The game at a certain point and size begins to lag. I can't believe they can't fix this. The lag is THE SAME on lowest settings as it is on highest. RAM usage is 43% only on lowest setting and 65% CPU usages. The video card is a over clocked Nvidia GTX260. It isn't computer based lag. I don't know what the hell it is. Everything off and lowest setting and all details off the lag is exactly the same. (Entranched expansion version 1.01 this is on but it was the same on all versions). I tried it on my brother's SLI GTX 260, 8 gigs of ram and quad core. Same thing. At about a certain fleet size or game time ...can't tell which one it depends on really. The zoom first becomes sluggish..than out of the nowhere the game just comes to a crawl. You can destroy all your units and lower the settings...the lag stays.
I'm not 100% sure if it will help, but something always worth a shot is, instead of using Nvidia drivers (From their site) assuming you have an Nvidia card, go with the manufacturers drivers (XFX, EVGA ect) SOMETIMES that works, it didn't in my case but hell, anything is worht a shot right now.
Things I've tried (Nothing works)
Fresh Sins Install
Closing all Processes aside from what Windows won't let me close
Lowering graphics and restarting from a save
Updating Drivers from Xfx and Nvidia site (Xfx's worked with less issues)
Changing voltage on Memory (High performance memory asks 2.1 instead of standard 1.9, lowered to check)
Overclocking processor (10% overclock from 2.2GHZ to 2.42GHZ noticed an increase in performance in everything but Sins)
Underclock and change fan settings. (Didn't really even notice a performance hit)
Defrag before and after sins istall.
Turning off Nvidia Overrides on Anisotropic Filtering, AntiAliasing, Vertical Sync ect
Things I want to try but having cause I can't find them
--Dev Suggested: Turn off Multisampling: Where the hell is this option? By the above you can see I know how to tweak Bios and card settings, but I can't find any Multisampling options! Sometimes I'm just plain blind tho.
AA options of the game? They are in the same location where you change your resolution. I think "video" .It won't make a difference though. I am telling you. I put all settings down and even lowered the resolution and nothing. I turned Multisampling off. Lowest setting or highest, doesn't make a difference. I restarded the PC also when I did it. I have an Evga but they just link me to Nvidia drivers anyways.
I wonder if the Hard drive isn't keeping up. Though Defragging would probably make a difference than.
I've got a Q6600, 8 gigs of RAM, and the game is installed on a RAID-0 of two 10k RPM Raptors, and a GTX 260.
I experience a large amount of slowdown when there are a lot of units on the map. It got to the point on a large random map that I just quit the game, since any commands I was issuing were taking up to a minute to register.
When I quit that game (and when I try to exit out of a completed game on any size map) the game usually freezes up and I have to alt-tab out and back in to get it to register anything. And after THAT happens, if I try to start another game, it just crashes.
I was monitoring my system resources and my processor was never above 50% and my RAM was nowhere near jam packed with Sins goodness.
I hope a fix comes quickly!
That's what I thought. The game gets overloaded it seems. It comes to a crawl and the units become really stupid and run into each other and sometimes don't enter phase space with their group. Lots of stupid shit starts to happen when it runs slow. The resources are plenty though for it not to do so but the game just does like it is the programming.
I have a Q6600, 8FB Ram, 3870X2 and Vista Ultimate 64.
There IS a noticable slow down to MP when the host is using alloy at about the 15 minute mark.
The game will hang in MP if a user cannot simulate quickly enough and therefore my machine waits to the sync from the host (or the data from all players if I am the host).
I have seen 5X5 games play fine online. The slow down generally seems to come with too many AIs as the game has to process them rathen then just implement the players instructions. That said, I have not had an issue where it has ever become unbearable...
I have a similar issue from day one... the more long is the game, the more difficult is to quit it... summary screen come fast, these with the stat... but for quit from there, it can take from a few second to more that a half hours...
Usually, i simply "kill" the application....
Possible issue with some people experiencing crazy slowdown, Doesn't apply to everyone but it seems, particularly on multistar maps, sometimes if the Pirates cannot get to their target (They cannot phase jump across stars) they just keep piling and piling units, assuming that their Corsairs alone are like Kodiaks a pirate fleet I came across was probably about 11,000 Points worth of ships (Yes, Over 1,000 ships) I don't know if this is an isolated case or a fluke just with my game. I've been playing this Huge Random against 9 Unfair AI's for maybe a grand total (of straight play, not including obvious breaks and sleeping) 22Hours and at about the 8 hour mark the Pirates had no way to get to the target that was set for over 100,000 credits. So the whole while they've have just been phasing in swarms of ships. I'll try and get ahold of a decent Replay, because if nothing else, it was F-ing hilarious. After clearing some of the pirates (Couldn't kill them all, had to armistice and save my level 10 caps) it felt like the game stopped "Ticking" and was just slow FPS (understandable on my rig)
Again, this probably isn't even 10% of a solution, but if it helps just 1 person it's worth posting, it also might bring about a fix if this wasn't an isolated case.
The pirates are dead in my game already lol. I have never seen the pirates get stuck yet. There is a timer isn't there? for how long they will attempt to reach your base. That bar at the pirate window.
I honestly think the lag comes from the AI having to do to many tasks. No matter your PC resources it just becomes dumb founded by the amount of task it must accomplish at the same time. This was the case in Supreme Commander as well but was later addressed in a patch. It would take a while to move units in supreme commander and the ai would barely play, everything would lag. However it was fixed. Though that game I never played that much and never liked as much as I like sins.
In layman's terms, it's using 100% of one of your cores, which means 50% total CPU on a dual-core and 25% on a quad-core. A game constantly capping at 100% of a core is probably lagging; this means there is never a nanosecond where there's not a few tasks pending, so there's probably a lot of them and they keep queuing up. Lots of tasks pending = lag.
c2d e8400 @ 4ghz stable with 3 gig ddr2800 on a dual 9800gtx+ setup (sli disabled for sins though) and mine runs fairly smooth. I start off at 60 fps but that can drop dramatically to 20 on occasion with large battles but overall it's still quite playable for me.
I have a quad core Intel with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia 8600 GTS.
I have experienced 'expected' slow down when fighting large battles, to maybe 10 fps at some points, depending how far I zoom in, but overall the game runs at a good frame rate even on Huge maps.
Well, my "rig" is a dell laptop with a certrino duo (32bit, 1.8GHz x2), 2 GB ram, 80 (uber!) GB hdd, and a dvd (omg!!) burner. With a... gma 950 (1337 h4x0r2). The lappy id from dell (m1210) about 2 yeays ago. It runs great!? I can push some settings up there and care less, and ultimately, the small 12.1 in screen makes "extreme" gfx useless, anyways. Oh, and it runs Vista 32 Ultimate very fast. Faster the the Phenom x4 (1.9GHz) 4GB ram, nvidia 9500gt desktop I have. But then, the cpu is AMD...
One effect I find hitting my system in particular, Been testing this on small maps, is the Shield effect (When the shield is hit, and it shows the shield itself) On max graphics on any map (Early in game) the game itself is running at 40+FPS the second a shield takes a hit, it drops to 10 for the duration of the shield effect visualization, I'm wonder if there can be any option later to turn that particular effect off or at least dow.
Yea just added another 2 gigs of ram which suprisingly Vista recognized of what seems like most of it. No improvement in the game. Hoever instead of usage of ram being 93% it is at 60% usage of full settings . Still lags the same though.
[BUMP]
Hey devs
Lets not pretend this is an issue that can be forgotten about & swept under the rug.. It's real, it's annoying, it's not going away!
Can we get a response, or at the very least an acknowledgement here or what??
Since very few people here seem to understand what they're talking about, I'll drop some knowledge for you all. I am not a software engineer, but I have done some architecture work.
Firstly, from 2GB of Ram to 1000GB of Ram you won't see a bit of difference. Vista might eat 512 on a bad day if it's doing a lot of stuff. Sins won't eat more than 1.2 GB or so. (I have 8GB
You can upgrade to a Quadro 5800 and drop your resolution and effects to nothing and you won't see a performance improvement.
Most likely, the reason that Sins slows down is that you have too many ships in your galaxy, and your CPU is pegged. Let's pretend that you have 8 players with large fleets. (2000 support = ~200 ships PLUS 100 strike craft) Now multiply that by 8 and you've got 2,400 decisions that need to be made every polling interval. It's not just the enemy AI, it's the programmatic routines that tell a ship how to navigate, avoid obstacles, follow orders, etc. Sins cheats a little bit by estimating ship activities that are taking place off-screen. The "obvious" solution would be to allow these threads to be run in parallel, but that's a lot easier said than done. To split a single process, you can do it either geographically (each star gets it's own thread?) or by player. (each player gets it's own thread) The geo approach is possible, but it can break down quickly, especially when you start processing dozens of process handoffs. You could run each player/AI in it's own thread, but then you need to set up either a serial aggregator (major bottleneck) or a fast thread-to-thread messaging system. When we look a the volume of traffic that would need to be messaged, the overhead explodes. Each event now has to be messaged to every other individual thread to see if it impacts it. That's a TON of memory overhead. There are other techniques, but each of them incurs a stiff penalty and takes a long time and a lot of expertise to implement properly. I'm SHOCKED that sins runs as well as it does on a single thread, so the programmers know their stuff and how to optimize. Retrofitting a product to multithread is a HUGE job, so don't expect it anytime soon.
Yes, multicore processing is the way that things are going, but it's REALLY hard to do it. In addition, your memory bandwidth is divided amongst your cores, If you ran a single core of the same speed, you might actually have marginally better performance. (if you shut down most of your windows services)
To get better performance, try setting processor affinities for all your processes (except Sins) to Proc 0. Set Sins to Proc 1. Turn off your virus scanner (overhead city!) spyware scanners, and every process you don't need. Then launch sins and play normal or small fleet sizes.
Hope this helps and/or educates
Heywood
Heywood,
Belive me, Sins can use more that 1.2 gb... unlickely with the vanilla game but with entrenchment or mod, it is almost sure...
For the rest, your post explain the problem in a good way... now about the 2400 ship for 8 players... you will need to rise these numbers... a multi star huge map have 150 or more planet... for each planet, you can build trade post ( meaning that you will have a lot of trade ship running from one side of the galaxy to the other )... they are little ship... no one seem to take care of them... but i like kill them... a easy way to earn money... TEC and Vasari refineries work by sending out ships to adjacent planets and increasing production at the extractors there.... Again more ship...
The mid or late game lag on big map is more related to the high level of development of planet...
Retrofitting a product to multithread is a HUGE job, so don't expect it anytime soon.
I don't expect it at all... same thing for the 64 bit support... if it is made one day, it will be a full new engine, for a sins II...
Without HUGE job ( change nothing ), with the source code, some optimization for multithread can be made by the compilator... loop are detected by example and will use a other core, same thing for some type of subroutine... but the new code generated will run poorly on machine with only one core... the goal of Stardock was to reach a max of machine, so it is not a option... two executable, one for single core and one for two core ( or more ) is not a option too unless people wish a bunch of sync problem in online game ( the famous predictibility of random number )...
In addition, your memory bandwidth is divided amongst your cores, If you ran a single core of the same speed, you might actually have marginally better performance.
Not always true... the 4 serial channel from the chipset to the memory have a total bandwidth of 32 gb/s ... the two front side bus to the processor have each 10.7 gb/s... if two core are used, the system will choose one core in the processor A and one core in the processor B... so, it will be always the best speed... if two core are running on the same processor, cache help a lot... in Xeon, the L1 and L2 cache are by core, only the huge L3 cache is shared...
Ballocks!!
I've tried this game on 3 different systems now.. Same crap.. Read the entire thread.
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/341237
windows is stripped down, no a/v.. all those tweaks are childs-play.. the games code needs to be optimised.. Bottom line.
Lets see you write something that is MORE optimised then what they have presented!!! BTW - what programming experience do you have? You know. So we can judge if you are qualified to make the statement!!!
I get unbearable amounts of lag during large battles, my fps drops from 10 or 5 during those situations. I'm running a fairly high end PC. My PC handels Crysis maxed out at 30 fps no problem, along with every other PC game that I've ever played, but when it comes to large battles in Sins I lag like hell when others do not.
H2900 1 gig version gpu
6000+ 3.1 ghz duelcore cpu
4 gigs of ddr2 in duel channel
windows vista 32 ultimate operating system.
I'm using 9.2 catalyst drivers but that seems to make no difference as its been doing this since I started playing the game with 8.9s.
I've talked to several people online during the game and during the battles if they are lagging, most reply that they arnt, and most of them have far lower specs then me. I dont know what the hell it could be.
Assembler, pascal, fortran, basic,c, ,function blocks, html, python, java, .net + a lot more.
I've coded software for the Commodore vic20,c64,amiga, I was running a BBS on a 300 baud modem. before the WWW was even prominent. So my experience runs pretty deep.
It's not my responsibility to re-code Sins. I just really like playing it..
Please don't turn this into a flaming thread.. I know the ins & outs outs of computing is all I'm trying to say. I wasn't trying to knock the guys @ Ironclad either.. I've repeatedly said Sins is an excellent game, if not the best in its class. I'm just trying to pull some attention to the issue.. The game needs a patch..
Hey I too have the same problem. I have a GTX 260, Q6600 @3.15, 3 gigs of ram, and home prem 32 bit. When the game first came out, it ran great. Now about an hour into it i get to 15fps and it stays that way no matter if im in battle or placing structures around planets. Ive only been playing one game in a 156 star system with 7 cpus and myself. One cpu was set at unfair and another at hard. I dont know anything about programming and im not trying to bash Ironclad, I just would really love to enjoy this game to its full potential cause its the best rts ive ever played. Also dunno if this helps samething happened with tf2. When the game first came out ran great like sins, now i get 20fps no matter what . I am able to run FA max settings with 6 players all cpus expect me and get 20 fps minimum. I can also run warhead at 30 fps and it drops to 25fps here and there and this is with max settings and aa off. Help please if you can
Oh yea that is a good excuse for not having to fix a problem. Saying that it is to hard to fix. Not to mention that the game advertises all over the place that you can have epic battles with thousands of units smoothly. Which apparantly is rare for anyone.
I've got the issue as well.
I thought a C2D E8500, 4GB Dominator, HD4870 would be able to handle Sins, clearly it's not.
It's impossible to enjoy the game with huge maps, it gets so slow that the time you need to finish the map by the end is so much longer than just a regular sized map.
Maybe simply disabling ALL trade/refinery fleets would have an impact. It's a lot of ships by end game, when you've got full developed planets, also across star-systems.
I am fairly disappointed. If it really does break everyone's game experience, why do we have access to large fleet sizes and huge maps at all? Seems redundant.
That is exactly what I mean. I have the rig, I have the options to play this epic 5 star map games. I just never do. It turns into a crawl.
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