Hey guys !
After playing with mods for a bit, I noticed I had significant performance issues during combat, especially during big battles. I've used The Last Hurrah as a baseline for my tests. With mods, I often had around 30-40 FPS during this mission with 0% idle, even without much stuff going on on the screen.
I've tried disabling all the mods and then playing on a clean install, no mods. I gained a few FPS (it sits at ~40-60 for most of the fight) but it's still very low compared to what I am expecting (targeting 144 FPS).
After a bit of digging and CPU/GPU usage monitoring with MSI Afterburner, I found out that my GPU sits at ~20% usage at most and 3 of my CPU cores are often at nearly 100% load, which seems weird to me since Starsector is supposed to mostly use a single core. RAM usage seems to be fine.
FIY, on the campaign map with Nex + 5 faction mods + adjusted sector (x1.1 sector size) and a bunch of other mods, I hover around 100-120 FPS with 0% idle, which is more understandable as a lot of stuff is going on. Without any mods, I get a stable 144 FPS with 30-50% idle.
These are my specs:
- i5-2500k OC'd to 4.3 GHz
- MSI 970 GTX OC'd (4 GB VRAM, 1113 MHz core clock, 3953 MHz memory clock)
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10 64 bits
My settings:
- vmparams RAM set to 8192.
- vsync off
- fps 144
- fullscreen
The steps I've taken to solve the problem:
- Making sure the GPU was handling the game through the Nvidia control panel
- Disabling Vsync, setting the openGL stuff on the 970 GTX in the control panel
- Updating the drivers
- Reinstalling the game
I haven't found any solution so far as most performance issues with decent rigs seem to be linked to AMD GPUs, which isn't my case.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, let me know if I can provide more information, or if I can get more precise tools to monitor how the game uses resources.
Thanks a lot !