Bad performance ruins long term experience

[Lazerius]

I really hope that they at some point allow us to move command points up or down in 3D space. As it is, you can move a station plot up or down. All you need to do is move the camera angle so you are looking from a side angle rather than up or down. Then drag the plot up or down. That's it. Just enable that for moving waypoints, and you are done. Easy fix, players are happy now that they have more freedom to move waypoints up or down, no need for any extra keybindings. Please Egosoft/CBJ, there are so many who would be super happy to get this sort of improvement!

It'd be nice if when giving an order to move to X position, they just added the ability to hold Shift and it locks in your horrizontal axis position, and any mouse movement would take you up/down on the vertical axis. Seems like that would be the easiest way to accomplish this, but I'm not sure if there are technical limitations (doubtful) or if it just wasn't added in because they intended for 90% of the action to be centered around the elliptical.

It certainly hasn't stopped me from building above/below the elliptical, but in order to give patrol/defend points for defense fleets for areas that aren't your station, you have to drop an object where you want it then tell your fleet to guard a 40k sphere around that object.

In the Homeworld games (space RTS) you could do that : click on a ship, select move command, move your mouse around to select a (x,y)-point on the flat horizontal plane, then hold shift to lock the (x,y) values and move the mouse up or down to modify the vertical z value. Left click to confirm these (x,y,z)-coordinates as a move command.

I'd love to have exactly that in X4.

Exactly where I got the idea from.

[Assailer]

Now, with the 2.5 there is out and tested I get around 1-2 fps improvement, which could be just traffic/event related.

I have tried the suggested audio tests. My audio system was already Realtek HD, so that didn't need any change. Disabling in-game all audio didn't impact performance, maybe, maybe 1fps, but again it's hard to say without FPS charts.

Graphical detail LOW/MED results in no visible FPS change. HIGH setting drops FPS by 4 on stations, ULTRA around 7. It seems it's not GFX bound issues (as already been pointed out).

Do you have plans to improve station performance?

How about adding some more detailed diagnostics to figure out where the clock cycles go?

[Buzz2005]

Now, with the 2.5 there is out and tested I get around 1-2 fps improvement, which could be just traffic/event related.

I have tried the suggested audio tests. My audio system was already Realtek HD, so that didn't need any change. Disabling in-game all audio didn't impact performance, maybe, maybe 1fps, but again it's hard to say without FPS charts.

Graphical detail LOW/MED results in no visible FPS change. HIGH setting drops FPS by 4 on stations, ULTRA around 7. It seems it's not GFX bound issues (as already been pointed out).

Do you have plans to improve station performance?

How about adding some more detailed diagnostics to figure out where the clock cycles go?

disable audio drivers not in game audio , If you have more then one audio driver enabled leave only 1 on, disable all others in device manager
Disabling ingame all audio will never do anything FPS wise

[steph2019]

Hi there,

just to set the scene, steam is telling me I've played 1300 hours+ since version 1.3 (or +) not sure, don't remenber exactly:
- I like this game no doubt and i've never done a fresh restart (to really played again with it i meant).
- I've got now more 10k ships everywhere, sateliites nearly everywhere, i'm owning multiple giant factories with ships buildings for some of them (probaly a dozen at this stage with ship creation capabilities), erazed Xenons and Paranides (and then now owning all their previous sectors )

So, yes my simualtion is big...
The point is at this stage the fps are near 5 to 10 fps ... so even if i use mostly the map menus only, it is painfull to do anything... it really needs improvement

When i do a fresh start (just to try) fps are back to 60 to 100 fps ... so not really the hardware or settings:
- I've played around with all the settings possible, disabling nvidia audio drivers, graphics cards options, latest drivers etc... (nothing with signiifcant effect with my main game)
- my PC is a resonable one Intel i7 -8700k (overclocked for games) + Nvidia Geforce 1080ti + 32 GB etc ...

As said elsewhere it seems the multiple core cpu potential is never used fully (using lasso i see cpu always below 19% in the best case), it might be an area to investigate/improve
Also, i read sateliites and removing too much fogs are not helping in particular when ships go crazy when moving and are extending the space discovered (a one time optimizer might help to correct this kind of saved game)...

I totally agree with the fact when game extension will be there with more sectors it will become totally unplayable with my saved game and probably for a lot of others (i'm already at the limit with what i'm doing now - mainly only management) if something is not improved in these areas

Thanks,
Stephane

[Buzz2005]

a suggestion is that you buy trade subscription and remove most satellites, it will help maybe even a lot

[Kadatherion]

Yep, satellites are among the major offenders, although it's basically every object with a radar range. There is a mod that gives you satellites that do everything they do in vanilla (plus more) but no radar range, which is another good solution. Every automated trader is pretty much like another "moving satellite" though, and in that case there's not much you can do. You could try modding the game to lower the average radar range of ships, which will indeed help, but in that case you would be sacrificing a pretty important feature: having ships with lowered radar range will affect gameplay and maybe also have unintended strange behaviours from the AI.

[Assailer]

Now, with the 2.5 there is out and tested I get around 1-2 fps improvement, which could be just traffic/event related.

I have tried the suggested audio tests. My audio system was already Realtek HD, so that didn't need any change. Disabling in-game all audio didn't impact performance, maybe, maybe 1fps, but again it's hard to say without FPS charts.

Graphical detail LOW/MED results in no visible FPS change. HIGH setting drops FPS by 4 on stations, ULTRA around 7. It seems it's not GFX bound issues (as already been pointed out).

Do you have plans to improve station performance?

How about adding some more detailed diagnostics to figure out where the clock cycles go?

disable audio drivers not in game audio , If you have more then one audio driver enabled leave only 1 on, disable all others in device manager
Disabling ingame all audio will never do anything FPS wise

Yes, of course i checked it. There is single audio device - Realtek HD - in device manager.

[Socratatus]

Hi Devs,

As topic suggests this is a serious issue at least for me. There should be some adaptive performance adjustment system to keep my FPS 60 even while docked on large station complexes.

--------- I do not care about the graphical detail ----------

Make them simple boxes if that's what it takes for low-end machines otherwise the whole experience is ruined.

I'm a long time fan of X games, but cannot play 17fps games.

Thanks!

Wait. I notice you haven`t told us anything about your system. What is it? You say you have a low res system, but how low is low in your case?

[steph2019]

a suggestion is that you buy trade subscription and remove most satellites, it will help maybe even a lot

Thanks for the suggestions, and ...yes, i've already heard about it - I don't really want to do that neither activate a mod - i prefer to stay with vanilla software for now.

I've made this post not to get a immediate turnaround but more to give my input and underline the general performance issue with long sessions
it will certainly require game adjustments in medium term (maybe some game settings, so the user can change its experience), i hope this will help the product owner to prioritise this non functional requirement

[Assailer]

Wait. I notice you haven`t told us anything about your system. What is it? You say you have a low res system, but how low is low in your case?

i7-7700, 16gram, 1060gtx

[Arisk]

all of the x series have the same issue when you have a lot of assets because of the fidelity and the scripted operations it does not matter, fps will safer, i think is more to ram system update than raw cpu power

dont get me wrong strong ipc goes a long way in x series but even in homeworld you can see single digit fps with low (relative) cpu/gpu usage

if you do some digging there are cpu (cache l2-l3) ram speed combinations that can outclass 500mhz - 1ghz cpu deficiencies same core count

[Ramokthan]

17 FPs... i would be so glad if i got that LOL.

Yes performance seems to stall VERY hard when game progresses... till its kindo no fun anymore... for my my pain limit is ~10 FPS.
XD

[SPiDER]

On a new Playthrough I have started I am going to limit my stations size and complexity to a maximum of 5x5x5 and hopefully see an improvement longterm...but my god the difference between this new start and my old one that 2.5 killed is by orders of magnitude..virtually all my old plots were all 10x10x10 and even when not filled up performance around those stations was painful..the other thing that bring a question is by how much of a performance hit do defence modules ( AI turrent Control (( Turrent -Turret as per betty))) create and so what would be the best balance between safety and performance.All I do know is that flying through a populated 10x plot was painfull so far a fully populated 5x5x5 plot appears to cost nothing..as more plots and stations get built it will change but by how much............

[steph2019]

so now i'm removing satellites one by one (the ones not really usefull) to continue to play a bit and yes I have almost all subscriptions so yeah it was a bit redundant
well, it is a game/own mission in itself with perf still in between 1 to 10 fps
I don't do that every week as I used to play before but still ...I'm with you and will be happy to see the next enhancements.
My Specs are in a post above

cheers

[Falcrack]

so now i'm removing satellites one by one (the ones not really usefull) to continue to play a bit and yes I have almost all subscriptions so yeah it was a bit redundant
well, it is a game/own mission in itself with perf still in between 1 to 10 fps
I don't do that every week as I used to play before but still ...I'm with you and will be happy to see the next enhancements.
My Specs are in a post above

cheers

Wouldn't it be nice if egosoft in their mercy had provided a command for us to order NPC ships under our command to "collect deployables"?

[Panos]

In relation to performance.
My 8600K @ 4.3Ghz (6c 6t) with Vega 64 I get a comfortable 45 fps in stations (High settings with MSSA 2x, 2560x1440) and over 80fps- (mid 90s most time) while in space. Pushing the CPU to 5Ghz improved FPS especially in systems with a lot of asteroids like Exchange III which is pretty bad
On Sunday my water cooling pump died, so until new coolers arrive, I am using my laptop. Which is a 6700HQ @ 3.2Ghz (4c 8t) and a GTX1060 6GB at 1500Mhz.
The performance on same settings (had to pull the save & settings), is barely 45fps in space a 30fps in stations. And without having Freesync, is pretty bad.

However the GPU doesn't work that hard, even if Nvidia has pretty poor Vulcan support, is the CPU which is holding back the system, considering that it's single core performance is 1/3 of it's desktop counterpart 6700K and 1/4 that of my 8600K. And using CPUZ I see that somehow cannot even hit half the nominal single core perf of my CPU, which makes my CPU working bellow the minimum spec regardless.

Tbh considering how many things going on the background, I am impressed that is still working I remember the complains about the performance when X3 and especially X2 came out back in 2003.

These are my 2 cents.

[steve_v]

comfortable 45 fps

Those words do not belong in the same sentence, at least not for a first-person game.

I can dig 45FPS in a dense asteroid field or a firefight, but on a mostly barren station with nothing whatsoever going on? That kind of miserable framerate on hardware that exceeds the recommended spec is not okay.
In X4 it's consistently not okay too, every time you dock, and it's CPU-bound beyond the ability of any currently available hardware to provide respectable (read V-sync 60FPS) performance.

considering how many things going on the background

In general, sure. But why so much more just because you have docked at a station?
If it's collision detection as some have suggested, that needs to be sorted out on the same level as the generally hopeless AI pathfinding. Why the hell are things colliding in the first place?

[Dirk-Jan]

a suggestion is that you buy trade subscription and remove most satellites, it will help maybe even a lot

I'm not sure that trade subscription even works as it should. I have all of them and still most stations won't reveil their trade items.

[Dirk-Jan]

Wait. I notice you haven`t told us anything about your system. What is it? You say you have a low res system, but how low is low in your case?

i7-7700, 16gram, 1060gtx

Doesn't sound low to me at all

[Buzz2005]

a suggestion is that you buy trade subscription and remove most satellites, it will help maybe even a lot

I'm not sure that trade subscription even works as it should. I have all of them and still most stations won't reveil their trade items.

really? I had the opposite effect where my ships would go to enemy territory to supply new defence stations that I dont even see in the map, blacklist took care of it