X4 Performance Troubleshooting Suggestions

[Imperial Good]

Even with all my mods in late game with thousands of ships, I have literally 0 lag or stutter and that is also with my game running on Ultra graphics on 1440p@144hz.
I have read online its AMD that makes these CPU affinity drivers for each game.
Could Egosoft contact AMD to ask if they can add a default CPU affinity for X4? so that we do not have to do this task manually or figure out some way to add the CPU affinity through registry or a shortcut ourselves?

AMD uses Xbox Game Bar and their latest chipset drivers to determine when to limit an application only to the high cache cores. Any application that Xbox game bar triggers for will likely induce the desired automatic behaviour. Try setting X4 to windowed fullscreen (recommended) and make sure your Windows 11 Xbox game bar is configured so that it detects games being run. Hopefully that should detect X4 running, or be able to be made to detect it, and that would trigger the desired core affinity behaviour.

This issue is one of the reasons I would recommend gamers get the R7 7800X3D over the technically better R9 X3D chips. The 7800X3D just has 8 high cache cores so there is no reason to play around with core affinity and should be significantly cheaper. Of course there are still benefits to the R9 X3D variants for some non-gaming workloads that can benefit from the extra cores or higher frequency.

If you can't do this Id suggest making a pinned AMD Ryzen 9 7950x/7950X3D guide on the Egosoft forum and Steam discussions, as ive read the CPU latency between CCD0 and CCD1 is also high and can cause lag/stutter, since the latency between Core 0 and Core 34 is a whooping 88ns. Though what I have not tested yet, which I will do after work today is test and measure FPS on Core 0-15 and Core 16-31, and compare the results and user experience.

The core to core latency is unlikely the main issue. I think the issue is that the high cache cores run typical X4 workloads much, much, faster than the high clock low cache cores. The high clock low cache cores end up holding X4 back while it waits for them to finish executing tasks. On top of that the high clock low cache cores will generate significant heat and use significant power which could even reduce the performance of the high cache cores.

[Dipluz]

Even with all my mods in late game with thousands of ships, I have literally 0 lag or stutter and that is also with my game running on Ultra graphics on 1440p@144hz.
I have read online its AMD that makes these CPU affinity drivers for each game.
Could Egosoft contact AMD to ask if they can add a default CPU affinity for X4? so that we do not have to do this task manually or figure out some way to add the CPU affinity through registry or a shortcut ourselves?

AMD uses Xbox Game Bar and their latest chipset drivers to determine when to limit an application only to the high cache cores. Any application that Xbox game bar triggers for will likely induce the desired automatic behaviour. Try setting X4 to windowed fullscreen (recommended) and make sure your Windows 11 Xbox game bar is configured so that it detects games being run. Hopefully that should detect X4 running, or be able to be made to detect it, and that would trigger the desired core affinity behaviour.

This issue is one of the reasons I would recommend gamers get the R7 7800X3D over the technically better R9 X3D chips. The 7800X3D just has 8 high cache cores so there is no reason to play around with core affinity and should be significantly cheaper. Of course there are still benefits to the R9 X3D variants for some non-gaming workloads that can benefit from the extra cores or higher frequency.

If you can't do this Id suggest making a pinned AMD Ryzen 9 7950x/7950X3D guide on the Egosoft forum and Steam discussions, as ive read the CPU latency between CCD0 and CCD1 is also high and can cause lag/stutter, since the latency between Core 0 and Core 34 is a whooping 88ns. Though what I have not tested yet, which I will do after work today is test and measure FPS on Core 0-15 and Core 16-31, and compare the results and user experience.

The core to core latency is unlikely the main issue. I think the issue is that the high cache cores run typical X4 workloads much, much, faster than the high clock low cache cores. The high clock low cache cores end up holding X4 back while it waits for them to finish executing tasks. On top of that the high clock low cache cores will generate significant heat and use significant power which could even reduce the performance of the high cache cores.

I tried the Xbox game bar, did not help me I patched my pc with the newest AMD chipset drivers as well.

When you say Windowed fullscreen, I dont have that option. I only have three options which are Fullscreen, Windowed and Borderless Window.

[Imperial Good]

When you say Windowed fullscreen, I dont have that option. I only have three options which are Fullscreen, Windowed and Borderless Window.

Borderless Window is what I meant. Fullscreen does not exist on Windows 10 and 11 due to fullscreen optimisation, which at best converts it to borderless window anyway.

[NilusBavarius]

...
I set the (nvidia) option in control panel:
Vulkan/OpenGL present method... to: prefer layered on DXGI swap chain
...
And the game is actually buttery smooth now (played for about 2.5 hours without a single stutter). BUTTERY smooth.
...
Curious for someone else with an nvidia card on win10/11 to try setting Vulkan/OpenGL present method to use the DXGI swap chain.

Thanks for the Info - tried it and you are right, smooth!
Win11

Have a great holiday!

[Nico07091980]

Hello,

sometimes you get calls from someone when walking on stations or ships or sitting in cockpit. I noticed an issue when I get called from Dal Busta or Boso Ta who are on my HQ.
I play the plots late in my current game so my HQ is somewhat hugh in terms of station modules. Everytime Dal or Boso are calling me I get something like 1 FPS what is especially anoying when flying a ship. If any other plot character from another location is calling me I don't have any performance issues. Is there a setting or something else I can do besides shrinking down my beloved HQ to prevent an impact from station size in callings?

Cheers

[Imperial Good]

sometimes you get calls from someone when walking on stations or ships or sitting in cockpit. I noticed an issue when I get called from Dal Busta or Boso Ta who are on my HQ.
I play the plots late in my current game so my HQ is somewhat hugh in terms of station modules. Everytime Dal or Boso are calling me I get something like 1 FPS what is especially anoying when flying a ship. If any other plot character from another location is calling me I don't have any performance issues. Is there a setting or something else I can do besides shrinking down my beloved HQ to prevent an impact from station size in callings?

Determining what is causing the performance bottleneck might be a good idea. For example, is it due to your system running out of free memory? Or free VRAM? Is it a GPU bottleneck from rendering so much geometry in the background? Is it a CPU bottleneck because your CPU is getting on in age? Is the SSD that you installed X4 to performing well enough to avoid an I/O bottleneck? You did install X4 to a SSD? Maybe try turning down some visual sittings in case that helps.

I also recommend making a thread about it so it is more likely the devs will notice your feedback. Perhaps Boso Ta and Dal Busta could be moved to a dummy lab at a dummy, easy to render, station for such calls made when they are not near the player.