CPU or GPU upgrade?

[AquilaRossa]

I am running a AMD Ryzen 2700x and a Radeon RX590 on Win10, plus SSDs and 16GB of memory. When i begin a game of X4 it will almost always stay above my 75hz refresh rate at 1080p on ultra, or at it if I have sync enabled. A few games days in I resort to dropping down to high settings and then to medium. I will turn AA off. But dropping the graphics settings does not actually make much difference. I begin to get the very low frame rates in map mode and also stutter and lower FPS when flying in sectors with lots going on. I know Egosoft are working to improve this problem, but I wonder what will help more - a GPU or CPU upgrade? The new Zen 2 CPUs have a huge L3 cache and higher IPC than the Zen+ stuff. I am thinking it might help the game chew thru the number crunching faster. I am not sure a stronger GPU will help because it happens on lower settings too, which is usually a sign of a CPU bottleneck. Correct? On the other hand is this going to happen no matter what hardware i throw at the problem, so I should just save my money and wait for Egosoft to improve things? I'd prefer to buy a new guitar amp and was not planning a computer hardware upgrade for another year at least.

p.s. 100s of new factories in my game. I have not checked every one of them, but some do not seem to be doing well. I think a script to liquidate certain factories would be a good thing.

[SPiDER]

thats where your performance is being hit besides the food or med factory spam the game also creates 4-6 ships per factory and yes the next patch will remove this spam...when it hits..beta soon then normally 4 weeks till release.
so imo is to hold off till the next patch

[AquilaRossa]

thats where your performance is being hit besides the food or med factory spam the game also creates 4-6 ships per factory and yes the next patch will remove this spam...when it hits..beta soon then normally 4 weeks till release.
so imo is to hold off till the next patch

I want to upgrade my CPU first and i think it will improve performance with X4 even after the patch. But being a X player I'd rather wait for AMD oversupply and the prices to drop

Do you know if there are any settings that help with the Logistical Overview being unresponsive? I click on details of a resource or product to set its prices and it often will not click closed. I have to scroll the whole page to get it to close. The other annoying one is how the player owned lists do not stay put when trying to click on something.

It's OpenGL huh? Should triple buffering be on or off? I searched for a post about the best way to set up a Radeon game profile, but have not found anything yet. So far I tend to just let everything be application controlled if there is that option.

[Alan Phipps]

I'm going to move this to the main X4 forum for now as this is not a Tech Sp request but is a mix of different comments, suggestions and questions. If the discussion gets too hardware specific then it will move again but to Off Topic!

[scav_n_ger]

The game is primarily limited by CPU . I suppose it benefits most from single threaded high MHz.
But do not expect wonders. As you noticed, the game scales to a point where it simply does not perform well anymore.
Better hardware will push the point further to the future.

I launched it on 7680 x 1440 for the lolz and it stayed at around 73 fps when i looked at the stars. Image just seemed warped on the auxialliary displays.

[vrod]

I run it at 5840x1080 (triple screens). Runs typically between 30 and 60hz. Depends on what is going on at the time.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

thats where your performance is being hit besides the food or med factory spam the game also creates 4-6 ships per factory and yes the next patch will remove this spam...when it hits..beta soon then normally 4 weeks till release.
so imo is to hold off till the next patch

I would second this advice.

It's unlikely to be a GPU issue if you're fine in the early game, and planned changes to station spam could help with CPU stuff.

[Bozz11]

Yea changing for a better CPU will improve the FPS you get but not a lot, I switcher from a I7 4970K to a I7 9700K and went from 35 FPS in very busy systemes to 45 FPS on very high graphics...
Then switched from RTX 2070 to RTX 2080TI and now I have 80 FPS almost everywhere with everything on max settings, I have 16G ram having more is useless as the game will never use them even with chrome and everything playing in background. Windows 10.
I play in UltraWide screen 3440x1440 so 1440p

[chew-ie]

Yea changing for a better CPU will improve the FPS you get but not a lot, I switcher from a I7 4970K to a I7 9700K and went from 35 FPS in very busy systemes to 45 FPS on very high graphics...
Then switched from RTX 2070 to RTX 2080TI and now I have 80 FPS almost everywhere with everything on max settings, I have 16G ram having more is useless as the game will never use them even with chrome and everything playing in background. Windows 10.
I play in UltraWide screen 3440x1440 so 1440p

Awesome, thanks for sharing those figures. Soo as soon I replace my 1070 there will be a massive improvement (using UltraWide with 3840x2160 while having okay-ish fps ranging from 10-60 fps)

[Imperial Good]

I run off a GTX 760 which is both below the minimum requirements and getting quite old now. The same visual scene can vary from 50+ FPS to <16 FPS just by flying your ship forward a few meters so it is inside an invisible Xenon station that is under construction. Since visually nothing has changed it almost certainly is related to CPU (one hopes...). With exception of some complex volume, particle and asteroid effects, X4 is mostly CPU bound as actual simulation cannot take advantage of more than 2-4 threads efficiently and suffers from major diminishing returns above that. Most games suffer from this because efficient multithreading is very difficult, especially for smaller development teams which cannot afford to chuck money at it like AAA developers can.

Upgrading to a third gen Ryzen will net you ~10-15% more FPS in these circumstances easy, especially if you have 3200/3600 MHz DDR4 with decent CAS. Even a Ryzen 5 3600 (non X) with 2 fewer cores will give you such a performance improvement.

Of course this is assuming visuals like anti-aliasing are turned off. X4 is known to have performance issues with some kinds of anti-aliasing due to how resource intensive anti-aliasing is. To rule out graphic bottlenecks in X4 the usual procedure is to reduce draw distance to 60-75/100, disable screen space reflections, turn off anti-aliasing and lower ambient occlusion in that order.

The large cache on third gen Ryzen is mostly for the higher core count parts where keeping them fed with data can be difficult due to the limit of dual channel memory and so reducing cache misses is important. Despite calling it "gaming" cache it unlikely makes much difference over smaller cache sizes from Intel when it comes to game engines, especially X4 and other complex state games which cannot fit such large active game states into cache anyway. Where large cache does make a difference is that border between most of the state being in cache and not, which is why third gen Ryzen can beat the I9 9900K in some games or when comping GCC code but loses to it by <10% with most games or with single threaded productivity applications.

[Killjaeden]

Since visually nothing has changed it almost certainly is related to CPU (one hopes...).

What you see vs. what the game calculates and renders are not the same, so something for the renderer might have changed, but that change is hidden from your view. Intels GPA tool can show how many objects / triangles the game is rendering.

[Imperial Good]

What you see vs. what the game calculates and renders are not the same, so something for the renderer might have changed, but that change is hidden from your view. Intels GPA tool can show how many objects / triangles the game is rendering.

Is it free? I am not going to spend money to try and prove something like this.

[chew-ie]

What you see vs. what the game calculates and renders are not the same, so something for the renderer might have changed, but that change is hidden from your view. Intels GPA tool can show how many objects / triangles the game is rendering.

Is it free? I am not going to spend money to try and prove something like this.

Duckduckgo'd it & sure looks like a free download. It does utilize Google Analytics with no way to opt-out though [so I stopped right there].

[AquilaRossa]

RTX 2080TI and now I have 80 FPS

I have read people saying they have that card and still getting sub 30 FPS in the late game once it has thousands more objects to crunch numbers for. I do think it would help in a way though. I noticed sometimes textures are not loaded when i go through a gate. That is usually a sign that they are not present in VRAM and are being loaded. That is with 8GB. **80ti class cards have 11GB and a wide bus that would help. But at $2500 NZD there is no game on Earth I like enough to want to pay that kind of money.
I want a 3700X for the extra IPC the comment above talks about, but not so soon after getting the 2700X. I am not that badly addicted. There is always a window of time where the new hardware drops in price but the part being replaced still sells for a decent used price. A better monitor is a good idea though. This 1080p LG one is less than a year old, but really hard on the eyes. I am laid up with injury and burning my eyeballs out killing time on the computer.
If turning down to medium or even low setting gives no FPS boost it is almost always a sign of CPU holding things up. I get over 75 FPS unless I open the map. That is where the big FPS drops happen.

I registered so i can get the beta patch the moderator is talking about here. In the mean time I am just saving after doing a big build of a factories etc. If half a fleet runs off to die while ignoring blacklists I reload. That is even more annoying than the FPS. I am happy to hear they are looking at OOS behaviour and how currently the ships are going to where the target was rather than where it is heading. Hopefully the fixes get the modders going again. Nexus is almost dead for new mods and updates.

[ballti]

For X4: upgrae CPU
General: upgrade GPU

So weit for 3.0. Alternative is to turn off some cores or SMT and try to owerclock CPU. 4+4 core can be eazy oweclock.

[AquilaRossa]

Turning off SMT helps? I'll try just using Ryzen Master.

Somebody saying they got improvements using a 2080ti makes me think extra VRAM and bandwidth that card offers could actually be beneficial (I definitely see the game stall to load textures using just 8GB of VRAM). Therefore I wonder how a Radeon VII goes on this game with its 16GB of high bandwidth memory. It's only roughly on par with 2080 performance and the cost is not justified considering a 5700XT matches it most of the time, but I just wonder about the VRAM capacity and bandwidth and how it would work with X.

I am just guessing though, because I have not checked my VRAM usage monitoring over a period of game play to see if the textures loading is down to full memory usage, or just the engine not making sure those textures are where they are needed. The most common examples I see is planets being absent for half a second when i go thru a gate, or the other is thumbnails for modules missing in the build editor for a second. I am using a SATA SSD rather than a NVme, so looking at that upgrade may help get bits to the VRAM faster. Maybe.

I also wonder if the 2080ti tried to run my save game it would be crawling with the map open too. Opening the map halves FPS. Maybe crawling a little faster.

I just flew around in the Matrix sector north of the Teladi HQ clearing Ms and Ps that were crowding the gate and not going through it. Frame rates were playable even if a lot lower than game start. The I go to where my HQ is and I am getting 30FPS because there are two massive complexes near the gates. I'd like to share my save to see what other people's systems get in the sector near those complexes. That will help me decide CPU or GPU first, although I am in no hurry and also want to see how the upcoming patch helps.

That makes me wonder how they will deal with the existing factory spam and huge numbers of ships in current save games. I think a liquidator script to get builders to dismantle and remove factories that are failing, but what if they are all thriving? i dunno.

[ballti]

SMT off can help in some games. X4 = up to 8 core, do test FTW. Also oweclock 4+4 vs 8+0, 4+4 core use less power, so eazyer for owerclock.

[AquilaRossa]

I just tested SMT off on the same save. With it on 60-70 FPS drops to 20-30 FPS with the map open. With SMT off the result is exactly the same and the input lag for mouse clicking menu items felt the same too. Bummer. I thought it might work.

Still undecided whether to get GPU or CPU first. It depends on which drops in price first i guess. Both will help with X4 only a bit until the patch, so no hurry. CPU will be a 3700X. I like power savings. Not sure about GPU but probably a Sapphire Pulse 5700XT. The other option is boycotted out of protest at The Great Turing Robbery. I have had only their stuff since the very first generation back when the alternative was stuff like 3DFX, but if a friend tries to rob you, do you stay loyal to them? Nope.

p.s. Re overclocking. I found it is not really worth it with a Ryzen 2700X, unless a few percent matters to you and you may or may not get it. PBO etc seems to get the most out of the CPU automatically. Only advantage of better cooling I found was that throttling does not happen in gaming workloads so far at least (Noctua NH-U12A). So the cooler was definitely worth it, even though the stock one actually did okay. The only thing I want to tweak is vcore and perhaps tackle trying to improve on XMP settings for the memory. I think the vcore runs higher voltages than it may need to, I see 1.5v from stock settings at times. That seems very high to me. Perhaps mobo makers trying to give their boards an edge in benchmarks, so they get loose with the voltage to get there. It's a Strix B450. I was sucked in by the YouTube review. It's just a bog standard B450 really with added bling. Bling and looks are not highest on my list, as my use of Noctua indicates. I do like RGB though. I thought it was just a silly gimmick until I saw it in person. Now I'd like my whole apartment to have it

[ballti]

XMP will not show potential of your CPU. Turning off SMT and some core may disable worse core and alow further owerclock.
Upgrading on "intel OC 5.2Ghz" is wey 2 expensive just for 1 game.
Upgrading on "R 3000" can benefit ~same like "OC R 2000".
2700x is not bad cpu even for RX 5700x.

[AquilaRossa]

2700x is not bad cpu even for RX 5700x

Going to a 3700X from a 2700X does feel like a luxury purchase for sure, especially considering spinal injury has ended my career and forced me into early semi-retirement. I do not have a lots of spare cash to throw around. I justify it by the 65W TDP lowering my power bill and the rest being covered by selling the 2700X. That's my story and i am sticking to it

Gamer's Nexus was saying just the other day how XMP does not unlock the full potential of memory with Ryzen. I will have a look at timings etc. I do not enjoy tweaking as much as I used to. I am also wary of pushing things too far, so i do not increase memory voltages. Broken parts are more difficult for me to replace these days. I also like to be able to keep a straight face when I sell a part and assure the buyer I have not overclocked the hell out of it.
My old 2500K overclocked well, but I think they deliberately built all that headroom in by setting stock speeds quite low compared to very high potential. Ryzen goes almost as fast as it can out of the box. I remember when I had an AMD Athlon C Thunderbird back in about 2001. Pencil lead in between two points on the CPU would unlock the multiplier. Good old fashioned rough and ready overclocking. The most free performance I got from a CPU was back in the day of OC'ing Core 2. Wolfsdale if I remember correctly.

But to get X playing smoothly when the map is open in late game, I need twice the performance and even then i am not sure it would help. HOP would just build 700 more factories and I'd be back to square one. I do not mind performance drops if I build 1000 ships and fly in the same sector. But that is optional. Can't be long now before we see that beta patch and how Egosoft decided to tackle the problems. It reminds me of Hearts Of Iron by Paradox. They try to fix one thing and it creates new problems. In NZ we call that 'pushing sh!t uphill'.