Frame Rate Issues

metalmike6

Hey all, loving the game thus far, but I've only been playing for about 3 or 4 days. Have a question for you guys... Is anyone else experiencing frame rate issues when there's lots of gun fire happening on the screen? My system is pretty good, ryzen 2600 and a gtx 1660, 16gb of ram and an SSD. I'm also overclocked on both the CPU (4.1ghz) and GPU. The odd thing is that my CPU core utilization is like barely anything. It's like the game is barely touching the CPU on ALL cores. I haven't checked my GPU but I hardly think it'd be taxing that all that much seeing as how I can play mostly anything else on ultra settings 1080p.

Lafiel

metalmike6 Normal. But you should investigate a bit. Also if you are not using a stable version there would be all kinds of other (test related or simply missing stuff) issues.

How to tell if you are CPU-bottlenecked or GPU-bottlenecked: Pause the game. If your FPS increases, you're CPU-bottlenecked. If it doesn't, you're GPU-bottlenecked.

If turning off animated backgrounds improves things, you know that you're GPU-bottlenecked in an empty game.

https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/9501-battling-fps-loss
https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/6366-fps-issuses

Walt

It would help if you posted a saved game file, or at least a screenshot. Also, what game version are you using, and are you using any mods?

metalmike6

I'll try to do that later, not home at the moment. But no mods at all. as for CPU bottleneck, I assure you, it is not bottlenecked. My CPU usage is literally nothing. And GPU? dude it's a GTX 1660. There's no way unless the game is un-optimized for nvidia's architecture or something. Also of note, when I lower the game speed the fps normalize. But the biggest issue here as far as I can tell is that the game is not using my CPU as much as it could be. I'll post some pics later tonight.

CaptainRedstone

metalmike6 Note that a lot of the game is single-threaded. All ryzen chips (except for ryzen 9s) have fantastic multi-core performance for their price, but are lacking when it comes to single-core performance. Given your CPU has 12 threads, a single thread being maxed out would only show up as 9%

metalmike6

So just some minor background here... I am a computer guy. I know all about single and multicore performance, and that most games run on a single core. Ryzen 5's single core is frankly not too shabby when compared to intels offerings. That aside though, when I say that my core utilization is low I mean individually. I'm attaching a pic, in it you'll see a frame rate of 4 in the top left corner and my utilization at less then 100%. 78% to be exact. I used affinity to direct it to 3 of my cores so you can see where the game is running a little easier.

At the end of the day though the point I'm trying to make is why isn't the game using 100% of that core. why stop at 80%? Also again if I drop to half speed the frame rate becomes livable at around 35-45fps. I mean hey if that's just how the game is I'll deal. It's fun and I don't intend to stop playing because I have to run at half speed. Just curious is all.

Equalizer

metalmike6 You may want to quickly try different logical core affinity assignments to make sure that two of the used logical cores aren't on the same physical core. Probably not the issue but should be easy enough to check.

CaptainRedstone

metalmike6 Ryzen's single core isn't bad by any standards, but is again, until Ryzen 9, simply behind intel... Anyway, your screenshot is indeed intriguing. AFAIK the game should be using 100% of that thread. How many archangels can you run before your FPS drops to 15? (Gonna compare to my Ryzen 2400G)

Walt

metalmike6 At the end of the day though the point I'm trying to make is why isn't the game using 100% of that core. why stop at 80%?

Just did some quick testing on my end, and this is what I see:

Setting Cosmoteer's processor affinity to 1 core causes 100% CPU usage on that core.
Setting Cosmoteer's processor affinity to more than 1 core causes the CPU usage of the highest-usage core (presumably the one running the main thread) to drop a bit for every additional core I turn on.

I have two theories for this:

Cosmoteer is NOT completely single-threaded. The game does offload some of the more expensive calculations (the crew sim, weapon targeting, flight calculation) to different threads/cores. But it does so per-ship, offloading an entire ship's calculations to a different core, so the amount of work each core has to do isn't perfectly balanced. Thus, it's possible that the main thread/core is actually spending some time waiting for the other threads/cores to finish their calculations.
Perhaps Windows is doing some sort of automatic core balancing, maybe for heat management? No idea if that's a thing that actually happens in real life, it's just a guess.