[1.1.3.9] I strongly disagree with the new CPU usage policy

[Korbul]

Ever since it was introduced, I check new patches to see if it's "fixed"
I'm talking about that performance change that makes the cpu go 50% usage when paused with a freshly started galaxy.

I'm against the idea and here is why. I like to play games in the background. Do some work, alt tab give some orders, alt tab work etc. Now, if I leave system load target at the default 60, my cpu is 50% usage all the time. It does not matter I'm in game, or if I'm paused or if the game is minimized. It's 50% usage ALL the time. If I reduce it to minimum it goes to 25%. This still enough for my laptop coolers to take off and just spin spin spin.

We live in a modern world. C# is a high level language. It has so many ways of synchronizing threads, and signaling and locking. Must we really do while(true) or thread.sleep on all workers or whatever it is happening?

Can we not execute work when work is available to be executed?

I hope this way of doing this is just for the beta, but I keep checking the logs and it seems it's not being touched anymore.

for reference I'm on a laptop with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz

[Erik Rutins]

I'm sorry, but in order to simulate a living galaxy, the game requires a certain level of CPU resources. Laptops are unique in that they put a lot of hardware into a small space and want to also run on battery power. As a result, when gaming you typically want to be plugged in and I would guess the vast majority of 3D games will in fact require a laptop to engage its cooling system.

Will the CPU usage decrease with future optimizations? Certainly, but more changes to that area are bigger than will be done in this round of updates, we're stabilizing the current changes to go official before we start a new round of risky changes. The CPU Load slider is the provided solution to decrease CPU usage. The other thing that may help is choosing to play on the smallest galaxies.

Getting the living galaxy working with great multi-threaded performance and stability on all systems is a very hard task which has been an ongoing challenge for years now. We've made huge progress, but I can assure you that it's not something where we could just get the CPU usage to be much lower without much work because we're in a modern world using C#. It will take time and more optimization and testing to maintain the better performance of the performance updates while decreasing CPU usage and I expect there will never be a point where a large galaxy requires minimal CPU usage or where a well-developed mid to late game situation doesn't want more than 25% CPU.

Regards,

- Erik

[Buio]

A few games (not many at all I've played) have a setting for "Background running max fps" which should be set very low. When the game senses it is no longer the focus window, it uses that level which lowers system usage. The problem here is if Distant Worlds 2 require a certain amount of CPU usage even running at very low fps.

[Erik Rutins]

A few games (not many at all I've played) have a setting for "Background running max fps" which should be set very low. When the game senses it is no longer the focus window, it uses that level which lowers system usage. The problem here is if Distant Worlds 2 require a certain amount of CPU usage even running at very low fps.

We'll certainly look into that - we will be improving CPU usage further in the future as well, it's just that in the short term better performance by default is more important.