

[Hotwire999]

Hi Imperial Good and thanks for the late night reply.
To respond to some of your inquiries: It is like that in any playthrough, also in Timelines DLC. CPU is not overheating and is far from fully utilized during the game (will add screenshots tomorrow after I return from work). My HDR is disabled always. Game is always running in borderless mode, I dont like using exclusive fullscreen (but I tried it for a moment, to test, but no change in FPS). My desktop resolution is native, and refresh rate is set to my monitor refresh rate - 165hz. I am not sure if my monitor supprots variable refresh rate, but I am also not sure how it would relate in any way to ingame FPS.

My CPU does run and boost as it should, here is also a screenshot from result of Cinebench multi-core test: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AtO8lu ... sp=sharing
Regarding RAM, I did find out it runs on 2400 MHz, and not 3200, I will fix that tomorrow and test it, do you think this might be the case for such low fps?

//EDIT: ok I didnt want to wait until tomorrow, so I hopped into BIOS and made my RAM run at 3200MHz, and then turned on the game and while I must say, that yes, the performance has improved significantly, it runs on 98-100 frames in empty sector, so like 30% improvement, I must also say it is still in empty sector and my settings are currently on off/low with medium textures. And I wanted to test it in extreme condition so i teleported to my HQ and FPS dropped to 11. While it may be expected to FPS to be quite low since my HQ has got plenty of modules, but still 11 seems way too low, and I am sending you screenshot, where you can see, that even with such low FPS, my CPU and GPU are not fully utilised, why is it so? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DNu-U1 ... sp=sharing

[Imperial Good]

Regarding RAM, I did find out it runs on 2400 MHz, and not 3200, I will fix that tomorrow and test it, do you think this might be the case for such low fps?

It might contribute to it since Zen2 CPUs often end up bottlenecked waiting for memory reads (low effective clock).

//EDIT: ok I didnt want to wait until tomorrow, so I hopped into BIOS and made my RAM run at 3200MHz, and then turned on the game and while I must say, that yes, the performance has improved significantly, it runs on 98-100 frames in empty sector, so like 30% improvement, I must also say it is still in empty sector and my settings are currently on off/low with medium textures. And I wanted to test it in extreme condition so i teleported to my HQ and FPS dropped to 11. While it may be expected to FPS to be quite low since my HQ has got plenty of modules, but still 11 seems way too low, and I am sending you screenshot, where you can see, that even with such low FPS, my CPU and GPU are not fully utilised, why is it so? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DNu-U1 ... sp=sharing

Its due to how complex the high attention level of your HQ is. Collision of every module must be simulated, and all nearby flying ships need to navigate the collision maze to fly around, dock and undock from it. It is very common to get such low frame rate with complex stations.

A better test would be to test flying around and fighting in a NPC populated system (no mega stations). If that gets 60+ FPS then that is considered running correctly as it should be more than a playable experience.

Since this is likely mostly a CPU bottleneck you can probably turn up many of the visual settings. Textures can be set to maximum for example as those have as good as nothing to do with the CPU.

If you want higher performance unfortunately you will need a faster CPU. Ideally one with 3DVcache if you are going AMD. Even a now older CPU like the R7 3800X3D would likely (not a promise) get you 30 or more FPS at your HQ. Assuming that the view does not end up GPU limited due to drawing all the modules. In this case the large cache greatly decreases the amount of time wasted waiting for memory reads, which is a major performance issue with modern AMD CPUs. Modern Intel CPUs are less affected by memory latency so have performance closer to the X3D chips.

You might be wondering why the game is CPU bottlenecked yet task manager is reporting most of your CPU is idle. This is largely due to task manger not correctly communicating actual CPU usage.

• Task manager shows percentage of time all CPU cores are scheduled. This does not consider at all clock frequency. Modern CPUs vary their clock frequency a lot and when running computationally demanding workloads on all cores the per core clock speed is lower than on a single core. This is due to power or thermal limits. This means that single thread performance has a tendency to decreases as more CPU cores are used.
• As it only shows a percentage of time scheduled for all logical CPU cores, it makes no distinction between logical cores and physical cores. Technologies like HT/SMT share the resources of a single physical core between 2 logical cores. When 1 logical core is blocked in a physical core, the other logical core is executed gaining additional throughput. However, when neither logical core is blocked they are both executed in an interleaved fashion meaning that each logical core has half the throughput, or effectively half the single thread performance. This means that as good as 100% of your CPU might be used when task manager is reporting 50% utilisation as that could represent a continuous workload on 1 logical core per physical core.
• Task manager does not show you single thread bottlenecks at all. Even in the per core schedule graph it is not shown as the bottlenecking thread might be hopping around logical cores. Ultimately every game ends up single thread bottlenecked as it is the code pathway that takes the longest time to complete. Making games use multiple cores is extremely difficult, and although X4 does do this in many places in its code, like with collision as an example, quite a lot still ends up being run single threaded so single thread performance is the bottleneck.