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[bing_crosby]

So I just reinstalled the game for the new patch (love it to death, fwiw) and I'm having some awful slowdowns in combat. Large fleet battles, or station fights, just slow to a crawl (10-15 fps, essentially). All while my system seems to barely be breaking a sweat (gpu clock sits around 450 with low usage, cpu usage around 30 with spikes to 70 on a couple cores here and there).I spent the entire day today reading through old threads and trying numerous tips and methods that people, Alex included, have offered up in the past to solve this kind of problem. All to no avail.

I just figured I'd put up a new thread and see if anyone has any new ideas for the latest patch. I don't remember any fps issues like this on old builds, but it's been a good couple years since I've played the game. The only thing that's changed on my system since originally buying Starsector is one or two gpu upgrades. Unfortunately I'm still on AMD, which I understand to be pretty awful for openGL. I just didn't think 10 fps would be within the possibility even with AMD's notoriously crappy drivers...

I've even tried installing the last 0.8 patch just to see, and the same issues were present. Basically, as soon there are more than 4-5 ships on the screen, my fps drops to about 30. Once combat really gets going, I hit the low 20's, and major engagements then slow to a crawl.

I've tried pretty much all of the standard stuff (driver update/reinstall, vsync on/off, triple buffering on/off, windowed/fullscreen, change my power management profile, screwed around with core affinity and cpu priority, mods vs no mods [gained maybe a couple fps?], sound on/off, etc). At this point I'm just kind of hoping that someone around here can just kind of go 'uhhhh dude you're an idiot, just do this'.

[bing_crosby]

So I just reinstalled the game for the new patch (love it to death, fwiw) and I'm having some awful slowdowns in combat. Large fleet battles, or station fights, just slow to a crawl (10-15 fps, essentially). All while my system seems to barely be breaking a sweat (gpu clock sits around 450 with low usage, cpu usage around 30 with spikes to 70 on a couple cores here and there).I spent the entire day today reading through old threads and trying numerous tips and methods that people, Alex included, have offered up in the past to solve this kind of problem. All to no avail.

I just figured I'd put up a new thread and see if anyone has any new ideas for the latest patch. I don't remember any fps issues like this on old builds, but it's been a good couple years since I've played the game. The only thing that's changed on my system since originally buying Starsector is one or two gpu upgrades. Unfortunately I'm still on AMD, which I understand to be pretty awful for openGL. I just didn't think 10 fps would be within the possibility even with AMD's notoriously crappy drivers...

I've even tried installing the last 0.8 patch just to see, and the same issues were present. Basically, as soon there are more than 4-5 ships on the screen, my fps drops to about 30. Once combat really gets going, I hit the low 20's, and major engagements then slow to a crawl. System and hyperspace screens tend to be around 45-60.

I've tried pretty much all of the standard stuff (driver update/reinstall, vsync on/off, triple buffering on/off, windowed/fullscreen, change my power management profile, screwed around with core affinity and cpu priority, mods vs no mods [gained maybe a couple fps?], sound on/off, raised the ram cap, etc). At this point I'm just kind of hoping that someone around here can just kind of go 'uhhhh dude you're an idiot, just do this'.

Thanks in advance for any help. Oh and sorry for the wall of text.

Quick specs - R9 390, 2500k @ 4.4ghz, 16gb ram, Win 10 64

[Alex]

(Merged the topics since they seem about the same.)

Unfortunately, it could just be AMD - the game's performance on AMD cards is really quite bad. Though not, to my knowledge, quite as bad as what you're describing.

One possibility is if you've got multiple graphics cards - a dedicated one and an integrated one on the motherboard, for example - then it might be using the integrated card instead, which could lead to poor performance also. In that case, you'd want to ensure the OS runs the game using the proper graphics card; the steps for that would be specific to AMD/the OS.

But, honestly, I think you'd get better performance than what you're describing out of an integrated Intel card. So if you *do* have one of those, it might be worth a shot also trying to force the game to use that instead.

This is about the only thing that comes to mind; the other stuff it sounds like you've already tried.

... well, there are  couple potential other things, actually:

1) Rebooting
2) Temporarily turning any antivirus off
3) Making sure no other programs are running - in particular stuff for video capture etc could potentially interfere

[bing_crosby]

Hey Alex, thanks so much for the reply. And sorry for the double post, guess I was a little fried after a long day of troubleshooting.

So after another couple hours in different rabbit holes this morning trying to fix this (including dragging an old 660ti out of the attic to see if that would make a difference, but unfortunately the card is dead)....I'm still exactly where I was before. I can load up The Wolf Pack mission, immediately scroll the view up so that the enemy ships are on the screen, and watch my fps tank to around 37. Only gets worse from there. Nothing I've done has made a single difference. I think I'm just depressed at this point lol.

As to the points you mentioned - I don't have integrated graphics on this mobo (and I'm watching my card anemically trying to push frames in MSI Afterburner, and yep I've tried running with Afterburner off after seeing an old comment of yours that it may cause problems), I've rebooted close to a hundred times at this point, and I've tried running with other programs off. No difference whatsoever. I can have a twitch stream running at source quality on my second monitor, using like 20% cpu, and it makes no difference on the game's performance. My system just seems totally indifferent to putting any effort towards this game. It's so god damn weird lol.

Anyways thanks again for taking the time to respond. I really do love this game, so here's to hoping that some hardware changes in the near future will get me where I should be. Or maybe someone will randomly come out of the woodwork with a magic fix for me. A man can dream!

Best of luck on future updates. Can't wait to see where the game goes from here (just hopefully at more than 10 fps lol).

[Alex]

Argh, sorry Thank you for being so understanding!

[bing_crosby]

Soooo I don't know if this matters, but figured I'd throw it out there. I wanted to check performance on another OpenGL game, so I booted up Doom 2016. Made sure it was running on oGL (not Vulkan), maxed out, and played it for ten minutes or so. Got smooth 60fps, no slowdowns. GPU cranked itself right up (actually still had some overhead, core clock ran around 1000mhz out of the 1100mhz overclock that I have set).

I get that they're entirely different games, structurally speaking, but the gfx API is the same. Does this make you think that there's something specifically about my Starsector settings that are causing this problem?

[Alex]

Starsector is using some pretty old parts of the OpenGL API, so support for those on AMD cards could be notably worse than supports for more modern parts of the pipleine, which I'd imagine they'd *have* to get performing pretty well. So, unfortunately, this doesn't seem all that unexpected.

[Tholis]

Alex,

I have encountered similar issues. I've been using a 7970 for years nearly 7 in fact, and never had the kind of FPS issues I've had recently. I have seen nearly identical behavior from my card and cpu as bing_crosby. I was due a graphics card update and finally caved in an bought an Nvidia card. Starsector is that much of my limited gaming time that made the switch, it made a world of difference. I would however like to offer up my 7970 as tribute if you would make use of it for testing. Please let me know.

 

[MesoTroniK]

I don't mean to derail but... It is useful info contained within.

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html
What is said in that blog post is just as true today as it was in 2014, if not even more so. AMD gets worse over time, not better, nor even remaining the same.

[Alex]

I have encountered similar issues. I've been using a 7970 for years nearly 7 in fact, and never had the kind of FPS issues I've had recently. I have seen nearly identical behavior from my card and cpu as bing_crosby. I was due a graphics card update and finally caved in an bought an Nvidia card. Starsector is that much of my limited gaming time that made the switch, it made a world of difference. I would however like to offer up my 7970 as tribute if you would make use of it for testing. Please let me know.

I don't have anything to slot it into at the moment, but I really appreciate you offering! Although, let me see, actually - my hardware situation is ... somewhat fluid at the moment, need to see exactly how it'll shake out in the next couple of weeks.

(Also entirely possible that there's not anything I can do, though there's always the off chance that I might be able to get it to perform on AMD somehow. But an off chance is all it is.)

[Templar_X]

Just to add that I had a similar experience with this update. Sadly after some troubleshooting I couldn't find a work-around.
 Performance started taking some big hits later in the game when there are more carriers around.

Specs: Ryzen 1700, 16GB RAM, AMD RX 480 8GB, updated drivers, no mods.

 Note: For some reason the vram clock doesn't go up when in game (as it does with other games), however forcing it up to normal gaming values seemed to offer little improvement.
Guess the problem is from OpenGL driver overhead or some such shenanigan? =\

[BulbasaurWizard]

Huh, this seems very similar to my issue that I posted in the modded support section. I am however using a NVIDIA 1060 6Gb. Similar FPS issues, similar low GPU usage. I’m actually going to be building a new computer in the next week or so, so maybe something will change.

[Alex]

Hmm - I think these are different issues, since it sounds like Templar_X is (unfortunately) getting about what you'd expect on an AMD card, given Starsector's use of OpenGL. Where BulbasaurWizard's issue is more unexpected and it sounds like there's something actually going wrong.

Just to add that I had a similar experience with this update. Sadly after some troubleshooting I couldn't find a work-around.
 Performance started taking some big hits later in the game when there are more carriers around.

Did you have better performance with a previous update of the game? That'd be unexpected (and I can't think of any changes that would make a drastic difference, plus in general performance on all cards should be better in this release compared to the previous, but given your phrasing, I thought I'd ask.

[Templar_X]

Hi.
 To clarify, I had a smoother experience before but I think that's due to different drivers, windows installation and so on.
 After your comment I actually went and played a few missions on the old version to check if it's smoother but it's hard to tell, so they probably have similar performance.
 I played the same mission on both versions but it's too dynamic to easily compare and the performance dips aren't always consistent (usually fighters on screen firing beams and missiles do the trick). Tried to do some recordings but the capture interferes with the performance too much to be of use. (on other games it usually only causes a minor <5% performance hit)
 So I think it's just the game interacting with openGL / AMD drivers problems, just that now they're worse than they were a year or so ago (?) when I last played.

[Alex]

Thank you for investigating! Not great to hear that AMD drivers seem to be going in the wrong direction, hmm.