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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Battle size and performance  (Read 1377 times)

Kh0rnet

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Battle size and performance
« on: March 12, 2020, 04:50:10 AM »

I am running a couple mods (including GraphicsLib) and I had no significant performance issues overall.
However, I recently decided that I want to bring my glorious space fleet battles to the next level and so I increased the maximum battle size from 500 to 800. This didn't choke the game outright during full-sized battles but I have noticed FPS issues - the game's engine visibly, though not significantly, "slows down" during battles, explicitly so when I launch a lot of missiles.

Now, I understand I may have pushed it too hard and the game's default battle size is locked to 500 for a reason. I do, however, have a relatively strong PC and GPU, which is why I am trying to figure out if there is a way to squeeze out superior performance and allow me to use the large battle size without compromising FPS.

I have tried the following to no noticeable effects:
-turning off V-Sync and/or G-sync via NVidia's control panel (V-sync for the program, G-sync globally)
-tweaking GraphicsLib settings (most notably turning off post processing and bloom)
-disabling GraphicsLib functionality altogether through "enableShaders":false in its settings

Since none of the above solutions have done anything to improve performance during large scale combat (only decreasing battle size works) I am wondering if the performance issue is related to graphics instead of something else (like processing all the entities on the map during combat - I have mentioned spawning missiles makes the performance drop noticeable).
I have also allocated extra RAM to the game via settings already (to 4056).

Here are my specs:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X Six-Core Processor
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
RAM: 16 GB
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Nick XR

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Re: Battle size and performance
« Reply #1 on: March 12, 2020, 11:07:33 AM »

Sounds like you've answered your own question.  If you have lots of ships, you'll then have lots of fighters and missiles (AKA "things")! Some calculations in game increase in complexity/time based on the number of "things" (eg: Every ship has to check something against all other ships) and we have to do these calculations for each thing.

StarSector is mostly single threaded so you need to do things to ensure you have maximum single threaded perf. If you have Simultaneous Multi Threading active, you might try disabling it.