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Poor performance

Caydr

Join Date 03/2006

Poor performance

(on Crysis-worthy computer)

I thought Sins was working quite well on my computer. I noticed hiccups from time to time, but that happens. Then I ran FRAPS to take some videos of the great battles to show my friends, and I notice... wow I'm only getting about 15-25 FPS most of the time.

Are there any things that can cause this sort of rather mediocre performance? Considering the game is intended for people with respectable but not cutting-edge computers, I would think I'd have 40+ FPS at the worst of times. My computer runs Crysis - all settings on High - at about 24 FPS average... better than I'm getting in Sins.

Computer specs:

Windows XP Pro SP2
Latest DX9 update
Official Nvidia drivers 174.12 - all relevant settings on "application control", and transparency AA turned off. Set for High Quality mode.

Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4 ghz @ 3 ghz)
BFG Nvidia 8800 GTS 320mb OC'd to roughly stock GTX performance
2.24 terabytes storage spread across 5 hard drives (the main "hard drive" is a RAID 01 array of 4 250 gb drives, so 8 total)
143 gb free on main drive
2 gigs RAM
600-ish watt name-brand PSU (I forget the specifics)
All hardware temperatures in safe zone at idle and full load
Approx 11500 3DMark06 score

Basically my PC is so far beyond the recommended specifications it's silly. So where's the weak link that's reducing my performance? I'm playing an 8 player, 60 planet game right now, is it just too complex at that size?

technical

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Short Answer: YES IT IS YOUR SYSTEM.

You cant count ? Have you seen how many threads about bad perfomance here ?
Or maybe you cant read: all other games are running great. Even such resource heavy ones as AC and Crysis.

Okay, so, you're not a programmer, you don't actually know anything that can cause it, you don't actually know how and why it appears, you don't even know what exactly it is.. and yet, IC is supposed to magically wave their fingers and fix it?

Im a programmer, and TyrelHUN is right. If drawing of 2d user interface upon ready 3d scene halves FPS - that means that something is terribly wrong in the engine.
And when 7 AI game brings down CPU - that means either someone did not bother with optimization, or game has "dead" features like "large maps".

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It doesn't matter if he's right or not. For that matter, whether or not you're right here is irrelevant too, because neither of you are actually providing any information.

I'll again point to the example of Malice and that thread - the OP at first posted a general "my game runs poorly" post, but eventually people had it narrowed down to Malice clogging up the system, with an attached save game and everything. That kind of thing helps. This doesn't.

It's easy to say it's not optimized, and that something is terribly wrong with the engine - but how about you actually find that "something", because until you do it's just a guess

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Multianna

Join Date 10/2006

+10

The UI fps problem was well known under the beta, but was fixed either by driver or game code, i dont really remember by what and when, but it doesn't seem to have that huge effect on my machine anymore.

Now that im doing the game engine test with the 32k+ ships i need to remove the UI to gain a huge fps increase, which i can understand to a degree, just find it weird the UI takes that much resources..

Also its weird that some of you have the problem with only a few ships..

Try fooling around with the icons and such within the menu/interface and see if removing some of it might help

and report back so the devs can have something useful to work with

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Everyone seems ot blame everyone here..
try some diagnosis..

What driver version of nvidia is cydr running?
Form what he says he is running the latest version, i am not, i am running the version previous..
This _could_ be the issue, i have seen many problems like this solved via drivers.. some work better some dont, geta screeny with the new drivers, get a screeny with the older drivers then we can rule that out.. and go from there..

We need evidence, not chit chat..
But i dont have a issue so i cant provide any evidance, it is up to those who have the problems, if they want it fixed they have to do something about it and not bitch and expect it to be fixed for them.

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Short Answer: YES IT IS YOUR SYSTEM.You cant count ? Have you seen how many threads about bad perfomance here ?Or maybe you cant read: all other games are running great. Even such resource heavy ones as AC and Crysis. Okay, so, you're not a programmer, you don't actually know anything that can cause it, you don't actually know how and why it appears, you don't even know what exactly it is.. and yet, IC is supposed to magically wave their fingers and fix it?Im a programmer, and TyrelHUN is right. If drawing of 2d user interface upon ready 3d scene halves FPS - that means that something is terribly wrong in the engine.And when 7 AI game brings down CPU - that means either someone did not bother with optimization, or game has "dead" features like "large maps".

I can read and count. 4 systems that i own run it perfectly, and 3 of my friends have systems that run it perfectly. that's 7 out of 7 with no issues.

The only difference is, we're smart.

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the_Monk

Join Date 01/2008

+222

The only difference is, we're smart.

...hehe That's my "quote of the day"! You made my day Commander.

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I have a Quadcore Q6600 @ 3.0ghz, 2 gigs of ram, an 8800GT and a WD 250gig HD.

The game runs perfectly, even when there are several hundred units on the screen. All settings are maxed at 1280x1024 w/ 4xAA.

So in short, yes it is your computer and not the game.

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Never a slowdown at any time - level up your computer.

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To everyone that's getting full 35-40 FPS during the entire span of the game, I'd like you to post how many players/AIs you're playing with.

I think that his problems stem mainly from playing against many players. My computer also starts to stutter extremely heavily when I get 1 or 2 hours into a game vs AIs. Currently playing locked teams vs 7 of them, so there are a ton of units on the field.

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Huge multi star map
10players
max textures
all on unfair.

Runs fine, in window 1280*1024 4xAA

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oh please stop it.
I can't read anymore of this "oh my super giga-quad system runs all fine - you're all wrong" stuff...

there are *obvious* some scenarios in sins which can slow down even the best hardware available.
since sins claims to run smooth even on moderate hardware there is definitely something wrong here.

to all posters claiming there is nothing wrong here try this savegame:

http://files.filefront.com/104+advent+vs+adventsave/;10009732;/fileinfo.html

jump to the battle where the 2 fleets clash and try to watch and defend.
good luck

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Huge multi star map10playersmax texturesall on unfair.Runs fine, in window 1280*1024 4xAA

Are they locked against you? Or are they all fighting each other/destroying each other's fleets?

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The only difference is, we're smart.

Very questionable. But ignorant - thats for sure. And no, you cant count. "7 out of 7" - is a kindergarten statistics perception. Because even when its 1 out of 100 - game can not ship. Because thats like robbing about 2000-3000 people.

And enough with this "Im a PC guru, and you're n00bs" sh*t. Try to prove it for change. Tell us, what can be possibly be wrong for me or Caydr, when every game works great exept Sins.

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FFA, have done it on locked FFA so they can't team up.
No issues,
Will try that save game and let you know.

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Isn't there a Nvidia driver coming out that better supports this game?

I can't be sure on this, might've been a dream.

It runs fairly well on mine with around 6 players until everyone gets to the max fleet capacity. My pc sucks so I'm not complaining since it runs well enough to play at all but the most hectic of times and even then it doesn't drop sharply in performance.

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Running the save game now as we speak, using 94% ram and 25% cpu, no issues, will have to repelay and actually play it instead of have it play out while i post.

Shame your other feet is 4jumps away would of beena better fight

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Edit:

Made them retreat after taking out 1/3 of there fleet, if you want the save game back let me know

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Well, I tried that save out and can say there's definitely something going on with it. It stuttered and hesitated all over the place, whether I was zoomed in or out.

As a point of interest, I just completed a large 5 star map with well over 100 planets and vs 9 AI (medium difficulty, FFA). I had absolutely no problems with it. Nor have I had any problems with any other of the Sins games I've played yet. So it came as quite a surprise to see this one stutter like it did. Very odd.

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Just to repeat, I can drop all my settings to low and turn off anti-aliasing, and I still get a better framerate in Crysis with all settings to high and AA off.

My computer has no bottleneck, I've built computers for years and I very specifically chose all my hardware. I have one of the fastest consumer processors in the world besides quad-core ones, and they're out of the running since the game only uses two cores.

At my current 3.15 ghz, I am 50 mhz away from having the fastest CPU Intel makes if I'm not mistaken. I have 2 gigabytes of PC2-6400 memory running slightly below its maximum rated speed, 770 or so instead of 800, there's a good reason but it's not applicable to this discussion. This is not the fastest memory anymore but it's hardly low-end. I never reach fully usage on my RAM. My graphics card is among the top 10 in the world at any price, and I have it overclocked to be almost neck-and-neck comparable to the second-fastest GPU in existence. I have a high-speed RAID array that gives me incredibly fast read and write speed. In short, I have no bottlenecks that can be humanly avoided.

I've given all my system specs, if there's any other info that would help I'll gladly provide it. And please guys calm down, you sound like fanboys. One side says they're having a problem, other side says it's impossible because the game is the very epitome of christlike perfection. First side says you're all poo-poo heads that don't know what a monitor is. Come on, be reasonable with each other.

I'm going to try to gather more statistics, I'll see what the limit is to when I start to get what I term as "rather not-very-good performance". ie, when I drop below 40 fps on a regular basis.

Remember my original post is not accusing the game of being badly written, or even that there's a problem - I'm merely asking if this is normal under my circumstances. I love this game, I don't feel cheated or ripped off even if my performance is actually normal. I just want to know if there's anything I can do to improve the situation. I'll get back to this a bit later.

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I can play the game from start to finish without a single drop of frames per second on my laptop on max settings 4xAA on 1280X768. Granted, with a Geforce 8600GT and 3GB of ram it packs more punch than a standard laptop, but we are still talking about a laptop, here.

My Desktop with E6600 and Geforce 8800GTS on 1366X768, and a mere 2GB of ram can run it rather well, too.

Seriously, you really need to check things out. Perhaps there's a problem behind the scenes with drivers, codecs or what's not. Perhaps you need to increase your page file, or defragment, or...I dont know. PC's are weird beasts. I had games that should have ran smoothly but didn't, and then I had games that were supposed to crawl to a slideshow level, but went quite smoothly.

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Just to repeat, I can drop all my settings to low and turn off anti-aliasing, and I still get a better framerate in Crysis with all settings to high and AA off.My computer has no bottleneck, I've built computers for years and I very specifically chose all my hardware. I have one of the fastest consumer processors in the world besides quad-core ones, and they're out of the running since the game only uses two cores.At my current 3.15 ghz, I am 50 mhz away from having the fastest CPU Intel makes if I'm not mistaken. I have 2 gigabytes of PC2-6400 memory running slightly below its maximum rated speed, 770 or so instead of 800, there's a good reason but it's not applicable to this discussion. This is not the fastest memory anymore but it's hardly low-end. I never reach fully usage on my RAM. My graphics card is among the top 10 in the world at any price, and I have it overclocked to be almost neck-and-neck comparable to the second-fastest GPU in existence. I have a high-speed RAID array that gives me incredibly fast read and write speed. In short, I have no bottlenecks that can be humanly avoided.I've given all my system specs, if there's any other info that would help I'll gladly provide it. And please guys calm down, you sound like fanboys. One side says they're having a problem, other side says it's impossible because the game is the very epitome of christlike perfection. First side says you're all poo-poo heads that don't know what a monitor is. Come on, be reasonable with each other.I'm going to try to gather more statistics, I'll see what the limit is to when I start to get what I term as "rather not-very-good performance". ie, when I drop below 40 fps on a regular basis.Remember my original post is not accusing the game of being badly written, or even that there's a problem - I'm merely asking if this is normal under my circumstances. I love this game, I don't feel cheated or ripped off even if my performance is actually normal. I just want to know if there's anything I can do to improve the situation. I'll get back to this a bit later.

Just to repeat,

I'm running a Quad Q6600 at 3.4ghz at home, all settings maxed out runs fine.

On this computer i'm running a Intel Dual Core (NOT EVEN CORE 2 DUO) 1.6ghz, and i get steady frames in 5v5s with 2x aa and medium settings.

I am pretty sure i have mostly all of ur hardware covered then as being used in my own systems.

Please, what Motherboard do u have, and do you have a soundcard installed? Anything interesting in the PCI-E 1x or PCI slots?

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Please define "steady frames"... I suspect we simply have different standards. Also I'm running on Very High... though as noted it doesn't make much difference even if I set it on low.

Again, I'm not *complaining*, others might be but I'm just asking if this is normal and if there's anything I can do about it. Settle down guys...

My motherboard is an Asus P5B-E, a very well-known and reliable board. My sound card is an Audigy SE... not something to be proud of, but I've only got 2 speakers and it eliminates the slight noise and static my onboard sound has.

Just in case it's the sound card I'll try switching back to onboard sound. I'll update my drivers to the latest Nvidia betas (174.74). It's certainly not my page file, I have it set for 6 gigabytes minimum and maximum - 4 gig for my RAID, then an extra gig on each of the other internal hard drives. I do not have my external hard drives configured to have a paging file. I strongly doubt it's due to a fragmented drive but I won't discount the possibility, I'll run a defrag tonight.

I have no PCI-E cards besides the GPU, and in my PCI slots I've got a USB expansion/joystick port that came with another motherboad (a standard Asus component), a standalone USB expansion card, and the aforementioned Audigy SE. As for my USB devices...

1 Saitek Eclipse keyboard
1 Logitech MX518 mouse
1 500 gigabyte Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive
1 750 gigabyte Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive
1 Canon Pixma MP530 printer
2 generic USB cords I plug into either my PSP or MP3 player
1 USB radio receiver for my Logitech Freedom cordless joystick
1 Wacom Intuos 3 drawing tablet

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Some more information...

I played a 2v2 yesterday, 3 hard AIs. Performance was quite good for most of the game with me getting between 55-60 fps during all normal circumstances. (60fps max due to vsync)

However once a battle started all hell broke loose. Performance bogged down significantly when more than a few dozen ships were involved, moreso than I'd expect from Sins. I tried to capture some screenshots but unfortunately they didn't capture my RivaTuner Statistics Server's onscreen display.

That one special weapon the Advent have sure is a pain in the ass though. I couldn't get accurate results half the time (enemies were Vasari and Advent) because as soon as a battle started I was dropped to 5-15 fps by default once those things were turned on.

I think on average, during a typical battle in this particular game I'd get about 15-30 fps. This was before I'd even reached 1000 supply, and I had 10 capital ships at this time so there weren't lots of smaller ships.

Here's an example. This one isn't really TYPICAL but it involves only a relatively small number of ships. I have just cornered the Purple AI at its homeworld. In a few minutes the Orange AI joins the battle and things get more complicated, but by that time the battle's pretty much over. You guys said a savegame would help you to see the problem right? Here's a copy of it:

savegame

And here's a screencap of my performance statistics for the time period the battle encompasses:

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Caydr,

Our systems are very similar:

Shuttle SD39P2 | Intel Core 2 Duo Conroe [email protected] GHz (320 FSB) | Crucial Ballistix 2x1024 MB PC2-6400 DDR2 (@800, 4-4-4-12, dual channel mode) | NVIDIA eVGA 8800GTS 320 MB | Maxtor 320 GB SATA II (7200 RPM, 16MB cache, AHCI mode) | NEC ND-2510A dual-layer DVD-R drive | Mitsumi FA404M floppy drive/card reader | WinXP Pro SP2

Sins plays absolutely great. I run it with everything maxed out, with 4x AA, at 1280x960 (I have a CRT), in 4v4 games online via ICO with 3 friends, on large galaxies, and don't have any problems (except for the bug Annatar has mentioned, which appears to be a Malice issue).

My first question is this: have you tried turning off all the overclocking? This can cause some weird nonsense in games. For example, I have a problem in Crysis where after a while the textures start to get messed up. No other game exhibits this behavior, and while I have personally not tried to run the game at stock clocks yet, I suspect it's the issue.

I can't guarantee this is the problem, but it should be ruled out. Make sure you back your CPU to stock speeds, your RAM timings, and any voltage boosts that you had to give the hardware to make it run at those speeds.

-HM

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My overclock is stable - been running this way for 10 months or more with no crashes outside what's incidental to certain software - but I'd be willing to try. First can you download my savegame and some sort of FPS monitoring software and see how low it goes with both fleets in view? Better yet output a graph of your fps during the battle.

I know I said previously that my RAM was never maxed out but it seems that Sins does in fact fill the entire 1.6 gb of free RAM my computer has. Is this normal? It seems rather high IMO.

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