sluggish performance on powerful system

From what I undertand, Sins doenst use more than one core except for loading textures or something. I wish they would release a patch so it can use multiple cores

I have an e8400, Vista 64, ATI 4850, and 4 gb of DDR3 and I am getting memory leaks after 4 hours of play.  It may be due to the thousands of mines the AI is producing.  It also happens in Supreme Commander when you have too many units on  a big map.

I have to agree that this game should have multicore support; you can exactly have "epic" scale games on just one core. I usually play with 11 hard AIs with about 250 planets - it slowly starts to lag more about 2-3 hours into the game.

This is not mostly due to the fact that the game is running on one processor core, but that more and more load is put on the memory (as mentioned before); the more resources (ie. the more units/buildings/mines(!) etc.) one has, more memory is required. 32-bits versions of XP and Vista have a limit at 2gb usage. (This is not 100% correct however, google it for more info :)) When the game is closing that limit the game has to purge the memory more frequently to add and remove resources from it as needed, and those operations require more time and power, both of the CPU and of the memory modules. In some cases, when the game specifically requires more than 2gb resources loaded at one time the game might crash due to a memory overflow error (which means that the game is trying to use more memory than it physically can and is allowed to, forcing it to quit).

Problems like these can be hard to solve, code and resource optimizing is often the only way, as it is hard to work around the 2gb limit. (As mentioned, there are several good resources to check for more info regarding this, such as http://www.prophotowiki.com/w/index.php/IncreaseUserVa (method to tweak memory usage in Vista), http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124810.aspx (same thing for XP - note that these two modify memory allocation for Windows as well, and might cause instability), http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=2382&start=0 (the Supreme Commander issue, same deal), https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?aid=333620 (SoaSE, seemingly same thing).

i get the same problem here....

and also i think the AI should slow down on the mines, i mean they love them to hell, go into 1 system and theres a good 60+ mines each planet
It might give us more performance if the AI doesnt build soooo many mines (and in my game, the AI doesnt use them most of the time)

It would be nice if Sins gets a multi-core update

also does sins support 64bit?

It seems to be a problem with mines. I see it in every game once the total mine count in game gets up high. They must count as units or something, so the unit count is skyrocketing, which is bottlenecking the CPU.

Hey all.

One quick correction: In my composition of the original post I said that I played against four AIs on a medium random map.  That was a mistake.  It was myself and three AIs, not four, on a medium random.  Forgive meh plx.

Later

Interesting, thanks for that info. I'll try it out hopefully it makes my sins experience better!

Sins of a Solare Empire is very heavy on memory usage; however, once it does its initial allocation, it does not seem to allocate much more on the fly. My sins stays around 1.3 GB of memory usage on a medium sized map no matter how many ships and structures I have.

Your sluggish performance is most certainly a CPU issue. Apparently, as you get closer to end-game, the AI decision making becomes more complex and thus stresses the CPU more. Clock for clock the AMD processors are not par with intel processors, and thus if you are using an AMD processor with a single-threaded application, you will notice reasonable performance degradation. 

To get the best performance out of Sins you should switch to a high clocked dual-core processor  (I would suggest intel since they overclock extremely well and do better clock-for-clock). Perhaps the E8400-E8600 range of processors. I suggest you overclock this processor. You will see extreme performance benefits with Sins, because it is only utilizing one processor most of the time.

It wouldn't hurt to upgrade your gpu either; however, the processor is certainly the bottleneck right now.

I'm not really sure what kind of processor this game requires now. I'm running a Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz). Before Entrenchment, I could play on any map and have no slowdown.

Now? Once the mines come out, even a medium map like Razors Edge becomes a slideshow. The engine just doesn't seem able to handle 1000 mines per gravity well.

I doubt it's the computer, since it runs stuff like Fallout 3 just fine. It ran normal Sins just fine. Without mines, it runs Entrenchment just fine. But the mines are sending unit counts up to numbers that you just couldn't reach before (even a 2000 supply fleet is fewer units then one grav well's worth of mines when the AI is laying them, and they do it EVERYWHERE).

no i dont think should it even should handle 1000 mines,  a solution is being worked on tough,  great idea so far was makinng mines use defensive slots  (10 mines = 1 slot) etc.

in most of my games Sins lags extremely in late game,  especially if you try to micro your fleets, this is pretty strange becuase i never see Sins of a Solar Empire use more then 50% of RAM (2048) neither does it use the full capacity of  my 2.4 ghz dual-core processor  really am curious why it doesnt

Ok

From what I'm seeing here cpu bottlenecking seems to be an issue with the client.  I conclude this because the system in question far exceeds the recommended system requirements, even in cpu clock speed which is what seems to matter here and because only one cpu ever really sees significant use during play.

If this is the case it is disappointing because the recommended system requirements imply perfromance gains through the use of dual or quad cores.

Happy to offer any further requested information to the developer for use in creating a solution.

Take care all.

Well you're not about to get a "code rewrite" so I don't know what kind of "solution" you're waiting for.......lol

It's a beta.

I was asked to provide feedback on possible issues.

I don't think that fixing the problem requires entire code re-writing.  I think it can be done with relatively few threading optimizations.  For instance, the game has to calculate paths all the time for different ships.  This calculation could just as easily be outsourced to another thread that can be run on another core rather than combining it with everything else.  However, I doubt we'll see this done right when entrenchment is released, however we can always hope for it in a patch.

It's 100% not a memory issue.  and for the record 32 BIT OS's are LIMITED TO 3.5GB of Memory, But during even HUGE RANDOM map my Available memory is 1.3GB.

From checking the Task Manager, I think everything here is true indeed that something is amiss in the processor department.  Only one Core is working, and that core is only ever working for me at 50% so I have no idea what's going on.  Currently I'm playing a Huge Random with 9AI's and it runs well until, like everyone else says, the 4ish hour mark then Boom, lag (Though not game shattering, I find the game still quite playable.) 

I have a very weak Graphics card (8600GT) and I know that's not helping the issue (Should be getting a 9800GTX soon).  I don't understand what everyone is talking about with AI spamming mines.  I certainly find mines in AI planets, but never close to maxed.  I just think the Beta Optimization isn't there yet personally but we'll see.   It would be fantastic to get some dev feedback here on this issue.

My Underwhelming Rig:

AMD Athlon64 X2 2.4GHZ Dual Core

4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 PC6400 (DDR2-800): 32BIT OS so only 3.66GB available.

Graphics: XFX Nvidia GeForce8600GT (256MB  128Bit)  [Upgrading soon:  XFX Nvidia GeForce9800GTX 512MB 256bit]

Plays Sins on B+ Graphics at 25-35fps until the Lag wall hits.

Is the GeForce8600GT really that bad of card?

carbon, the 8600gt is good enough for sins, the lagging is RAM/cpu core BOUND ie faster cpu/ram the better

sins runns almost as fast on my old laptop ie toshiba l20 as it does on my q66oc 2.8ghz w 4gb1066 ati4850 system

harpo

are you playing entrenchment or not?

because it actually is a memory issue and the beta has been vastly improved in terms of memory performance and fixed leaks.

on my [email protected] GHz i can now play medium and large maps and still have no issues after 4-6 hours of playtime and very large fleets and battles.

you're 2.4 GHz X2 has about 60% the performance of my E8400 (overclocked) in terms of raw cpu power per core so there is you're problem.

graphics performance isn't that big of a deal in sins, you just have to turn down the details far enough.

I hope all of you understand that memory optimizations doesn't mean use less ram... It means that they're refining how the data travels between different levels of memory to the cpu cores themselves.  This process is what causes a lot of the bottlenecks that we're seeing in late game.  But even if they reach an optimal solution, it will only run so well because of the amount of data that is flowing in and out of the memory and the cache.  The AMD dual core CPUs have two levels of cache and they are much smaller in comparison to your E8400.  This is why the intel chips tend to perform a bit better...  The level 2 cache on your E8400 is 6 times the size as his AMD CPU.

I remember way back when SimCity 4 was still kinda big. There were a lot of talks on their forums about issues regarding performance lategame on big cities. It kinda reminds me of this problem now that I think about it. Their explanation was that the game was heavily reliant on the front side bus of the processor and how it was all problems with memory transfer speeds. Not so much in the vein of addressing, and this also was a time when having a front side bus of 400 was super quick, but it just kinda reminded me of that one.

This still doesn't mean that you can't gain performance by using multiple cores; it only means that you have to be more clever in how you go about it.

But, more importantly, everything comes down to money. 'More clever' translates to higher development cost, and considering the same money can be spent adding features or bugfixes, IC may not wish to bankroll it yet.

Exact same problem as everyone else, I frequently play with me and a partner vs unfair AI's, and regardless of how many or what size map, around the 10-15th autosave every.single.time. the game slows to a slideshow.

I am usually the host and my spec's are as follows:

Windows XP Pro 64bit

AMD Phenom X4 9850 @ 3.0ghz

4gb Kingstom HyperX DDR2 @ 1066

2x 8800GT 512mb

Creative Audigy SB Live

PS: I see no change between this and the old 1.10 I was playing in relation to performance.

I usually dont get much lag at all till around my 27th-34th auto save. Now, I play with differenting difficultly AI and with a Mod with graphical addons. It only slows down to a crawl during huge fleet engagements.  I blame it on the 200+ SC squads the AI builds per each faction. Plus my own compliment of SC. In one particualar battle I think there were around 554 SC squads in just one gravity well. I couldnt watch the battle. I had to zoom out to get it move past 6FPS.

as we are in the beta forum you should not complain about the bad performance of the original sins as this has been vastly improved with entrenchment.

still extremely huge battles like 3-4 fleets with 300 ships each will take down any high-end pc but that's just the limit of the 1 thread engine-architecture.

since beta 2 i didn't have any game slowing down on me before i finished off the last enemy and depending on map that usually takes 4-6 hours.