Performance

[dukechaos]

I'm having quite a bit of trouble with performance in the game.

I'm running Windows 7 - 64bit Ultimate

I have a Q9650 Quad core processor and 8GB of RAM in addition to a 10k Raptor hard drive.

My video card is a GTX260 although since the game seems 2D instead of 3D I'm not sure if this makes much of a difference.

My sound card is a Sounblaster X-Fi Fatality Titanium card.

This may not be cutting edge, but I run a number of current 3D titles with no problems using max settings.

I've updated all my drivers and am running the latest non-beta version of Return of the Shakturi.

The game I'm currently running has 700 stars and 19 alien races to compete with. Performance started off good, but now that I'm max tech with over 2000 ships and 100's of colonies the game is crawling.

The vanila game seemed to run a lot better, but even a 1400 star game got bogged down.

I slowed the frame down all the way to 10 and that isn't even helping.

Is this typical, or is there something going on that I'm not seeing?

My machine seems plenty beefy enough for a 2D game, but perhaps it's not.

Any thoughts?

[Kayoz]

I'd love to see an official response to this.

[Abraxis]

Though, it is 2D, you have to keep in mind that every ship, every station, every planet, all that shit that moves, is being crammed into your VRAM whether it's on screen or not. 2000*19 = 38000 ships, was that including commercial ships?  Then there's all the other stuff.  It may be 2D, but there is a lot of it.  People tend to underestimate how taxing strategy games are on video cards because they tend to think only what's on screen is rendered, if that were the case though, scrolling around the map would be unbearable.

If you want to try and identify the bottleneck, try reducing all the vid settings, see if it makes any difference.

Otherwise, it could easily be your processor.  As far as I know the game isn't written to take advantage of multiple cores, and while 3Ghz is good, the tens of thousands of automated ships making decisions and running full economies, the 19 AI's all interacting... makes for a lot of calculations.

Try setting the game's affinity onto a free core, so it has all 3Ghs to itself, if that makes a difference, then your CPU is the bottleneck.

In either case, there is a handy program called Game Booster that disables every non-critical system process (or any other junk you've accumulated) while it's enabled.  I picked it up originally for Dwarf Fortress, which is an insatiable evil devourer of CPUs from hell.  It really makes a noticeable difference.

That being said, I'd also like to hear an official response.  Though, being a coder myself, it doesn't seem like the game was coded inefficiently, it just seems like they didn't shy away from the kind of depth other games typically avoid.

P.S. The 8 gigs of ram on a 64 bit system should be enough, unless it's clocked at a really low frequency, or it's just shitty RAM and can't run at a high frequency, it really effects the RAM's transfer rate.

[adecoy95]

i have never had noticeable performance issues with the game, even on the largest maps, and i have a way crappier system.

[Abraxis]

Could be a software thing then, I wonder if updating .Net framework would make a difference?

Edit: Just updated to .net 4 (from 3.5 which comes with the game)**. Loaded up a game that was pretty far in, certain things seem faster, but I could be my imagination, so marginal improvement at best.

Still worth a shot though.

**If you wanna check your version type "javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)" into Windows Internet Explorer (Only WIE).

[Data]

yap, earlier threads on this also reported improvment with updating the .net

[sbach2o]

There are a few non-obvious but important performance tweaks hidden away in the options. I do not have the game before me, but when you have found the 'framerate' settings, the others are probably not far off.

Look for 'Nebulas in systems' or something like this. Turn the option off. It may help to also turn down the backgrouns star density. I have it way down, but this is because I can then better make out asteroids when zoomed out somewhat in a system. The thing having to do with 'limiting framerate' shouldn't affect performance much, on the other hand, as the actual drawing of stuff isn't the performance bottleneck for DW.

This should give the game some more headroom for smooth operation. But the more objects the game has to track, the harder it gets on the processor.

Right now I am running a 1000 stars galaxy on an old Pentium 4, and now that my empire has ~5K ships total (it makes up 75% of the galactic economy), the game bogs down very much, maybe a little more than DW did at a comparable stage. I am not complaining though. I knew what I was risking when I set up the game this way. Your machine is more powerful than mine in every aspect, but I doubt it could run my game completely smooth either.

[unclean]

From what I've noticed the number of other races in the game has a way larger impact on performance than galaxy size - 1400 stars with 9 races stays pretty smooth the entire game while a normal size map with 19 races gets unbearably slow after a few hours. Don't really know why, maybe the worse economy in the galaxy (from fewer homeworlds) means there's less crap constantly flying around for the game to keep track of, or maybe 19 empires all having to deal with each other is just exponentially more complex than having 9.

[dukechaos]

Thanks for the advice folks.

I failed to mention I already have the other performance impacting items down, it just seemed that frame rate would be the most impactful.

I do doubt that all non-displayed items are in the video ram, that just doesn't seem plausible. It's not how I would program it.

Regardless, the number of races seems a likely culprit due to the complexity of all the AI's interacting with each other.

On earlier games I ran with far less, so perhaps that is the key.

I am thinking that all the fighters to manage with RoS expansion is helping to drive up the management overhead as well.

My .net is 4 and every other driver is up to date.

I'll try the CPU affinity as well as seeing what else I can disable, and perhaps Game Booster is worth a shot.

Thanks again.

[Raap]

Have you overclocked your CPU? Should be pretty easy getting it to at least 3.6ghz, which would greatly help performance in the game.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Raap

Have you overclocked your CPU? Should be pretty easy getting it to at least 3.6ghz, which would greatly help performance in the game.

Personally I've never found a need to overclock. Mine is running the game without problems at its standard 2.8 ghz

[Data]

same here, and I also have a puny laptop on which it runs

[Raap]

Well, the game is running mostly on one core, so you would see a pretty linear boost to frame rates/smoothness if you overclocked. Going from 2.8ghz to 3.8ghz could take you from like 30fps to 40fps, for instance.

[jalapen0]

vram doesn't work like that. It does not have objects loaded into it. It has frames loaded into it. The more ram, the more frames that can be loaded at once. That's a simple explaination but I can tell you, it does not run a "database" of 28000 objects in a game. That stuff is in system memory, not vram.

[WoodMan]

Hey guys, a quick tip regarding performance.

Setting the nebula detail in systems to low, makes a huge difference to performance and virtually no noticable actual graphics difference at all.  Just recently I thought performance in my game had dropped, so I checked the options and found that Nebula detail was low as always.  However, changing it to medium, and then back to low again showed me that in fact it wasn't set to low in the first place!

It looks like when you do either one of the following (not sure which) a)install the expansion or b) patch your game, the graphics settings reset, but not the sliders!  My slider said it was at low, but changing it off low and back again showed it wasn't on low in the first place [&:]  Now performance has rocketed back to how I remember it used to be.

I also found unchecking the unlimited frames box helped with scrolling and setting the star density to minimum also gave a massive boost in smoothness.  I also think that the low star density looks nicer, there were too many background stars for my liking before.

Hope this helps.

[Data]

it does help, WoodMan, good suggestions....for my part there can never be too many background stars though [:)]
i like the christmas tree map aspect, it's like every time I play I get a present [:D]

[Lord_Astraios]

Updating those single softwares that the game is dependant is helpful,  update the video card too even so it doesnt use much out of it.   But the game takes a lot of processing power.

So you need to check all those background programs.

But im running a game here with my Rig (Multi Boot,  Win XP Pro SP3 With 2.2 GHz AMD Phenon,  4 Gig Ram but 3.4 Gig Usable Ram since im running 32bit,  1T SerialATA Drive, ATI Radeon 5750 1Gig)  im running a game of 1400 Stars.  And here ive given the players and me an advantage,  get them to build lots of ships,  by reducing the costs on the race data file plus other stuff.  And i have a messy map.  And i dont have a problem with the framerate, my only issue is when i load a game,  it takes a while to load.

My Empire consists of 219 colonies in 129 systems,  second in the list with 190 colonies,  i have the game at colony abundant
4128 in ships including state,  military and other.
21 races.
1194 troops

In other terms what i got take a lot of process and for me a lot of playing since im at war with 4 races now,  3 races and the shakturi wanting cookies and wanting my rear in a silver platter if i dont deliver.