Low FPS with high end system

How much RAM do you have?
Are your drivers up to date?
Are you playing against max numbers of hard AIs with highest graphics and zooming in to watch the battles way close?

On a completely unrelated note, just how much did that set-up cost?

its 2x 2Gbyte RAM. Yes I zoom in on the battles. Yes I play with Hard AI. I dont have highest graphics on all of it, but it seems that my FPS suffers the most right ofter I have given an order to my fleet. Yes my drivers are updated.

It costed about 9.500 kr (danish), but assuming you have no clue what this means, it would be about 1590 euro. (we have VAT here, so you have to take about 15% off that I believe if you live in the US)

I'm pretty sure its the CPU thats bottlenecking the FPS, but I dont see how that could be, unless Sins isn't optimized for Quad

I got a similar (not so high end) system with similar problems.

Here is my system:

CPU: Core 2 Duo E6400(OC'd to 3,2 Ghz)
GPU: GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB (OC´d to 650MHz TMU Domain and 1GHz Memory, can´t remember the shader domain clock, must be something around 1,5GHz)
Motherboard: Intel P965
RAM: 2GB DDR-II 800MHz (2x1GB)
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3

I´m an advanced PC user so don´t tell me anything about updating my drivers or something.

In my observations, the map size or the number of the AI opponents don´t change much.
Just have some Iconus Guardian in your or the enemy fleet launching their "bubbles" and the framerate goes below 10. So most of the graphics effects just use to much rendering power.

The only game that kills my PC like this is Crysis but frankly when I´m playing this I see the reasons why it runs so bad at my pc.

And to be honest I don´t think Sins is a well crafted game on the engine side. Technically it is like a 5 year old DX8 game. It has no advanced shader effects, no hdr rendering, no post processing effects, no self shadowing, no ultra high res textures and it still runs like shit on higher end mashines.

Another big nono is that ironclad games has mostly done nothing to use modern multi-core CPU architectures. My humble Dual Core isn´t really used at all and today quad cores are in the mainstream price segment. At the end of the year, Intel will launch it´s Nehalem Micro Architecture which can perform 8 threads simultaneously.

Voodoo: I have that exact same setup, with nearly the same overclocks and have no problems. Hmm.

Are there Advent players involved when the battles slow way down?

Oh and please take my moaning to serously. It is just about the technical side of the game. Gameplaywise it is one of the best RTS I have ever played. (and I played alot)

@Carbon
What are your ingame and driver Settings for Sins?

I´m using the 175.16 official WHQL driver atm and all my driver settings for sins are default. (application controlled Anti Alaising+ Anisotropic Filtering, Texture Quality at "Quality")

Ingame all my settings are @max with 4x MSAA Anti Alaising.

Maybe the great performance slowdowns are just a Problem with nVidia G8X and G9X based graphics Cards and some specific settings?
I really want to know what graphic cards stardock/ironclad are using for testing and if they can reproduce this.

To go deeper into that I will record an ingame movie with fraps which will show this slowdowns. ATM I´m not @ home so I will upload this movie on saturday.

Yes I have the exact same drivers and default settings. Yes Advent players are involved, as thats what I'm playing atm.

from other posts, i can tell you the actual game processing is not multi-core optimized. sins will pre load many images and textures but actual game processing occurs on a single core.

plus, you are running 64bit windows. im pretty sure that the os is scaling down to run the 32 bit app. this means all 4gb of ram is not being addressed by the game, and the processor is working to emulate the 32bit enviroment.

my guess is between the proc bottleneck and the 32 addressing, that is why you are having about the same performance as my e6300 with 2gb of ram and a 7300 nvidia card.

besides that, sounds like your rig is rockin'

Would be good to upload a replay so people can check it out on their systems and see if inferior pcs get better framerates meaning there is some problem.

I'll take a game now, and upload the replay afterwards.

Q6600
8GB
3870X2
Vista Ultimate 64bit

No issues - I am always starting the game (hosting or otherwise) and getting stuff queued up while others are lagging/loading.
The biggest difference I am seeing between your rig and mine is the video card - though I thought the Nvidia driver issues were fixed (haven't really followed it that close since it didn't affect me).

Using the same driver.



Same here.

Very weird.

ive got 2 things to say about this. 1 is that when i got the game, id heard off a couple of reviews that it's supposed to run really well. This gave me high expectations. Actually later i tried to and couldnt find any actual benchmarks for the game. What im saying is that some people think 30 fps is completely smooth, and others including me would count that as being jerky. 2, i found out that if i turn the sound effects down, i dont have this weird lag issue anymore when loads of ships are firing they're weapons, so you should try that, but i think it may be because i installed the latest x fi betas which has caused this (dont install them btw). I havnt seen any huge battles yet, but after solving my sound bottleneck by turning down the effects, i realised it would stay at 60 fps untill i had a battle of about 120 or so ships, then it must of dropped to 30-50 or so, not sure as i didnt have fraps on, just i could feel it wasnt 60 anymore. So what im saying is that 100 or so ships isnt really that much, and i also have a high end system:

vista x64
Core 2 E6600 3.4GHz
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
4GB DDR2
evga 8800GTX (latest drivers) 650, 1580, 1000
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music (with dodgey beta drivers)
OCZ GameXStream 700w Silent PSU
Sunbeam Transformer case

I think the game is great, but i'm not playing it now as i dont like not having sound effects, and also i seem to get constant lag spikes in multiplayer. Hopefully soon a fix will turn up...

Try going into a save that lags bad, then go and drop all the graphics down to the bottom and see if it does anything. It didn't do a thing for me.

My system:
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 (6MB L2 Cache,3.0GHz,1333FSB)
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs
nVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
320GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music (Not Beta Drivers)

I haven't tried anything with the sound yet.

So here are my uploaded fraps videos:

Video 1: (recorded with 30 fps)
Video1

Recorded in the middle of a battle that was around 13-15 fps, It´s clearly how slow and sloppery the game runs. Look for the enormous performance increase when the camera leaves the iconus bubble

Video 2: (recorded with 60 fps)
Video2

Again in the middle of a battle and somewhere around 10-15fps. just look and see how the game jumps back to a steady 60 fps when the iconus bubble disappears.

Video 3: (recorded with 60 fps)
Video3

Starting with a small/medium sized fleet at a smooth 60fps framerate and a short camera flyby. Shortly after that I manually activate the shield bubbles on 5 Iconus and the game framerate went down to a lowest peak of 9fps (!!!). Just look for the performance increase when the camera leaves the bubbles.


(please download the files for a good viewing quality)

On a sidenote: I just used the iconus bubbles because with them the performance drop is very easy to reproduce. But even without them, the performance drops are there. Mainly because of the graphics/particle effects of all the ship abilities.
To enjoy the game I don´t need a steady 60fps but when it goes down to a 10-15fps framerate the whole thing gets unplayable and that just really sucks because the graphics aren´t that great to run so bad at my pc.

also keep note that, while the graphics aren't "superior", i believe the massive amounts of ai that is being run on a _single core_ is what mainly brings fps down.

not to mention that it seems like the game is forcing vsync+double buffering.

having a "high-end" system isn't the end all of high frames. there are quite a number of other things that can affect the number of fps.

so much for being an advanced pc user.

The newest Nvidia drivers are somewhat buggy, try dropping DOWN a driver.

I think many parts of lags exist in this game definitely caused by sound effects. Vasari Cap-carrier`s Repair Cloud skill is a good example. And some unreasonably high poly counts on small ships like fighters/bombers even with no LOD support also could cause performance issue.

In any case, this game lag like hell beyond expectation even with the highest system available and It`s definitely problem of the game not pc.

The videos bear out pretty much exactly what I expected: stacking the Guardian shield bubble graphic. That particular graphic seems to add up fast, but then again having multiples running at once gives zero benefit to your ships, in addition to tanking the framerate. So until the devs can examine and address it, the simple answer is to not overlap shield bubbles.

Though the AI absolutely loves to spam it for me.

If only I knew how to find those... All I can find is ancient drivers from 2005 and older, or the newest on Nvidias website

Well I'm on the same page as you guys, and I'm a mostly advent player.

After about 2 hrs (by this time the large 200 ship throw-downs are taking place) and the framerate drops to very sloppy levels. Even when i'm not carrying the Iconus Guardians in my fleet and i engage a non-advent player, fps drops considerably.
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AMD X2 6400+ Black Edition at 3.2ghz/core - Evga 8800GT - 4gigs Corsair DDR 800 - Vista Ultimate 32 bit

I think that probably one of the main problems is that nobody has a standard to go by when they say "the game runs good" or "the game runs horrible". People with high-end computers (like myself) look at this game and say to themselves, "it uses no post-DX8 graphics features and yet I can run Crysis faster" (no exaggeration, I can make a video), while people with lower-end systems say "wow this game is running pretty good compared to the other stuff I play" (since their computers would explode if they tried to run Crysis).

Another problem is that people are having different numbers of ships and players and saying it runs good or bad. I started a thread similar to this one a while back and everyone was laughing at me because I was getting down to 15-20 fps during battles between TEC fleets. Then I posted a savegame and those same guys admitted they'd never seen so many ships before, had no idea the game even let you build that many, and that they were getting a slideshow.

I hope they add benchmarking to Sins soon.

My own PC specs:
Windows XP Professional SP3
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3ghz w/ Zalman CNPS 9500
OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 2x2gb @ 1ghz 5-5-5-18 running dual channel symmetric (3gb utilized)
BFG Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb @ 612 core, 1446 shader, 1800 mhz RAM
Asus P5B-E motherboard
Onboard sound (for the moment)
4x250gb Western Digital SE16 in a RAID 10 array, 500 gb effective, 100 gb free
Multiple secondary hard drives, approx 2tb storage total currently
Samsung SyncMaster 2232gw 22" widescreen

I'd overclock faster but my motherboard can only deliver 2.1v maximum to the RAM... with a few hours' tuning I could probably get significantly faster speeds from everything above, but for the moment it's already faster than 99% of the computers out there so I'm not going to bother.

If anyone wants to see the savegame that slows down my computer, I think this is it here: WWW Link

Sokar by the way you spent to much money on your comp if your euro to USD convertion is write.
also quade cores are a basd idea write now for two reasons. Barly any thing can utalize them and two there realy expesive compared to duel cores.
Ive never had lag on my rig, but if i ever have a land party the person i play with had a quade and it lags a a few points but it isnt bad by any means


CPU 3.2GHz duel core
RAM 2gb DDR2 800Mhz
Video 8600GT 512MB
case cool master
32bit xp(cus vista is crap)