Can I pay for a FPS DLC?

[af_2017]

Started new game recently, X4:foundation without dlcs.
I suspect that OOS activity is less in the case.
Game loads/saves faster, which is explainable.
In sector activity (ships, pew-pewing) still impacts performance, fps lowers.

So I suspect each next content dlc (with new sectors, factions etc) affects game performance and eventually will make the game not playable performance wise.

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

I took a screen after letting the sim run for a while, my settings:
https://i.imgur.com/5fPO1oV.jpeg

SSAA 4x is a really heavy setting.
I would try 4x MSAA with FRS on high quality, or the same setting but with 2x SSAA.
Also disable chromatic aberration because it is a feature that blurs the edges of the screen too much.
What can greatly affect performance around stations is definitely the space reflections.

Maybe you could improve something but it will probably still be far from the performance you would like to achieve

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

So I suspect each next content dlc (with new sectors, factions etc) affects game performance and eventually will make the game not playable performance wise.

Likewise it is likely that subsequent content has not yet been as optimized as the initial content, which in the future may improve the overall experience instead of making it worse...

[af_2017]

Likewise it is likely that subsequent content has not yet been as optimized as the initial content, which in the future may improve the overall experience instead of making it worse...

I assume that "new content" is pure data which existing engine processes.
In ToA we've got changes in economy with scrap thingies but I would not expect much performance loss because of this.
And since "new content" is pure additional data, like objects, stations, ships and faction this results in more calculations.
That makes me think that whole engine requires optimizations. From this point of view I would even say that it is impossible to optimize one dlcs separately.

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

I'm not sure if that's the case. For my little knowledge I have the impression that "engine optimization" and "content" are two distinct and separate things.

[TwoThe]

The meshes all have collision. 3D collision is quite complicated. Each station module has dozens of collision surfaces to match up with their geometry. Repeat this for hundreds of modules and performance can quickly tank. Even optimising the collision testing to cull all inappropriate meshes becomes resource intensive when having to deal with thousands of such meshes nearby.

I leave this video of a physics demo from 2014: https://youtu.be/1o0Nuq71gI4

2014 a standard graphics card can simulate millions of physics collisions in real time easily, 2022 X4 cannot simulate collision of a single station at 60 fps. Take all the time you need to think about that.

[Imperial Good]

2014 a standard graphics card can simulate millions of physics collisions in real time easily, 2022 X4 cannot simulate collision of a single station at 60 fps. Take all the time you need to think about that.

What about AMD and Intel GPUs? What about also having to render a full game scene at the same time? What about a non proprietary implementation?

[TwoThe]

What about AMD and Intel GPUs? What about also having to render a full game scene at the same time? What about a non proprietary implementation?

Solved already, as demonstrated by the thousands of games out there that use PhysX or equivalent.

[NewtSoup]

What about AMD and Intel GPUs? What about also having to render a full game scene at the same time? What about a non proprietary implementation?

Solved already, as demonstrated by the thousands of games out there that use PhysX or equivalent.

Your knowledge is really impressive. Have you submitted your portfolio to many games developers?

[Raptor34]

Don't they render your crew wandering around anyway, even though they are behind you?

No; frustum culling ensures that that doesn't happen. There is still some calculation cost, because we have to first work out where they are and make sure it's not in view, and this can be further complicated in some cases by the need to calculate whether an object's shadow is in view, but objects behind you are not themselves generally rendered.

Would this help out with say map lag? Or is this a CPU vs. GPU thing and it doesn't matter?
Trying to figure out what's the best position when afking/empire managing.

[Kintanar]

Oh well! why seems iam not suffering this performance issues you are talking about?

My computer is an i9 10900k with a 2080ti nvidia rtx graphic card, with 16g 4000mhz ram, mobo MSI MEG Z490 Unify

Running the game at 2560x1440 resolution, (it can run it at 4k even but some hud elements are very small and i was tired of it) every graphic setting at max quality but AA is at FXAA, because at that resolution i dont need more to smooth edges.

And example on how my comp run the game here: https://youtu.be/19hYNGSeiMM (this video was recorded when i was using 4k resolution)

The few times the game slowed down or i got some sttuter was when it was the paranid unification, or when the split plot unification, and even then, just until the whole process ends. I know this was because the game was running a lot of modifications and calculations.

In most cases, battles, even at my huge self-sufficient mega city-shipyard-wharf, I have between 80 to 120 fps.

[Blitz4]

Even Star Citizen has taken the path of the "impossible product". And despite $ 500 million and 300 employees working on it, it's still nowhere near complete. Why this?
Because certain products, with such high details, require 20, 30 years of development by megagalactic teams that by comparison the design of the Space Webb Telescope is a breeze.

Now, imagine that X4 is exactly like SC, but instead of conceiving it in the form of "almost reality" it was conceived in the form of "billions of calculations per second". Yet the EG boys wanted to dive headfirst into this impossible undertaking.
What is not understood is this, the complexity of developing products like this, which is not like the others, cannot be developed like the others nor can it be compared to others.

I just looked into SC and it's come a ways. Not saying performance is amazing, but I feel it's interesting to review. There's a telem page that states it tracks every user in real time to summarize the expected performance you'd get based on the hardware config. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/telemetry
The checkbox top right (outlying data) click that as well.

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

Even Star Citizen has taken the path of the "impossible product". And despite $ 500 million and 300 employees working on it, it's still nowhere near complete. Why this?
Because certain products, with such high details, require 20, 30 years of development by megagalactic teams that by comparison the design of the Space Webb Telescope is a breeze.

Now, imagine that X4 is exactly like SC, but instead of conceiving it in the form of "almost reality" it was conceived in the form of "billions of calculations per second". Yet the EG boys wanted to dive headfirst into this impossible undertaking.
What is not understood is this, the complexity of developing products like this, which is not like the others, cannot be developed like the others nor can it be compared to others.

I just looked into SC and it's come a ways. Not saying performance is amazing, but I feel it's interesting to review. There's a telem page that states it tracks every user in real time to summarize the expected performance you'd get based on the hardware config. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/telemetry
The checkbox top right (outlying data) click that as well.

I know that site, as I know SC since it was born.
I started Star Citizen very few times because I like to play complete products and I no longer want to spend my time on a job that the developers should do, especially when these games are MMO.
Some time ago I defined my hardware configuration to basically play two games. X4 and "one day" Star Citizen ...
Fortunately with X4 so far I have been able to enjoy 3000 hours of gameplay, with good quality for my taste and lots of fun, with Star Citizen as I told you I played deliberately zero hours.
Some time ago, thanks to this link, I discovered that my configuration is decent to play SC at 60fps in 2K resolution and ultra details.
But I am confident that when the game is complete, or at least to the 1.0 version of the day one, those 60 fps will become 85 fps without having replaced a screw

Coincidentally, 85fps at ultra details and 2K resolution are the performance i get on X4 with the current configuration

[Blitz4]

I took a screen after letting the sim run for a while, my settings:
https://i.imgur.com/5fPO1oV.jpeg

SSAA 4x is a really heavy setting.
I would try 4x MSAA with FRS on high quality, or the same setting but with 2x SSAA.
Also disable chromatic aberration because it is a feature that blurs the edges of the screen too much.
What can greatly affect performance around stations is definitely the space reflections.

Maybe you could improve something but it will probably still be far from the performance you would like to achieve

Testing some more. I keep getting similar results.

https://imgur.com/a/CYX8zNy

The sn850 SSD is dedicated to X4. Note that the screen of the game is the default Young Gun start, I just ran to the platform and left the game run for 5-10 mins.

My launch options:

Code: Select all

-skipintro -noantialiasing -nocompress -nodefaultlog -nosoundthrottle -noworkshopsync -offline -showfps -malloc=system -USEALLAVAILABLECORES -sm4 -high -novsync

Some posts suggest to use a command line option to use a low-overhead AA, but my GPU is twiddling it's thumbs, so I opted to instead use AA on the GPU and listed the options in the screens. Video of what those settings mean.

One stat that's key is the Frametime, you can see in the screen of X4, polled at 100ms intervals, that is is always above 20ms. Why do I keep mentioning 20ms? Because of John Carmack.

Starfield is the next game that will bring more players to X4, if there's a proper marketing campaign to capitalize on it, Starfield players are likely going to include a lot of sub-20ms FPS gamers. I'd love if X4 could become more popular.

[Blitz4]

Tested with a smaller set of launch options and setting the Process priority to High. Similar results.

Code: Select all

-skipintro -noantialiasing -USEALLAVAILABLECORES -novsync -showfps

https://i.imgur.com/apwQmXN.jpeg

Makes me wonder. If all we want is smooth gameplay, but it's understood the importance of allocating a lot of resources to allow the universe to sim. What about 2 (two) separate frame rate limiters, one for the sim and a separate for the graphics? Not my idea at all, it's a feature of vanilla Dwarf Fortress: https://i.imgur.com/fKMLy4B.png

[Imperial Good]

As far as I am aware most of those command line options do not exist or they do not do anything.

[Blitz4]

As far as I am aware most of those command line options do not exist or they do not do anything.

This thread listed all of what was used and also documented a few: viewtopic.php?t=434569#p5020006

Code: Select all

-USEALLAVAILABLECORES

I wish this one would work. It seems to have been been explained hundreds of times, the design of X4 is firstly a sim, and it's far too complex to run the sim portion among multiple threads.

What about big ship battles? I want to believe that flag improves performance for big ship battles, but like you said, I doubt that works as well.

It was already mentioned of the issues with 3D pathfinding and there was one solution mentioned. Let's say that 3D pathfinding was no longer an issue in X4. What other games could be used as a reference for what's obtainable in the best case scenario for a massive battle among dozens or hundreds of ships? Can't use EVE Online or any MMO as mentioned earlier, those types of games aren't a 1-to-1 comparison.

If 3D pathfinding is a zero performance hit, then it may be comparable to a 2D game, minus the overhead from the sim. I've both a 2D and a 3D example that handles it very well, the 3D one is free to test. These games when tested have a good amount of distributed load among all cores.

3D - Star Swarm Stress Test
2D - Ashes of Singularity: Escalation

The Engine was created in a time before time, using AMD Mantle, a dead non cross-platform predecessor to Vulkan. I've never seen anything like it. So I investigated:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020706/N ... ent-Engine
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWar ... nguage.php
https://forums.stardock.com/495413/star ... ame-engine
https://oxidegames.com/products/nitrous-2/
https://oxidegames.com/2014/05/21/the-n ... hics-apis/
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcontrol/co ... _arrrrrgh/

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

Testing some more. I keep getting similar results.

https://imgur.com/a/CYX8zNy

The sn850 SSD is dedicated to X4. Note that the screen of the game is the default Young Gun start, I just ran to the platform and left the game run for 5-10 mins.

My launch options:

Code: Select all

-skipintro -noantialiasing -nocompress -nodefaultlog -nosoundthrottle -noworkshopsync -offline -showfps -malloc=system -USEALLAVAILABLECORES -sm4 -high -novsync

Some posts suggest to use a command line option to use a low-overhead AA, but my GPU is twiddling it's thumbs, so I opted to instead use AA on the GPU and listed the options in the screens. Video of what those settings mean.

One stat that's key is the Frametime, you can see in the screen of X4, polled at 100ms intervals, that is is always above 20ms. Why do I keep mentioning 20ms? Because of John Carmack.

Starfield is the next game that will bring more players to X4, if there's a proper marketing campaign to capitalize on it, Starfield players are likely going to include a lot of sub-20ms FPS gamers. I'd love if X4 could become more popular.

As Imperial says, I only know a few of those options, but they are not necessary for performance purposes.
Also I believe you have fiddled too much with nvidia's 3D settings. I'm pretty sure the drop in performance is due to that. I would bring everything back to standard and use the game options for graphical changes.
From the screen I could see that in your configuration there is the 2080. But what is your processor? And what is the speed and CL times of your ram memories?

[Imperial Good]

This thread listed all of what was used and also documented a few: viewtopic.php?t=434569#p5020006

Which as the following thread explains, many do not exist...
viewtopic.php?f=180&t=447934

Of the command line parameters you have listed, only -nocputhrottle is actually even read by the game. Enabling this option will make the game run faster when in the background, but at the obvious cost of potentially stealing performance from whatever application is running in the foreground. That's why it's not enabled by default.

For reasons that should be pretty obvious, we don't hide performance improvements behind command line parameters. In general, command line parameters will switch features or optimisations OFF, for testing and debugging purposes.

For this reason I recommend no command line parameters for the optimal experience unless you explicitly need some of the features such as running full speed in the background (some people like to keep X4 running while they do other things) or logging (used by modders and for bug reporting).

[Duncaroos]

For this reason I recommend no command line parameters for the optimal experience unless you explicitly need some of the features such as running full speed in the background (some people like to keep X4 running while they do other things) or logging (used by modders and for bug reporting).

Except for -skipintro....Get to playing faster