I too notice that my 10 player huge universe can consume as much as 1.5GB of physical RAM. Watching the constant change in memory allocation, makes one wonder if the process is hitting the 2GB virtual address apace limit for 32-bit addressing.

Just a thought...

Fireseal, I also have a Q9450 with 4Gb DDR3, but running on a 790i m'board with twin 9800 GTX on Vista 32 (so less available of the 4Gb.)  All drivers are up to date and like you, Crysis, Grid, Supreme Commander, etc run smoothly at max settings - as you'd expect after spending this much on a PC!  Sins (patch 5) is the only game that just doesn't want to play.  

Even with 4 opponents on a medium map, the game slows down massively once the AI players begin building their fleets.  When loading a savegame from the previous evening the effect is immediate, so it's not a gradual thing.  At its worst, I get 5-10 seconds of smooth play, then everything but the mouse cursor and music stops for anything between 30s and 2 minutes.  It's entirely unplayable.  I have also noticed that exiting to the main screen from the 'game stats' screen takes around 5-10 minutes.  There are no error messages, the game doesn't crash, it is simply unplayable.

I've tried dropping resolution, switching every effect off, switching absolutely everything to minimum, stopping all other tasks running on the PC, setting the game affinity to every conceivable combination and permutation of cores, running as administrator, running with and without SLI, etc.  Nothing makes any difference.  Memory, processor load, HDD load, etc are all normal (i.e. not 100%) and vary with each test I do - so they don't seem to be part of the problem.  Had it been a memory problem, I would have expected the pagefile to go ballistic, but this isn't the case.  Processor and graphics temperatures are all fine so its not a heat issue.  I have tried everything I can think of and can only come to the conclusion that it's the game itself.

Any admins out there with a clue why this is happening?  There are 2 of us with very powerful machines that should be able to run your game without any problem, but in both cases the game slows to less than a crawl.  Why?

Yup this is a problem of SINS not being properly multithreaded.  I've noticed on my friends AMD X2 5000BE system @ 3ghz the game only uses one core and pegs it at 100%.

I have an E8400 that is clocked at 4ghz and when I play sims it splits the usage across both cores and it runs about 50 / 50 % which is EXACTLY what I see with applications that are not multithreaded.

Not sure why the intels behave differently, but I'm sure it has something to do with core archeticture or something.

Stardock, when can we users expect SINS to take advantage of these expensive multi core systems some have invested in?

you can run crysis ??

nice...

1 thing tough.. is your game lagging? or is it SLOW? cuse i think it should run fine....

if it lags it might be Ram memory

Like anyone else, we generally read recent posts. If something slips past when it's been recently posted to though (possible if it's on a weekend or holiday), it's not generally going to get further attention unless/until someone digs it up intentionally.

The bottom line though is that, as has been said elsewhere, Sins is primarily single-threaded. Only texture loading is done independently, so for game performance purposes, a faster CPU with fewer cores will do better than one with many but slower cores.

The only known outstanding performance issue I'm aware of is in relation to the Advent shield bubble ability. Otherwise, the best bet for issues is to contact [email protected]. Stardock support only handles account/install issues for the most part.

Kryo, thanks for your response and for letting me know that you do read the posts.  Since you've now read this thread you can see that there is a serious outstanding issue for a number of us with very powerful machines, where the game inexplicably slows, and not just by a small amount - my earlier post described the serious nature: "At its worst, I get 5-10 seconds of smooth play, then everything but the mouse cursor and music stops for anything between 30s and 2 minutes."  It's not just an issue of 'playing better' - it's an issue of the game practically freezing on machines that are much more powerful than the multi-core specs you quote on your website, so this is not a hardware issue.  I'll do what you suggest, though, and email Ironclad games directly, although since this is the official games website, I'm disappointed that you say you don't actually support the game itself.

Staalin, thanks for your response too, and cooling was my initial concern but this isn't a cooling problem. I use a Zalman cooler in a Cosmos case (lots of big fans) in an air-conditioned room.  Even with Crysis running at 40fps on max settings at 1280x1024 the GPUs don't get much above 60C and I've been monitoring the CPU and GPU temps so know that this isn't the cause.  No other game suffers this way, so everything points to a software problem.  If I get any joy out of Ironclad I'll post back here.

I'll try running a Multiverse game on the laptop tonight and see what happens.

Thats really as much to blame on the manufacturers as it is the developers XselenS. Wouldn't it be grand if Intel or AMD found a way to automatically split the workload between cores.

And then comes Quantum Computing - then, we're ALL screwed.

Aside from common issues with known solutions, gathering additional info for the devs, or handling account/install issues, which can be done here on the forum, reports need to go to the guys with the code. Granted, the devs do come here as well, but if you want to be sure they see it, that's the best way.

It's a matter of practicality, not policy; if our guys took support tickets on Sins they'd just be acting as middlemen to IC's people anyway. Dealing with IC directly regarding technical issues makes it faster and easier for everyone.

Kryo did say this in reply 14 above, perhaps you missed it..