1.7.0.6 Performance

[WiZz]

ORIGINAL: vonHart
Hardware issues are not an uncommon problem with videogames due to nearly endless possibilities to combine pieces of hardware in your machine. Testing your piece of software on every possible combination is impossible; it's especially problematic for a small developer like matrix games which has only 30+ employees (wikipedia).

I'm pretty sure, that DW can cause lags even on highest level top PC. I'm sad, that DW is lagged, but I had used somehow. [:(] As for me, this is not biggest problem.

[unclean]

@vonHart do you have an ATI card? Like Wizz said this game pretty much doesn't touch the gpu at all, but it's weird that performance could be so inconsistent.

ORIGINAL: defekt
If DW is not written to work with some modern gear then that needs to be made abundantly clear on the required system specs otherwise some customers will have grounds to ask for a refund. This thread already probably stands as being a warning to prospective buyers, and those whose gear may not be affected may avoid the game entirely just in case. (Add to that the cost of the game and expansions if bought from Matrix and most will be more likely to not risk it.) Some technical input from the developers might serve to alleviate some of the ambiguity.

You should post in the tech support forum or pm elliotg. But yeah, such poor performance in an $80 game is pretty unacceptable.

[vonHart]

@ unlcean: nope, Nvidia. I suppose it’s a multicore processor load issue. As far as I know DW was originally build without multicore support and the feature was added in some addon or patch. Maybe there are some troubles left with that. And yes, i tried to run DW on a single core.

@ defekt: as I said before, I don’t think that this bad performance with certain specs is expected or intended by the developer. Thus I think some sort of disclosure obligation doesn’t make sense because it would have to include every problematic hardware combination, that will be a pretty long list. What would help would be a demo. Does anyone know what’s the problem with that? Btw. defekt, have you already tried Erik’s tips in the Tech-Support FAQ regarding bad performance issues? It didn’t solve the issue for me but made DW at least playable.

[stryc]

An ATi 6x series card with an AMD quad core CPU on a W7-64 OS isn’t what I’d call an esoteric configuration. I don’t know for certain if it is a problem with the way the game interacts with the card but thus far all leads point towards a draw rate issue. I’m not for one moment suggesting that the game was deliberately coded to run poorly on certain hardware configs -- I'm angry about the game running badly when I know that it runs smoothly on far older machines but I'm not irrational about it -- but I also don’t subscribe to the notion that the devs aren’t already aware that something might not be as efficient as it could be with modern gear, of which new customers are more and more likely to own as time ticks by. Considering the price point at which the game currently sits this becomes a significant issue.

A demo would certainly help but seeing as the game doesn’t grind to a practical halt until the mid-late stages I don’t see how a demo could reveal that without giving away too much of the game itself for free.

I’ve tried all tweaks listed within these fora and many more besides.

[vonHart]

Well you could limit the demo to a few quick start scenarios (beginning, galactic republic) with only a single race and limited amount of time. With the galactic republic scenario you would get a look of what awaits you in the mid-end stages of a sandbox game.

I share your feelings about the performance of DW on low-tech compared to high-tech systems. But I wanted to point out that it's probably not a systematic problem which may serve as an argument against buying DW, as you said in a previous post

If DW is not written to work with some modern gear then that needs to be made abundantly clear on the required system specs otherwise some customers will have grounds to ask for a refund.

but rather some sort of "bad hardware combination luck" problem. And if only a small fraction of the gamerbase is affected by it, the devs will not prioritize work on that problem. I thought that your words in post #18 were unfair because your assumptions were wrong, thus i replied. But I think that already enough has been said about that.

What made you think it's a GPU related problem rather than a CPU related? The fact that DW runs smoothly on older systems seem to be a clear indicator that the graphical processing tasks in DW are not that big that you would need a specific GPU to handle. Rather older CPU's seem to shoulder it effortlessly. The comment of WiZz that you can run DW without a GPU seems to point in the same direction. My estimate is that it is a CPU multi core related issue because that feature was not available from the beginning of DW, so there might be still room for improvements.

[WiZz]

My estimate is that it is a CPU multi core related issue because that feature was not available from the beginning of DW, so there might be still room for improvements.

It doesn't help much. Only one effective decision is coding ENTIRE game engine to use graphic acceleration. It is the only way. After that, DW will flying. But, I think, this will not be made, because next addon is last for DW.

[ehsumrell1]

For those of you who may have missed it, a while back Elliot gave an interview concerning
Distant Worlds and Codeforce that may provide some insight into some of the previous
discussions in this thread. Just FYI. [:)]

You can read it here: http://truepcgaming.com/2011/10/28/4x-space-odyssey-distant-worlds-interview/#more-2580

[stryc]

More performance testing findings:-

I suppose only someone technically connected with the game's mechanics will be able to answer this but does the game run some sort of five second cycle? Every five seconds the frame rate falls away dramatically, then for the next five seconds it's smooth, then five seconds later it falls away again... repeat ad nauseum. At first I thought this was caused by pop-up dialogues but it happens when the game is paused and when no pop-up dialogues are in view. My test was to start a completely new game (v1.7.0.16), zoom in on a planet and gently circle the view around by holding RMB. For five seconds it will be smooth, for five seconds it will be very laggy, then for five seconds it will be smooth again, etc.

I stripped away all unnecessary processes, including virus scanners and so forth, and performed the above test both with and without CPU affinity settings (1 core, all cores), with and without dual monitors, etc. Essentially I've repeated all the things I did before to try and claw back some performance before I noticed this five second cycle. No other game or application follows the same five second pattern, it's just DW.

[Gareth_Bryne]

In my experience, the cause may lie in motherboard compatibility problems. The components may be all right, but the connections are flawed on a material level, which shows in singular cases. And DW IS a singular case, it runs smoothly on otherwise low-end computers with enough processing power, and sometimes has problems on high-end systems.

[stryc]

I'm sure you said something insightful but I was too busy admiring your choice of avatar and sig quote.

[Gareth_Bryne]

Well, both of the personas involved smile in a similar way[:D]...

[vonHart]

Recently I had some problems with my machine which I fixed by disabling all active services.
A few hours ago I once again started to play Distant Worlds, only this time with all unnecessary services still disabled and e voilà, the game runs as smooth as a buttered baby.
Star Amount: Huge, Physical Size: Huge, Expansion: old, AI Empires: 19, Nebula Detail and Star Density: Max
Performance: just like the ocean under the moon

There will be no sleep for me tonight...

[Cruis.In]

what is active services and how do you disable?

I too have this issue. I suspect it is not as bad as the OP's own. But I posted about this when I first bought this game. This game is too great to be held back by this. Using .NET and XNA are probably its major issues. The fact that its tied to those.

DW needs a new rendering engine which uses the GPU and not the CPU. Should be fairly easy for a developer to do a rendering engine or license a cheapish one, you don't have to replace or recode the game logic.

But the decision to leave DW running on this crappy engine, after all these years and three expansion packs doesn't surprise me from a developer who releases no demo for their game and charges outrageous amounts compared to similar games. They shoot themselves in the foot, my only reason for it could be they do not want too many people playing DW.

DW is so awesome even with the engine flaw, the cumbersome UI. A demo of this game would surely get more people to fork out. Who is gonna fork out 100 dollars for a game with no demo?

Anyway I digressed. My Core i7, nuff ram, nuff everything gets sputter issues on large scale combat, when the ships start to shoot. Yet people are here saying they get no issues on all settings, large galaxies, large combat with low end computers.

These reasons make it difficult for a fix for one person to fix for another. Could be firmware, mb drivers, multiple core issues, windows issues, all those issues in one, some of those issues.

I've heard someone say turning star density to lowest and setting FPS to like 15, smooths it out, try that along with the other suggestions see if it helps you out.

[Shark7]

Active services are all the little 'helpful' programs that run in the background. Many of them are necessary, but some of them really are just system baggage that can be done without.

I know how to turn them off, but my advice is that unless you are 100% sure what you are doing, its best not to mess with it. You can really mess things up if you get to messing around in the system configuration.

[vonHart]

@Cruis.In
Maybe I misread your last line so just let me make things clear. I do not have any performance issues once I disable all unnecessary services. The ocean under the moon moves smooth...
Shark7 is quite right if he says that you can badly mess up your OS by tinkering with the services. However, the Devs of Windows have thought of this possibility and supported us with a safety switch, in case we are in the mood of tinkering.

1. Open the run box. Either by clicking on the "start button" and "run" or by pressing the "windows button" on your keyboard while simultaneously pressing "r"
2. Type the command "MSCONFIG" into the run box and press Enter
3. Click on "Services"
4. Make sure the box "hide all microsoft services" is ticked. Now you only see services non vital for Windows
5. Click on "disable all"
6. Click on "Accept changes"
7. Restart your computer and test the performance in DW
8. Give us some feedback

Be aware however, that if you keep these settings you need to start every service manually if you need them. The service starts automatically if you try to run the program which is in need of the service. But if you have any programmes who runs themselves during the system start (like anti-virus or firewall) you have to activate them manually. Of course you can also activate the corresponding services via the MSCONFIG command to keep them running. Or, if this solution works, you can only disable the services while you are playing DW.

[Grimnirsson]

And DW IS a singular case, it runs smoothly on otherwise low-end computers with enough processing power, and sometimes has problems on high-end systems.

So after reading this thread and some reviews that say that DW is needing a high end PC... I actually don't know whether my notebook will run this game smoothly or not - what do guys think?

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/lapt ... 03US-specs

8Gb Ram, Dual Core, HD6480G integrated gfx chip (http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon ... 685.0.html), motherboard version 305E4A

Armada 2526 is running fine btw...

[Bingeling]

It should be a problem. You may want to avoid the largest galaxy settings due to pace, though, but all depends on various stuff...

It is a lot of game to be had even if you avoid more than 700 star galaxies...

[Gareth_Bryne]

May lack processing power.

[Buio]

According to an official post about the expansion, performance is getting a boost. I hope it will get back-patched to people without the Shadows expansion too (even though I personally will get the expansion immediately).

I don't think I can link yet, new user limitation. It is in the "Distant Worlds: Shadows" topic on page 6 (with default forum setting).

Here is a quote of the post;

One thing I have not mentioned is that we've made some major improvements to the underlying graphics engine which _should_ mean a significant performance improvement for everyone. So far, in my testing, much less graphical lag and higher fps on low and mid-range systems, though until we start the wider beta test we won't know if that's the case for most players.

Performance overall is quite improved, we'll have to see if it's enough. As always, we tend to improve performance and then find new ways to slow it down again with new features.

Anyway, performance is indeed low even though I have a high end system. Have no idea why. I've tested some things I though might affect it, but no change.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Grimnirsson
8Gb Ram, Dual Core, HD6480G integrated gfx chip (http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon ... 685.0.html), motherboard version 305E4A

It should run fine, better at the smaller galaxy sizes.

Regards,

- Erik