Performance Issues

Sins is single core only, that's why your other apps run ok, they use the other core.

The only thing you can do is get a faster processor

Also in 'Options', you can turn off cargo ship icons, they are a drag on performance.

well just save the game ,exit it and reenter the game to refresh such 'crappy performance'

I've been trying to sort out what the bottle neck in Sins is for months. My system is nuts, Phenom ii x4 c3 at 4.0ghz, 8 gig of 1600 ddr3 pair of 5780's, plays everything way past 60 fps and yet sins will drag down to almost unplayable speeds in a larger developed game. The core on my cpu that runs sins never gets past 60 percent usage the gpu doesn't seem to be bothered by the graphics rendering as it's usage rarely passes 50 percent usage. The memory that sins grabs for itself seems to get maxed out at 1.8 gb or whatever but even tightening up clocks doesn't help. Seems the only solution atm is to drop settings as low as possible, (blanking trade ships etc) and find out how large a scenario your system can handle and playing within those boundaries.

rothdave1, as fuzzy stated sins is single core for the simulation, so for best sins performance you NEED very high MHZ on your CPU, multicore only helps in windows/other games/LOADING of sins, also sins is affected my ram speed. I have found on my computers  with sins that with similar cpu performance that higher ram speed helps to reduce the slowdowns,

summarizing you want ddr3 16000mhz ram on a 4ghz cpu to get the best from sins

harpo

Really your sins only run on single core, I am not sure whether it is mine or yours but my sins runs on both cores

I don't really follow what you mean here. I know sins is a single core game that is apparently limited to two separate chunks of 1 gb of ram for whatever reason on x64 systems( only 1 on x86?), but if you have a 4.0GHz "core", (regardless of how many cores you), have running sins and it's running at 55-60 precent utilization my first thought is "this can't be the problem". I would think if you are barely stressing a core and are running 20-30 fps that theres a problem somewhere. Same with graphics, I had a GTX260-216 and now I've got 5870s. The 260 never got anyhere near 100 percent maxed and the 5870s barely crack 50 percent. Which led me to ram as being a possible bottleneck, but I don't know enough about it to sort that out and I've never seen anything bottleneck on ram with volumous high speed low clock ram. I'd love some thoughts about that. Especially if you have triple channel... and don't go passed 1333ddr3 on amd systems

You're mistaken, during game SINS will only use one core. Pre-loading, etc you may seen more.

I just have a 2GHz dual core Athalon, 4G DDR, recently upgraded my video card to 58xx? I'm running 1600 x 1200. with some graphics textures turned down. I don't blank trade ships.

Anyway, large games get sluggish when I release a lot of scouts to explore. This leads me to believe the bottle neck is AI pathing, Fog-of-war updating, and auto battle resolution.

This could be worse for mulitplayer scout spamming (smurfing).

ATI Radeon 5850 or 5870? If so mang you need to upgrade your other stuffs. That 2 GHz cpu is going to bottleneck the hell outta your GPU. You could get a Black Edition dual core that will clock at 3.6-3.8 stable on air a mobo for it and some DDR2-3 for 250 bucks.

Sorry, but Sins uses 4 threads on my i7 920 quad-core with hyperthreading enabled. Quite nice, actually.

I've found that if I zoom in really close to fighters, and watch them for a while in a large battle and zoom out, then the game will become pretty laggy. I had to save and restart the game lastnight and it was fine again.

Just got the new parts in. AMD 965 Black, 4GB 1600 Ram, Zalman 9900? cooler, GigByte UDP (SATA 3) Mo board. I'll have fun with it this weekend.

I've been playing with RAID for the past 2 weeks. I luv it. Windows and SoSE load at least 3x faster. I think it helps my Sins game, but maybe it's that I only have 2G DDR. RAID 0, 2x WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA, each one is must faster than old WD Caviar 250GB Sata.

Also: Mistated my video card number (hey, I was at work).. It's a 4850.

I'm still using XP. Maybe I should move to W7 OEM after the new sys is up and runing with a new GPU (4870?).

[MOD] The Sins Optimization Project  

The project is still a work in progress (WIP) but it has helped greatly with the lag. I am well past the point where I have quit games before because it was unplayable. Maxed out large fleet on 5 star huge random with 10 players. The button clicks are still a little laggy but easily playable. I can't wait for Major Stress to complete this aw some mod that is easily stackable onto other mods and for all versions of SoaSE.

The problem with lag is due to the hardcode limits in Sins.  The Sins Optimization project solves some of this by shrinking the ram load on the game.  Check it out!

myfist0,

Thanks for the tip on the Sins Optimization project. It really helped my old PC.

My new one is plenty fast enough, but I'm still running Sins on XP with the 2GB limit.

Other are having trouble with it on W7-64. If not, I would try it the 2GB limit extended. Someone on Sins Optimization project thread poseted a link to a utility that changes limit. It's a variable used to inform the OS.

doesn't always work, especially with mods, it has to with the number of ships and planets you have

even then after some time it will slow right back dowwn to where you started with