FPS Drops to 2.4 frequently (using built-in FPS counter)

[user1679]

Game Version: 2.50

System:

Win7 Pro x64
CPU: i5 7500
Ram: 8GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
VRam: 4GB
Driver: 436.15
Display: 144 Hz, 1080p max

Graphics Settings (current):

** Note: I have tried all combinations of these settings and other than SSAO/High Shadows killing my FPS overall, the problem persisted through all variations

Resolution: 1920x1080
FXAA: Low
Display Mode: Borderless Window
Present Mode: No VSync (this setting is actually selectable with the driver version mentioned above)
Colour Correction: Photo
Gamma: 100
Graphics Quality: Custom
Texture Quality: High
Shadows: Off
Soft Shadows: Off
SSAO: Off
Glow: Off
Distortion: On
LOD Setting: 50 (see problem details)
Effect Distance: 50
Radar: Low
Screen Space Reflections: Off

Problem Details

I created a dummy game start that simply dropped me in Argon V, docked at a station. At this point my FPS is around 90 with slight fluctuations. After about 2 or 3 minutes
I will suddenly drop to about 2.5 to 5.0 FPS and for about 3 seconds will completely freeze, then shoot back up to around 75. When this happens, the game sort of plays in
"fast forward" mode for a few seconds as if it is catching up on all the input I made during the lag. For example if during this lag spike I was trying to climb into my ship,
when the spike ends my character will climb the ladder so fast it sort of just pops into the ship.

As I mentioned above, changing graphics settings doesn't seem to help other than the possibility of LOD / Effect sliders.

I noticed that this lag spike happens everywhere, even in deep space so it was hard to pin down. It seems to occurr most often when a ship enters the system and even more
specifically, when one I haven't seen enters my view for the first time. When I reduce the LOD to 0, the lag spikes become much less frequent but now the game looks really
bad, and the spikes aren't gone completely.

Since you can really see what LOD does by rapidly running the slider back and forth on the settings screen and observing the changes to the demo playing, it seems to me that
for some reason the game is having a problem loading the different bits associated with a ship or station. The strange thing is that once a ship has caused this lag spike, I can
spin my ship around 360 and when it comes into view it doesn't spike.

I don't know if LOD also applies to NPCs but they also cause the spike as they pop in and out of view. But again, only for the first time seeing them.


So there it is, I think it's related to asset loading and yes, I'm still using a standard platter driven SATA 3 drive. But this shouldn't really matter. I can play both EvE Online
and Skyrim SE on this same macine with graphics settings set much higher than X4. Unfortunately these lag spikes make the game very frustrating. Instead of playing for a couple
hours, I can only get about a half hour before I shut it down. Not ready to quit yet but then again, I never finished X3 AP so...


UPDATES

2019-09-04

* Mods installed: None
* When this lag spike occurrs, I actually hear my GPU fans speed up...

[jan12342203]

do you have Trader mods active?
a lot of active ships will cause performance problems like this... it helped me... especially TaderTrader and Random Trade are performance hungry..

[user1679]

do you have Trader mods active?
a lot of active ships will cause performance problems like this... it helped me... especially TaderTrader and Random Trade are performance hungry..

Nope, I actually have no mods so there isn't any outside influence. Will update the OP.

[Alan Phipps]

Comparing other games that have graphics bottlenecks is not really useful as X4 is often cpu-bound instead.

These regular periodic lags might be consistent with something else taking system high attention away from the game. Do you have any specific core affinities set and do you have any background applications running that might for example be accessing the internet regularly?

Does your system router or hub indicate activity when these lags happen? Is there an unusually high amount of disk drive access during the lags (eg cache access, pagefile or system administration)?

[SPiDER]

It may not be related...But I had this exact same issue...caused by an adblocker......uninstalled and the problem disappeared.

[user1679]

Comparing other games that have graphics bottlenecks is not really useful as X4 is often cpu-bound instead.

These regular periodic lags might be consistent with something else taking system high attention away from the game. Do you have any specific core affinities set and do you have any background applications running that might for example be accessing the internet regularly?

Does your system router or hub indicate activity when these lags happen? Is there an unusually high amount of disk drive access during the lags (eg cache access, pagefile or system administration)?

Actually it is quite useful because background tasks would also effect other games. Skyrim is also very CPU intensive because it relies heavily on scripting (and I forgot to mention I have 300 mods). EvE Online, despite being an online game still loads ships and stations from local game files based on the data packets sent from the server to the client. In the case of X4, I am not connected to the internet so I don't see the relevance of the router in this situation.

To address your other concerns, no there is no unusual disk activity and I tried several different affinity options for the executable but it doesn't matter. The work is spread evenly across all cores. I could have been wrong about the fans, it may have been my CPU fan and not the GPU fan speeding up however when profiling with various types of software, I see no unusual spikes in any of the cores. The game pretty much runs at about 30% on all cores.

There does perhaps seem to be a memory leak, based on my experience as a DirectX programmer. When I first start the game, it uses 1.1 GB of my VRam and about 3.2 GB of my RAM. After about 20 or 30 minutes, RAM usage is well over 5GB but, according to one profiling source, my VRAM is suddenly over 11GB. One of the first things game programmer learns is that Windows' pagefile is a terribly slow place to put data. Now I'm not saying Egosoft did this deliberately but if there is a memory leak, when allocated memory hasn't been read from in a while and any EXE attempts to load more data, Windows' memory manager will offload that "stale" data (regardless of who owns it) into the pagefile to make room for the new stuff. In this case, it's possible that X4 isn't releasing unneeded memory objects, causing massive pagefile usage.

Now, I did mention above that there isn't much disk thrashing (read/write spikes) but I believe that is because the data being put in the pagefile truly isn't needed anymore. So the action of offloading it from RAM ot VRAM causes the periodic system freeze but there's no actual disk thrashing because X4 never needs it again.

Anyway, just some theories since I don't have access to the source code

It may not be related...But I had this exact same issue...caused by an adblocker......uninstalled and the problem disappeared.

I don't use anything like that. I only use antivirus and have never had it effect any program I use. I actually exempt my game folders from auto scans but I do completely disable it as a
troubleshooting step and forgot to mention it. It didn't change anything.