Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: NorthernWatch on December 09, 2019, 08:20:40 PM
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What should be the computer specs that I need if I wanted to have decent FPS on a 500 Battle Size?
atm on my 500 with 4-5 Ships on my side and the enemy has 10-20 the FPS is at 10-20 on Zoom Out, while 20+ zoomed in depending on the amounting of Weapons Fire.
Im Running FX-8350 with RX 580 8GB GPU and 16GB RAM
and the games installed on my NVME 2.0 500GB Samsung
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Yea it's really weird if you're having that low framerates with those specs. What mods are you running tho? Because AFAIK even with the best possible specs, the game can't really handle huge battles (especially with lots of fighters) with graphical mods.
EDIT: Oh yeah and did you allocate enough RAM for the game? The default is only 1gb and you have 16 lmao.
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Without mods, your config is more than enough for size 500 battles. My computer is 3 years old and runs Starsector on 500 battlesize smoothly.
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There is a difference between 500 size with few battleships and 500 size with Spark Drover spam.
My eight or so year old computer can handle 500 size just fine if my fleet is mostly big warships. With Spark Drover spam, my computer chugs a bit.
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I found that every few hours, I will save, exit the game, and then reload the game. This seems to clear up most of the performance issues for me.
My specs are similar to yours and I usually don't have a problem.
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With 8 mods The game runs alot more smoother than Vanilla for some reason I do not know lol
On Default Vanilla I struggle to even play it smoothly on a Capital Battle where a Tachyon Lance takes 5s to actual reload due to lag
and I dont think Ive edit the ram yet so Ill look that up and see if it fixes it
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It isn't a surprise at all that it is running bad on your rig, the FX-8350 is extremely obsolete and was a low-performance CPU even when it was new and came out in 2012. And your AMD video card... AMD cards runs OpenGL badly, so yea you got a perfect storm of performance issues due to hardware here.
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Okay I cant seem to modify the vmparams? I replaced the jre with the 64bit java but now it cant read the vmparams file?
Any instructions on how to do this?
EDIT: I downloaded someones copy of the vmparams and I defaulted back to the original jre and now the game runs better at the 6GB one but I still dont know how to modify it to the max
FINALLY AFTER 5YRS I can play it a bit better than usual now 30+
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6 GBs of RAM allocation should be plenty for all but the biggest mod lists. But what Meso says is true: This is a perfect storm of a weak CPU, (and starsector is CPU bound), and an old AMD video card. IIRC the RX series has had tons of issues with starsector
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I can confirm that the RX 580 is extremely poor at Starsector considering its nominal power. A few years ago I upgraded my rig to it and it was no benefit despite being about 6 years newer than the card it was replacing. For contrast, I started playing SS on a mobo integrated GPU and it ran just fine (must have had decent openGL support).
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On Default Vanilla I struggle to even play it smoothly on a Capital Battle where a Tachyon Lance takes 5s to actual reload due to lag
That's amazing, your lag increases the rate of fire of the Tachyon lance.
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The FX-8350 is a very bad CPU for starsector additionally. It is worse than my current machine which i would never dare attempt 500 battle size on.
Specifically the 8350 is designed to really use all its cores together well. The problem is that many games and especially Starsector tend to rely on a single core. This is because the majority of the processing cannot easily (or at all) be temporally separated. Before calculating and asigning damage from attack 2 i must know whether or not attack 1 hit and did damage and how much. Everything must be done in sequence and so an extra core cannot add much value. Desiging games to take advantage of multiple cores is exceedingly difficult and Starsector does not really try.
For soecific benchmark info:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/AMD-FX-8350/Rating/1489
As another example how this works in the current gen. The i5-9600k is about 5% slower in benchmarks(indistinguishable when overclocked) than the i9-9900k until you get to “full core speed” where the i9 is ~40% faster. But if you look at in game benchmarks the vast majority of games show basically no difference. Its only when doing the server(and not personal/gaming) oriented tests that the 9900 gets to the point where its advantages matter. But the 9900 is twice the price.
Your card was designed in the time when everyone thought that multi-core was going to revolutionize gaming. And it skimped on the single core power making it decidedly weak for non-workstation tasks.
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Ive been trying, "Trying" to save up to upgrade my computer to the latest series of AMD, Which would be for the CPU R9-3900x 12 core and the GPU Radeon VII
Would this make even a few FPS difference?
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Ive been trying, "Trying" to save up to upgrade my computer to the latest series of AMD, Which would be for the CPU R9-3900x 12 core and the GPU Radeon VII
Would this make even a few FPS difference?
Yes, the 3900x is much faster than the FX-8350, most importantly for SS is its far superior single threaded performance.
Can't speak to the Radeon VII; a strange choice, as it offers poor performance per dollar, performance per watt, and dodgy drivers.
I'd go for an Nvidia card; 1080ti, or a 2070 super.
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I will state this again, AMD video cards can't into OpenGL.
http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html
This is just as true today as it was in 2014, if not even more so...
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Ive been trying, "Trying" to save up to upgrade my computer to the latest series of AMD, Which would be for the CPU R9-3900x 12 core and the GPU Radeon VII
Would this make even a few FPS difference?
It would make a lot. Buuut it will make zero difference compared to an i5-9600k. Which is only 200 dollars
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-9600K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-3900X/4031vs4044
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this topic interests me.
so i adjusted the vmparams file to accomodate my long modlist:https://www.dropbox.com/s/r45pnbsshvkt8p9/starsector_mods.png?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/r45pnbsshvkt8p9/starsector_mods.png?dl=0)
about 4-5GB now allocated. (before on default settings it failed to save with all these mods)
but the game always gets slow after a few hours of playing. i had the same issue with kenshi. after 4-5 hours FPS dropped and i had to restart.
also like kenshi this is singlethreaded(?) so upgrading my i5-8600k won't do me any good at all will it?
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this topic interests me.
so i adjusted the vmparams file to accomodate my long modlist:https://www.dropbox.com/s/r45pnbsshvkt8p9/starsector_mods.png?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/r45pnbsshvkt8p9/starsector_mods.png?dl=0)
about 4-5GB now allocated. (before on default settings it failed to save with all these mods)
but the game always gets slow after a few hours of playing. i had the same issue with kenshi. after 4-5 hours FPS dropped and i had to restart.
also like kenshi this is singlethreaded(?) so upgrading my i5-8600k won't do me any good at all will it?
If the game is slowing down over time, either the mod(s) are introducing a memory leak, you've got junk in the background that's doing stuff, or you've got an overheating problem.
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i run AIDA64 in the background and my CPU/GPU doesn't go over 75° C when i run the game and i hardly have anything running in the background.
as for the memory i sometimes check in the console and its always green 1.5-2.5GB out of 5 i think.
not all of my mods are updated though. might make a backup update and start a new run to see if that fixes it.
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this topic interests me.
so i adjusted the vmparams file to accomodate my long modlist:https://www.dropbox.com/s/r45pnbsshvkt8p9/starsector_mods.png?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/r45pnbsshvkt8p9/starsector_mods.png?dl=0)
about 4-5GB now allocated. (before on default settings it failed to save with all these mods)
but the game always gets slow after a few hours of playing. i had the same issue with kenshi. after 4-5 hours FPS dropped and i had to restart.
also like kenshi this is singlethreaded(?) so upgrading my i5-8600k won't do me any good at all will it?
If the game is slowing down over time, either the mod(s) are introducing a memory leak, you've got junk in the background that's doing stuff, or you've got an overheating problem.
Or memory still isnt sufficient and after a few hours enough has been loaded into memory such that swapping is necessary. At which point youre subject to your hard drive speed limitations rather than your memory speed limitations.
This could also be a video card memory issue as starsector has lots of sprites and these are relatively memory intensive. As you load in more sprites your video card could run out of memory and need to start swapping.
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This could also be a video card memory issue as starsector has lots of sprites and these are relatively memory intensive. As you load in more sprites your video card could run out of memory and need to start swapping.
All SS graphics assets are front-loaded on game startup *except* for system backgrounds. Only one of those are ever loaded at once.
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so it might be that with my modlist a GTX 970 with 4GB VRAM isn't enough? i will play a few hours and check the VRAM load in taskman then..
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https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
is this list legit?
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I can confirm that the RX 580 is extremely poor at Starsector considering its nominal power. A few years ago I upgraded my rig to it and it was no benefit despite being about 6 years newer than the card it was replacing. For contrast, I started playing SS on a mobo integrated GPU and it ran just fine (must have had decent openGL support).
can you please be a bit more precise why the GPU even matters i mean i have FPS problems with spark using an rx 5700 xt and i have my doubt the card is the problem if it runs at 60-200 mhz with no real GPU load.
are you hinting the openGL AMD driver is so bad that it needs a magnitudes more CPU cycle to do the same work as intel or nvidia and that's why it is slowing down?
i'm not here to defend the AMD driver which is at best horrendous i couldn't even use the card for 4 month thanks constant driver crashes but what is this card even doing in this game?
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Yes AMD video card drivers are *that* bad and they can't into OpenGL at all for the third time...
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Huh, well I actually decided to test and it turns out that I was wrong: The RX 580 is not even close to being a bottleneck, so it makes more sense why I didn't see any improvement with it. I'm totally CPU bound. Running some of the larger missions as tests, I'm clocking 100% CPU on one core, with GPU flickering between 0 and 30% - hw monitor can't seem to make up its mind, which is odd, but its not building up enough heat to spin up the fans. (Could this be that the openGL is so bad that it can't even run hot?) In either case, CPU is pegged close to 100% on one core so.
So, despite AMD OpenGL drivers that indeed are terrible, I can say that for my system the GPU is about 3x more powerful than it needs to be.
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I can confirm that the RX 580 is extremely poor at Starsector considering its nominal power. A few years ago I upgraded my rig to it and it was no benefit despite being about 6 years newer than the card it was replacing. For contrast, I started playing SS on a mobo integrated GPU and it ran just fine (must have had decent openGL support).
Strange I play just fine on my RX 480 8gb card. It's 3 years old now, but I am about to upgrade to the RX 5700 XT in 2 month's(income tax). Is that a bad idea for this game? It shows it's 70+% faster than my 480 on benchmarks. Granted I run this 480 with a I5-7600k. I plan to get a Ryzen 5 or 7 as well. I keep seeing "AMD cant do openGL," but my AMD card seems to run every game I throw at it just fine including Starsector. It has only recently started to only be able to do "high" to "medium" settings on most newer games. I also have had zero issues with my drivers over the last few years(switched from Nvidia). The 2070 super is $100 more for only a very small fps gain in benchmarks.
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Well now I'm a bit confused myself, tbh. On the one hand, I know for sure that AMD OpenGL drivers are bad. On the other hand, even with the graphics mods enabled I don't seem to be bottlenecking at the GPU, it seems to be pCPU. (I thought Alex had said things are usually GPU bound, but I can't find the quote so uh maybe I imagined it.)
Stock Ryzen 1600's aren't blazing fast by any means on single core, but I'm also able to play pretty large battles comfortably so * shrug *. So honestly, while Nvidia OpenGL is miles ahead, I don't think it really matters for this game. Now for other OpenGL titles it might.
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Well now I'm a bit confused myself, tbh. On the one hand, I know for sure that AMD OpenGL drivers are bad. On the other hand, even with the graphics mods enabled I don't seem to be bottlenecking at the GPU, it seems to be pCPU. (I thought Alex had said things are usually GPU bound, but I can't find the quote so uh maybe I imagined it.)
Stock Ryzen 1600's aren't blazing fast by any means on single core, but I'm also able to play pretty large battles comfortably so * shrug *. So honestly, while Nvidia OpenGL is miles ahead, I don't think it really matters for this game. Now for other OpenGL titles it might.
Yea something to consider anyways, but I have plenty of time to think about it. Testing this game it runs at 60-59fps on 500 battle size. I can run games like Doom just fine on Ultra though, but I think I used Vulkan. I play old Halflife games which I know are opengl fine. Honestly I can't think of many games any more that use openGL only. I would think I would be fine upgrading to the 5700XT since this runs on the 480. Honestly all games that used opengl have switched over to Vulkan, and i'd love it if Starsector added that support as well :D. I know it wont at this point, but it would future-proof this game.
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Also is it just me or Mods seem to make the game smoother than the Vanilla version?
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Also is it just me or Mods seem to make the game smoother than the Vanilla version?
Huh, with the exception of a couple mods designed to improve performance, this would be pretty strange. Mods should be increasing the required memory and GPU memory, and several add in combat scripts of varying efficiencies that can tax the CPU.
The graphics utility mods are all well written and pretty though - maybe the enhanced lighting effects make things appear 'smoother'? There are a bunch of glow effects that are quite nice that might give that impression.
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Strange I play just fine on my RX 480 8gb card. It's 3 years old now, but I am about to upgrade to the RX 5700 XT in 2 month's(income tax). Is that a bad idea for this game? It shows it's 70+% faster than my 480 on benchmarks. Granted I run this 480 with a I5-7600k. I plan to get a Ryzen 5 or 7 as well. I keep seeing "AMD cant do openGL," but my AMD card seems to run every game I throw at it just fine including Starsector. It has only recently started to only be able to do "high" to "medium" settings on most newer games. I also have had zero issues with my drivers over the last few years(switched from Nvidia). The 2070 super is $100 more for only a very small fps gain in benchmarks.
Well now I'm a bit confused myself, tbh. On the one hand, I know for sure that AMD OpenGL drivers are bad. On the other hand, even with the graphics mods enabled I don't seem to be bottlenecking at the GPU, it seems to be pCPU. (I thought Alex had said things are usually GPU bound, but I can't find the quote so uh maybe I imagined it.)
Stock Ryzen 1600's aren't blazing fast by any means on single core, but I'm also able to play pretty large battles comfortably so * shrug *. So honestly, while Nvidia OpenGL is miles ahead, I don't think it really matters for this game. Now for other OpenGL titles it might.
Just to chime in on this, it's entirely possible that *some* combinations of AMD's OpenGL drivers + cards work fine for Starsector, as appears to be the case for the 480 you have. On other AMD cards/driver versions, you'd get performance that's similar to a low-end integrated card, maybe a bit worse. This doesn't seem to have any correlation with the nominal power of the card. So upgrading to the RX 5700 might indeed tank your framerate. Or it might not. Unfortunately, I don't know there's any way to tell aside from trying it.
As far as what the game is "bound" by, it's really about 50/50 cpu/gpu, so it depends on which one is weaker (or, in the case of some AMD driver + card combinations, just happens to struggle with what the game is doing).
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so i may have issues with my 5700 XT because it is literally idling.
with idle i mean ~5% GPU load at ~160 mhz so not even close to 1 % load.
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Are you also getting poor performance, with the CPU also not having any cores near 100% in combat?
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whats interesting for me is i get many hours of 60fps in the "overmap" but if i have battles (and especially long battles like dickerson) my fps afterward goes in the toilet. like i had 10fps in a empty system. maybe some garbage collection issues after battle. and also sometimes i click too fast in the dialogue windows and the game slows to a crawl. just my 2 cents on performance.
apart from that i love the game!
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Are you also getting poor performance, with the CPU also not having any cores near 100% in combat?
i don't really get 100 % at single core but zen 2 are not easy to read...
i don't even understand what a performance GPU should be doing in this game.
this is not a judgement of the quality of the game.
darkest dungeon looks amazing great too but you clearly don't need a powerful GPU for this.
an intel iGPU can run this game fine and it is magnitudes slower then even an older RX 580.
i still have a couple of nvidia card laying around here i could test too. why should i my 5700 is taking a nap.
i can't recommend the NAVI series anyway. keep your finger of it if you like having a working PC. this will change with time but they are not there yet.
the current driver reports hardware decoding as hardware encoding...
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I benchmarked this before.
You can have low CPU & GPU use and still get bad FPS in this game. This is one of the cases of AMD OpenGL having some weird overhead or stalling behavior with some cards, like R9 series for example.
I had a '08 videocard, a NVidia GTX 275, which ran the game infinitely better than the card I have now, a R9 270X which is supposed to be many times more powerful. Go figure. You can run SS fine on an '08 videocard, it just needs to be the right one.
Zen 2 should not max out in SS.
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My FPS problem is now solved since I have given the game 16+GB of RAM
I can now do Capital warfare with 50+ ships on my screen at 500 Battle Size with 30+ FPS
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I have given the game 16+GB of RAM
''How much RAM do you want for this game?'' - ''YES''
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i have 16GB in total. what happens if i assign all of it to starsector? because i currently have it capped at 6 and i've seen it go as high as ~5GB. i don't want to run out of memory as that would introduce a different kind of lag.
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i have 16GB in total. what happens if i assign all of it to starsector? because i currently have it capped at 6 and i've seen it go as high as ~5GB. i don't want to run out of memory as that would introduce a different kind of lag.
Your computer will dynamically assign swap memory on your primary hard drive. You may run out and page fault* but probably not. If there is a total memory error its more likely to due to inability to allocate (and the program will fail to start)
*this will BSOD you
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Just set it to 80% of your Max RAM amounts but this will prevent you from running any other app on the background while playing your game though
So keep an eye on your Task Manager and reserve at least 3-7GB for the System, Windows 10 Uses 5GB on Idle thats with my Utorrent running on background and nothing else
My NVME SSD can handle the rest if it ever goes over hahaha XD