"I cannot play this game!" ‼️ X4 Performance Explained
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Very good explanation.
It is very surprising that so many people that are playing games on a daily basis don't actually knows how X4 works.
Like an MMO Server is a very good way of explaining. Only that your PC is acting as the "Server".
Well done. And thanks for the video.
o7 from 🇸🇪.
@@DanielFrost79 That's typical of gamers, even developers like EgoSoft. I'm not one of those complainers, but as i plan to buy my next gaming computer, i'm keeping one of egosoft's terrible practices (to be fair, most devs do it) in mind: i need to focus on single-thread performance. If egosoft added 2 features (i understand they're not small), it would infinitely improve the performance of X4. Let's face it, the "map FPS" is the biggest problem in the game.
First, OOS stuff needs to be multi-threaded. To make it easier, just make every sector it's own thread, i'm sure under the hood they already have a setup ready for that but don't realize it (you gotta keep sector data separate to calculate collision properly). The challenge comes in when you have cross sector messaging, which could be solved by using buffers or something.
Secondly, multiplayer. It sounds like it would be a problem with added complexity, but it would allow people to offload the calculations to another computer. I'm not talking MMO levels of multiplayer, either (tried posting this theory before and people couldn't tell the difference and even described my idea saying they'd like that better than my idea). Even if you are the sole server user, if you can offload all the calculations to another computer. In my house, in another room, i have a very noisy machine that supports 24 threads at once. If I could have that baby running my OOS stuff, or all the game entirely, i don't think i'd have any FPS issues what so ever: my computer could focus on getting the results of those calculations and putting it on my screen, while that beast does all the hard work. I'm sure someone could figure out how to offload those calculations to a second GPU as well.
The idea of offloading calculations to something else is why we have graphics cards in the first place. The idea works, and it's time for egosoft to accept it.
rtx 4090 and 12900k cpu 32GB ram and the game hardly uses them but lags to hell even on lowest gfx settings. and its on an m.2 drive. looking at my HQ brings fps to a crawl.
I already made a comment on this. It is game engine limitation. Game data processing primarily uses at most two cores (no parallel or simul processing for other cores) that is further processed by the other cores and GPU hence the lag. You will notice that you can experience low gpu usage, low cpu usage and low fps. Unfortunately, the OP was not able to explain how the data is processed. Once big data is processed, only two cores process this data and then redistribute the work further to the other cores and GPU. Once the two cores are choked with data, the other cores and GPU would just make do whatever data the two cores throw at them. Again - this is an old game and no amount of tweaks could resolve the issue of low performance even if one uses a top tier system. Unfortunately graphics settings or a lower res does not help that much. The solution is not to choke data processing by having lesser number of ships/stations/satellites etc.
Dude, when the game is only using 1 CPU and 31 are idle... Its the games issue honestly.
As the game currently stands, it should be using at least 4 CPUs, not 1. I constantly have the task manager open while I'm running the game, and I see 4 threads at or near 100%, while the rest of my CPU is near idle.
This is normal for AAA games--most PC games of today use between 4-8 threads, leaving the rest of the CPU idle. This is why having a 20+ thread core doesn't really help all that much with game performance; you really want to be focused on the single-thread performance rating of the CPU.
that's how almost every single game works, the overhead of multiple threads and switching between them is pretty bad for calculations
X4 uses 4 threads imho. Which is not surprising since it was started to be build when nobody had more than 4 cores at home and it looked like more would never happen. You know, the pre-Ryzen era when Intel said they make good profit with immensily expensive 4 core CPUs, no reason to invest in making more cores.
@@ivanrivera777 not necessarily - depends on how you'd schedule and distribute each task. An Example would be DOTS (or ECS in general), which builds a graph to execute naturally, which is great for parallel execution. SIMD helps even more if you can batch similar tasks together and execute them simultaneously. To take things to the extreme, we have Dyson Sphere Program as a prime example of leveraging GPU to calculate massive amount of similar tasks without using much of CPU
Sounds like your CPU is broken :p
You are forgetting one thing maybe.. This game engine is a custom one dating back from the earlier X games wtih some upgrades.... It also uses some custom scripting elements that frankly is completely broken if you look at the amount of bugs in the game. You mentioned FSR is in the game.. As I remember it is FSR1 which is so utterly ugly and useless it might as well not be. And TAA isn't close to DLSS in performance and quality...
Why do games built with engines like unity/unreal/godot able to handle stuff a lot better? Because they take advantage of current technology and hardware and are actually upgraded. They take advantage ot multi core and GPU processing, even for tasks that would be done only by the CPU in the old days (X4). That is a huge difference with this ancient engine. You can upgrade a vm beetle all you want but it will never be ford mustang. Game engines like mentioned before are created and updated by professionals. I don't think Egosoft has that kind of quality onboard (not even mentioning that half their staff is volunteer modders from what I heard in one fhte CEO interviews).
I can understand your stance on this as you are obviously some sort of advacate for Egosoft. In all honesty not really objective.
But excuses won't solve things. If you are charging full price for a game and basically deny that the game has serious issues, you are not worthy of my time anymore. And I do have 600 hours into it where I would asume 300 hours is afking because it literleraly takes a week IRL to build a bigger structure.
I find if you pause the game when your either on the map or building a station, that can help a lot with you fps 😊
You shouldn't have to do that.
For performance on the Map it's very important to use the filters, displaying information that is not necessary at the moment (eg orders) messes up performance and clarity.
I think you completely missunderstood what TAA means. TAA does nothing "only temporarily". The temporal means that it uses multiple frames for the anti aliasing and thus delivering a temporally stable edge smoothing. At the cost of blurring the image during movement, which is common to most fast anti aliasing solutions in differenct degrees.
Interface lag in the map is my only performance complaint … right click a station to trade with and it can take a bit to happen. Pausing helps a LOT, and it hasn’t stopped me from logging over 1200 hours, and in the last year the graphics have improved so much that I went from medium preset to ultra on the same aging PC
that's impressive
I agree with the UI lag being pretty much the only annoying part. Although at least to me that only happens late game when I have hundreds of ships and satelites floating about.
I use a keybind to pause tthe game, and tend to pause it in late game when in map mode. ANother thing I do is turn off show orders and show allied orders in the filter option, that gave me a 30+ fps boost (from 20 fps to 50 fps) in mid to early late game. eventually though once you have hundreds and hundreds of assets on the screen it can get laggy even with that, and the pause is my best friend.
There are definitely compromises that could be done to decouple the interface fps from the simulation tick. People are probably fine with their ships position updated once a second (or even less), especially if it means the interface would run smoothly.
@@meneldal Honestly they need to decouple sectors, too. We don't live in a single-core world anymore, and it's time egosoft takes that plunge.
little correction here.. the game HAS TO calculate the position of any ship at any given time even outside of map, just a simple timer won't do. Those who delved into mods and map structure will most likely agree that the game actually does ship positioning with an extremely simplified model of the universe, which literally just puts the ship to certain coordinates within the entire universe (NOT WITHIN A SECTOR) all this while the "Map universe" is flattened to 2D so the calculations are basically made on a plane. Then maybe (I'm going off of gut here) adds a 3rd dimension to tell how far from the ecliptic plane the ship is located. In the end you only need 3 numbers to precisely position the ship ANYWHERE in the universe and only really start rendering the ship stuff when you, the player get within 70kms of it (In my experience the particles, weapon lasers and the like get rendered before you actually see the ship itself at 40kms). Let's be honest here, calculating 3 numbers isn't really a problem even for 10k ships in the entire universe, say, 5 times per second.
that said, if you take the time to investigate the save files, you'll notice that there are actually also velocities being saved, so it is not unreasonable to assume that the game also calculates velocities when determining where the ships (all of them) will be on the next tick. Again, velocity is a vector, so 3 numbers, not that heavy of a calculation, even for thousands of ships.
Another consideration (judging again by what one can read from save files) is that landed/docked ships do not need to have their position calculated at all. They just need to say they are docked at "that" ship, which will have its position calculated. Whenever the docked ship undocks, it gets its position copied from the larger vessel it undocked from and starts being calculated on its own. This appears to be the reason why, when you launch 21 ships from Raptor while sitting inside it, they will get all confused and launch in all sorts of weird angles, but when you launch then from OOS, they will launch pretty much instantly without any issue whatsoever. The fact that there are no collisions being calculated (and therefore also not trying to be avoided) while OOS also helps.
This answers a lot of my questions about this game and 3d gaming in general. It does seem like a lot of vector math, but I'm imagining someone could contain it all in a single particle effect. I'm now seeing the whole thing as a particle effect where the particles send signals from time to time. Maybe that's what all games are. Maybe that's what life is.
Help a smooth brain out. Are sectors given discrete blocks of coordinates, with objects more distant from the centre having a longer string of decimals?
@@mainomai If you mean internal sector coordinates then yes. And if you mean objects more distant from the center of the sector have a longer string of decimals then also yes. It works like this (I have to acknowledge that I have been wrong in my previous statement): Every sector has its own XY coordinates locating it within the 2D plane of X4 "space", in addition, every sector has its own internal XYZ coordinate system, which represent the 3D universe of that specific sector. In technical terms, each sector is a separate instance of game world that gets loaded when you enter it. Within this 3D space, stations, asteroids and ships are located with their own specific SECTOR coordinates
bro it doesnt work to tell gamers, hey the games running a lot so just accept it...i have a high end rig and performance sucks, cpu gets almost 80 degrees and gpu is non existent....EGOsoft has to get modern with multithread support/Vulkan and DLSS...*just my thoughts, great vid though man
You do understand that DLSS does absolutely nothing for the game, do you?
Don't worry, the modding community will fix it eventually, just like they did for x3..
For me, I only need decent FPS when in first person and flying or fighting in my ship. I don't even care (nor even notice) when I'm sat in my HQ Office playing Star-Manager for my empire. I know my PC is now showing me all the details of all the systems and all the ships and all the stations and calculating everything at every step... why would I also expect (or even NEED) 60FPS at that point? I'm looking at little ants crawling around interacting with each other half a universe away.
Good explanation. As a software engineer I get that simulating this much in real time consistently is really not an easy task. It will be demanding no matter how far you go with optimization. Older X titles were a lot more simplistic in this regard. Its a bit like Crysis, where you can cry about "bad optimization", but in reallity it was just using more performance demanding effects by design (and they also had to do tons of optimization to make the it work on hardwares of that era).
there is also the current fad of people building pc's based on youtube videos that leave out essentials like "install motherboard drivers" or "make sure the system has fully updated" or worse "ignoring windows updates for several months while windows slowly kneecaps your system trying to force you to update"
ive had several arguments in the past with streamers that it wasnt the game that was the problem, but thier setup, only to be proved right 6 months later when they went and paid $500 to get it fixed and then had to rebuy parts because they didnt know the motherboard had certain specifications and that getting the top cpu switched off certain ram ssd and gfx options
If the average player had lots of performance left unused we simply would cry for a bigger galaxy and a bigger game and would want more in general. I play on a fairly new system and i have almost no performance problems at all. Some people play on a 1080 or even 980 and expect it to run super smooth.
Old X titles didn’t have a legitimate simulation. A lot of things were spawned. X4 is the first true simulation of the series.
@@3komma141592653 i'd love t have my hands on a 1080. I just don't have the money to replace my computer every 2 months.
@Hunpriest the issue with X4 is it's trying to live in a single-threaded world when the nature of x4's calculations are just begging for threads.
ok bro, you are way off base here. And to your qualifications, I have been playing this game since the original for over 20 + years and I have about 10k hours across all the games in the series compared to your 1500. I have also been around long enough to see modders and other game devs pick this engine apart. I also have a BS computer science degree and 25 years of experience in the field working with tech and software. And you are wrong on quite a lot here.
First, You can actually use upscaling, NOT FSR, actual NVIDIA upscaling by simply turning it on in your nvidia app for the computer. Now, the game is ALWAYS calculating the movements of the objects in game, and your MAP is NOT a "SERVER". And Servers DO NOT RUN AT 5 FPS as a general rule. FPS for servers is Tickrate. Tickrates need to be ATLEAST 20+ in order to have a smooth MP server in ANY game. But should strive for 30+. (Your use of SC here to objectively say 5 fps is normal is outright hilariously ignorant.)
Now that we have that out of the way, this has been discussed over and over for years. The problem is the engine itself and comes down to how the game was coded, and how it offsets the calculations to threads ( or rather how it basically only uses 1 thread for simulation.) as stated here: forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4692161. The reason it runs slow on someone's computer comes down flatly to CPU bottlenecking. You need ATLEAST 4 cores and as fast a CPU as you can get.
It has nothing to do with graphics or TSA, or FSR, or some made up SERVER FPS bs. The reason the game runs well when you first start it up is because there are less objects in the games DB. After a few hours the game creates more assets and the game has to start tracking more and more and more.
The slow FPS performance of the in game menu comes down simply to the Menu UI tech itself and how it translates the background calculations to the users UI. IT has nothing to do with changing how often things are calculated.
Ryzen 5700G CPU runs this game perfectly with all million fleets arround or whatsoever. Basicly I am saying You need little modern computer - that's it.
My CPU have 24 Cores. This game only uses a very few of them 2 if I`m not mistaken. No excuses for that. We are not in 2006 anymore when dual/quad core was introduced worldwide. We are in 2024 and this game was released in 2018 far away from 2006. They did what they did because they wanted and this is the result an unoptimized game that struggle to give good FPS. I bougth an 360 FPS monitor to achieve a higher FPS not just because the beauty of this number but because this brings more fluety to the game images. I bought an latest processor and graphics card available in the market to reach certain quality and even so this game gives a sh*t for your hardware specs. This is just facts nothing else. I love this game but the way that was developed... well... results are results. By the way when we are talking about online server we have to count the network latency and their limitation. In single player games like this we don`t have latency to be worried and the number of "players" that will connect and request information to that server. Nowadays processor have a lot of cores to simulate only "one world" to only "one client/computer". So the scale and complexity is cut by half at least! Again, development decisions on engine or whatsoever was underseen...
Probably the most correct answear here. The single thread is what the issue is here.
Is there anything modders can do to change this?
Is there anything I can do to change this?
Or is this on some deep core code level that noone but the devs can solve?
Every game needs a Captain Collins.
🥰
Oha! Ich hab ja jetzt nicht sonderlich viel erwartet, aber das sieht noch kleiner aus als gedacht. Entweder quetschen die sich ordentlich da drin oder eben Home Office.
and at least 3/4 of all cpu cores utilization
Fact, bro.
That's one of the reason i built my empire with seperate stations.
It requires more ships for logistic, but it's way more fluide than a méga complex.
Thanks for this clear explanation.😊
You are missunderstanding how it works. Megaplexes are only bad if you are within 40km of them. If you simply don't go within 40km of them they will be better for your overall game fps as you will need less ships/objects to service them.
@@ghostfacedninja1000still, it does help in not having an fps bomb sitting in a corner of your sector and instead "distribute the load" over the whole place, really lay your claim.
@@ghostfacedninja1000 Not really, because yes in absolute number you will need less ships, but in practice you're concentrating a lot of traffic around a single station, ships that will all interact between themselves (if only to detect the presence of other ships in the vicinity) even when OOS.
Having a big blob of ships all in the same place will kill your CPU (number of interactions between ships grows exponentialy with the number of ships in close proximity) and of course if you're in close proximity yourself it will also happily kill your GPU with all the drawing needed on top of having to do actual collision detection and physics calculations.
It's better to have 200 ships all roaming around the universe, than 100 of them all converging to the same place.
Hmm, I'm playing this game on my Laptop with an external 2k Monitor with high settings and I don't really have that many performance issues. When I load my 100+ hours Save it stutters a bit at the very beginning, but that stops rather quickly. Other than that I only have very few micro lags here and there, nothing that would ruin the game experience for me.
And for those who want to know my specs:
- RTX 3080 mobile (16.000 GDDR6)
- Intel I7 11800H (8x 2.30 GHZ)
- 32 GB DDR4 (3200 MHz)
- 4 TB M.2 SSD
Your laptop has the same specs as a gaming PC I built last year for 1700 USD and you play at the same resolution as I do. What a bizarre coincidence
As someone who has played Egosoft games since X2: The Threat, I can say that they have gotten better and better at optimizing performance.
I still remember the battle for Omicron Lyrae in the main story of X2 when the framerate on my Pentium 4-powered PC dropped to a crawl... Wow, I just realized that's 20 years ago!
I think these games are brilliant. Sure, they can be janky and not perfectly optimized. Sure there may be some bugs and weirdness, but I've always just liked the mood in them. Maybe except X: Rebirth. I never got into that game properly. But X2, X3 and X4 are probably the games I've played the most of all my games ever.
I subscribed to a mod removing all civ ships and it drastically increased my FPS
Mod name?
U know, i agree mostly. But there is only one but. If U will check GPU and CPU usage, most of the time it circles around 50%. Thats some optimisation problems.
Captain Technical Yay ! 😀
TAA makes moving objects blurry, but it requires less resources than SSAA, and visually almost the same
taa gave me a HUGE performance boost. Could make multiple settings higher and still got better performance
so I will ask if your calculations work on 8 cores of my processor or only on one, if you tell it so nicely but without the basic facts "on how many cores are these calculations performed?" and why should I improve my PC, if it is powerful enough to handle cp77 ba ultra 2k and here I have 60 fps, then there is probably something wrong with the game
do you know how difficult it is to simulate 1000s of units at once? cyber punk isnt simulating tons of individual ais at once. my guy its basic physics.
@@zerotheliger it only simulates what you see, the rest is on low simulation I know more than you think, and that's why we have multi-core processors and 3dcashes
I don't understand the complaints about performance, because I have no performance issues myself. Granted, I play on a 1080p screen with graphics settings in the medium-high range (ultra does slow things down a tad), but I'm using laptop Nvidia 1660ti graphics, so that's to be expected. Yet my gameplay is smooth 99% of the time (there is an annoying pause when NPC voice comms first trigger).
I'm not sure why I'm lucky and others aren't. I do run 32 GB of RAM with swap disabled, and my version of Windows 10 (1909) is highly optimized with very few processes running in the background and any performance "nerfs" like the Spector Patch disabled. That said, this unique setup does not benefit me with other poorly optimized games like Elite Dangerous Odyssey, so I really don't know what my secret is.
You never said exactly what framerate you're getting. People who complain say, often times in GREAT detail, what their framerates are. I expect that the secret is that you're simply playing the game and only worrying about framerate if it gets in the way of having fun. These folks have tools running to display stats at all times showing just how well the game is running. Getting the game to run as well as possible is itself a big part of the fun for them. Then this game comes along and puts demands on their computer unlike any other game they've played before. They make a bunch of assumptions (which, to be fair, have worked beautifully for the past 100+ games they've played) and we get an explosion on one of the forums.
Your secret is probably the lack of things in your universe.
let me guess, you haven't made it to midgame + where there are actually a lot of things happenign.
@@ZlothZloth The X games have always been demanding, for whatever generation of GPU/CPU was availavble at the time. X has never been forgiving when it comes to outdated gear, whether that was X2, X3 etc. in short - upgrade..
Beta 7.0 is a game changer. The performance increase is gigantic. I don't experience the map and interface lags. Neither in game. Even with Shift + 4 speed up everything runs more smooth then before the beta. It is crazy❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Well TAA and DLSS tend to do that BUT the graphics takes a hit with blurry when you move, general looking bad.
@@torgrim123 dlss? There's no dlss in 7.0 sadly
Wait until you get mid game+
Can't tell you how many times I've heard "This update is gonna be a game changer!" ... still waiting
This was correct, TAA is probably the best implementation I have seen yet, no blur works perfect and looks great. Now I have 0 jagged edges, the performance also increased, mid game around 30 advanced satellites, 40 ships, 3 stations, I went from 40 - 50 fps on stations, 80 in space to 60+ on stations and 100+ in space, game also looks much better, this is @ 1440p maxed, using R5 5600X and RX 5700XT.
Absolutely agree!
My only complaint is the lack of better multi-threading in such a perfect game for it. All else, yeah more people need to understand. Thanks Capn
Probably too many things that would race condition everywhere if they were run in parallel when it comes to stuff like ship orders and you need a huge rewrite to make it work.
@@meneldal Sure, but why wasn't it done that way with this Engine?
It was a foundation after all.
@@laserak9887the new engine introduced in 6.00 did improve multithreading. Is it the most utilized optimized thing? No. But people don’t realize most games still run with very low thread counts.
@@laserak9887 Because they build up from X Rebirth and previous games? Rewriting the whole engine would be a lot of work.
@@monstrosity8855 Most games don't try to simulate a whole universe. Multithreading isn't new by any stretch of the imagination.
TAA is almost like DLSS?! oO Upgrade your CPU to gain like 5% boost for a ton of bucks, cause all CPU cores are not used anyway?! Wut? I like you, Cap, but this video is not what I expected to see... My FPS drops in battles (actually not even really large ones), not on the map. And using minimum settings doesn't help in this case. I've upgraded PC not long ago, I have a decent CPU and a good RTX card. I don't want to start any holy wars here, sorry for the comment, but this is nonsense. And very close to the speech of Todd Howard about Starfield.
i agree that the game has a problem (but it's still a great game) the problem comes when you are in battle with many ships or near big stations then the fps drops drastically while the computer still only uses 25 to 30% CPU power and my graphics card has never been above 50-60%, as I experience it, the game can't push more data through the game engine than it does now, maybe it's because the game is from 2018, my opinion is that the game doesn't know what to do with all the powers that are in new PCs
@@Woehlk35 I never said that the game is bad, I love it =) I just don't understand the point of this video.
@@RaymondThierry Sorry I didn't mean it from your side I just meant I love it too. I don't see the point of this video either. I was hoping that there would be a nice game engine update. but no just some blah blah
A lot of people don't realise that you can massively improve fps on the map screen by pressing "3" to toggle the "Other" overview. The main thing about that is by default it will show all of the planned routes of all your ships. Disabling this makes frames shoot way up as your system isn't showing all of the calculated paths.
X4 has performance issues... 😲, the solution is to save the gameplay by delete all the factions with giga ultra Chad fleet 😅
I wanted to play X4 with my 5800X3D & 4090 and I get only like 20-30 FPS in that game...what is that?? every other game has no problem...??
Game Dev here (I work as a programmer for Bethesda), and I love X4. I have more than 500 hours in this game already.
In my experience with X4, especially within the last few months, I have seen that the game tends to use 4 threads on my home CPU (10 cores/16 threads). When I watch my task manager during gameplay, I see that 4 threads are constantly utilized at or near 100%, while the other 12 threads are mostly idle.
This is normal for most of today's PC games, even AAA titles, which tend to use between 4 and 8 threads on your CPU and leave the rest idle. Even our game Starfield, which can be very CPU-intensive in some areas, only uses a limited number of threads on my work CPU (32 cores/64 threads), with the majority of them at or near idle.
This is why, in most cases, having a CPU with a high number of cores/threads isn't going to help gameplay performance all that much. What really boosts performance in CPU-intensive games is the single-thread performance rating.
To illustrate this point, my home CPU (Intel i5-12600K, 10 cores/16 threads) runs X4 much more smoothly than my work CPU (AMD Threadripper Pro 3975WX 32 cores/64 threads). The single thread rating on my home CPU is 3954, while the single thread rating on the Threadripper is only 2660. (source: www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4603vs3851/Intel-i5-12600K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-PRO-3975WX )
Very interesting. Will seriously take this into account when I upgrade next time. I usually can't afford these 10 core CPU's 😅
@@snaphaan5049 Actual clock speeds do mean something. This is why the 5600X is more than adequate for most users, but its clocks aren't as high as, say, a 5900X which has a lot of headroom for things like Chrome and youtube, and OBS and twitch streams all running in the background. With a 4/8cpu theres no headroom for those other things like Chrome and streaming.....
Hilarious, a Bethesda game dev telling us that bottlenecking at 4-8 threads is 'normal'.
@@mariopenulli1395 It's pretty clear to me that you didn't understand my post. I said nothing about bottlenecks. I was pointing out the fact that most (not all) modern AAA titles only use 4-8 threads on multi-core CPUs. This is not unique to Bethesda games; I encourage you to run a test yourself using a number of different modern AAA titles, and watch your CPU core/thread utilization in the windows task manager.
Oh, so you played the old "it's simulating EVERYTHING" card.
Does not mean the game is optimised.
It's not. It would be optimised if it used multi-threading properly.
Except - it hovers around 35% CPU usage on most modern hardware.
Playing the game at 30 fps on high end PC rigs in 2024 is simply not an acceptable PC gaming standard. Period.
akshually OOS is a term from the older X games, up to and including X3 AP/FL and possibly X Rebirth, although idk wether they still used that system there or not. The low attention simulation X4 uses is quite similar, although there are some differences, like for example it being applied in the same sector the player is, just outside of the players viewrange, while the old X titles used the IS simulation on everything that was in the same sector as the player, regardless of wether the player could see it or not. Tbf the sectors in the old X games also were a lot smaller.
Could just start referring to OOS as Out Of Sight. Then OOS still applies no matter which game.
If Egosoft uses FSR, DLSS would be a downgrade from that. It's a lower tech version of the same thing.
Finally, somebody's talking about that!
Right?! :)
AMD FX6300, Nvidia GTX1060 6GB, and 16GB of RAM... Runs well enough to put over 500 hours in so far but I'm long overdue for a PC upgrade...
I run the game on a 6800k and a ref GTX1080. Pre V6 on old saves where I had stations and ships all over the place my FPS used to drop to
I have over a thousand hours in the game and never had problems playing the game
you must have a nice PC
Not really I got a 1080ftw with a 8th gen i5
The most common video card, according to Steam's annual survey, is still the GTX 10060, which was okay, but never great to begin with.. It is now an 8 year old GPU. If you have one, its time to upgrade and stop the complaints. It's not Egosoft's problem you're running 8 year old, never was very good to begin with, equipment. X4 runs balls to the wall on a 2070, 2060 Super, 3060.....
FFS get with the times and upgrade and STFU.
Edit Captain Collins mentions DLSS and TAA, etc.. DLSS, as far as I am aware, is not applicable to the 1060. DLSS is for RTX GPU's ONLY. No wonder your 1060 is performing like crap. Go figure.
Also, your CPU is overdue for an upgrade. 4 cores/8 threads @2.3Ghz is very much underpowered these days. It's nice to have overhead ie 8/16 or 12/24, at, say 5.0Ghz. Of course 4/8 is going to struggle with all thats going on in the game in the background, whilst 12/24 will smoke this game with ease. Clock speeds do mean something. If you're trying to play AND stream on a 4/8 2.3Ghz your system will struggle compared to 12/24 5Ghz. It's not rocket science.
i think egosoft shold work more on utilize multithread CPU
I think it's because I attack with groups of like 80 Behemoths/Phoenixs, and 100+ varied M sized ships. Yeah. Thats probably it.
Can they just implement FSR 2.0 or 3.0 ? that will be the biggest performance upgrade for anyone, Nvidia and AMD.
For anyone that wonders what's the best upgrade: I swap my old 4 cores i5 3570K to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the FPS from 20 in the map with full empire and economy jumped to 50FPS in the map,
SO SAY WE ALL!
Game uses only 1-2 cores. thats it. in 2024. I understad that they paying you money for lobbying this garbage of a "game". Curb your advocacy
"paying you money" :D :D :D :D haha, you're so wrong...
oh also one big problem, they SUCK BALLS AT USING THE NEW ECORE PCORE balance, horrible, barely anyting beyond 1 core being touched, why is this???? we have multiple core cpu's USE THEM
I never had any Problems with performance in X4 to be honest.... and my PC is defenately not a high end rig.... just a RX 5700 XT with Ryzen 2700 X ....
i love this game i have been here from the start of x3 ie x3 reunion. x3terran conflict. x3 albion prelude. x3 farnham's legacy. x rebirth. and x4 and the dlc,s just not the sound tracks dlc,x .... i want the Dycen's moon replaced ie the AI's staging area the 1 you take controll of with gates you chose where they connect to
Imagine the game on
i3570k
Ddr 3 1600mhz cl9 32gb
XFX RX 580
Early game is near to 60 fps 1440p medium/high settings. Some battles with 2-5 fps so I have to leave the scene :D
Captain, is there a way to get rid of those annoying semi-transparent orange/brown triangles on the zoomed map, for example 5:43 you can see one on right part of the screen, and when you rotate view angle it moves like it is some kind of object, but it is not
My only big issue with X4 is how BAD capitalships are when compared to M2-class ships from X3TC .
An M2 ship from X3TC would utterly annihilate a destroyer from X4, i'm willing to bet a single M2 could easily win a 1v10 ,
simply because of the fact that in X3TC, players were given a much greater option of costumization on ships, that included
weaponry , and most players put Capitalship weapons all around, and FLAK top and bottom .
Meanwhile , destroyers in X4 barely has any weaponry imo, the only capitalship weapons are the 2 infront, with very limited energy,
and all destroyers from ALL FACTIONS uses *THE SAME* capitalship weapons, while M2-class ships from X3TC could be fitted with any type of varrying weapons , PPC , Gauss, Ion, etc etc..
My opinion is that Egosoft went backwards on X4, in terms of gameplay. And i don't know why.
Now I better understand what is happening when I'm flying around my 30,000 module mega station. 😂🤣😂 ...I do like to build.
Never stop building :) Embrace the impact ;)
Your Server Explaining is good. But i run a Ryzen 5800X3D and have no FPS Drops on the Map. When I still had a Ryzen 5700G, I was also at 20 FPS. I solved that with the new CPU.
I get your point but I have to disagree.When you trying to justify the fact map is not as important but gameplay is. I don't think any game should be acceptable on latest hardware to run 10FPS in late game on map sometimes even dropping to 5FPS. That is not acceptable no matter what kind of simulation is going on. And I am talking about 6GHZ CPU's power which average user wouldn't even have access to. They need to handle better way of optimising map as it is the CORE interface of the game. The real issue here is that game is single threaded and not utilisng all THE CPU CORES. THIS IS FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM. Which falls down to engine they using and coding techniques they applying. Take a look at ECS systems that run 10000s of entities at same time.
TAA = Ghosting on.
Which defeats the purpose of using OLED in the first place.
The ghosting is worse Imao then FXAAs blurring.
I prefer real AA, like MSAA or SS if there is none available.
I havent got a state of the art PC: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor 4.20 GHz with 64,0 GB ram, Nvidea Gforce RTX 4060 Ti. No issues at all tbh🤔
It could be far more multi-threaded though, I appreciate that is not an easy thing to do but I guess from the player and consumer’s perspective that’s not their problem they buy the hardware and they expect it to be used i.e. if I have 8 cores I want to see the load split across 8 cores as much as is possible. Tbh though X4 runs pretty well now Egosoft have improved things over time and it would be unfair not to acknowledge their progress ❤
This is a common misconception. multi-threading doesnt always mean more speed. Even with multi-threading many things like calculations and simulations have to be done in sequence. YOu can do them in multiple threads but you still have to wait for one thread(or calculation) to finish before you start another, otherwise you have waht is commonly referred to as "race conditions" which can cause crashes or bugs. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant, some things simply take time and must be done in specific order.
@@tonechild5929 isn't that what well architected software is supposed to do i.e. remove race conditions and sequential processing locks? Either way as a player, consumer, user its not our problem to solve is my view.
@@bigbangerz5856 Yes, but that doesn't mean more speed. As a player or consumer, seeing not 100% thread utilization and saying that's the problem is a red-herring. It's the dunning-kreuger of pointing the blame. THat's not why the game is slow.
@@tonechild5929 lol. wrong analogy. 8 women can produce 8 babies. 1 woman can only produce 1 baby at any point in time if your analogy in performance are babies because even if a woman bears a child - it is generally 9 months. You cant even produce a baby in one month by one woman. The game engine is worse. Low gpu usage, low cpu usage and hence low fps..terrible old game engine.
@@Hyperion1722 That's not how the analogy works, it's about 8 women creating a single baby in 1 month - it's going to take 9 months to create a single baby no matter what - because one thing has to happen after another.. sequentiially. people who think you can get more done by using all cores are making the same mistake as assuming you can produce a baby with 8 women in a single month. Unfortunately, that's not how it woriks - some times one thing has to happen after another, and things cant all be done "at the same time" so using multiple cores does nothing but locks and waits for things to get done and is essentially slower than using a single core. there's a lot you can optimize with multiple calls for sure, but the only people who think that not using all cores = poor optimization are talking out of their ass and have no clue how programming works. Being good at building computers, knowing you have multi-core system, and using task manager or others to see how core utilization is not even a percent of the knowledge when it comes to software engineering, but people fool themselves into thinking they're experts because they can build a PC - hence the whole "not using all cores" meme seen all around every gaming forum. That thinking is utterly foolish - learn to code and specialize in multi-threading, then you can articulate an argument that might impress me - other than that it's just more drivel that the idiots eat like slop while patting themselves on the back for thinking they're smart because they learned the marketing terminology for hyperthreading.
No no no, my expirience happened 90% on map in this game... Its like Eve, but no online. Game about spreadshits and menues
Are you sure people are having these problems or are they just saying they are having these problems. I have not had one problem even when I was using an old R580 8gb in 2k on an old 3600xt amd cpu and still have not seen any issues on my new 7900tx 20gb on the same 3600xt cpu in 4k.
Turn Chromatic Aberration OFF folks. you can run this thing without any anit-aliasing or any upscaling and it looks great. I only use FXAA High anti-aliasing, no upscaling. The Chromatic Aberration if on makes the game look like shit. Turning upscaling on makes the game look like shit... I only have FXAA on because it gets more depth to the station lighting, blur and haze effects of lighting and adds a touch more color to the game [imo]. Turning it off or on a barely notice the difference.
Chromatic Aberration makes things too blurry and out of focus. It's what threw me about the whole graphic settings and was making the game look like crap.
I even capped my fps to 60, so it wouldn't be doing 160-375 and over using and heating up the card for no reason because I play for hours upon hours at a time.
I lover that game, and i know why game has performance issues......but I sort of disagree with mesage of this video
I know that game has lot of calculation at realtime .....BUT anyway, game has bad porformance.
straw man:
consumer care about performance, not reasons why perforamnce is bad. if consumer get explonation why it works bad, he may ask "so why it is this way and not other way".
In my experience, TAA makes everything look blurry and fuzzy.. Really the only anti aliasing i can tolerate is SMAA.
im not woried about performance i woried about stupid AI vs xenons while you watching the battle. They just suicide. But when you outside its just a numbers that fighting with each other
i know how to evade SETA 10fps gameplay. Just place 1 ship into edge of a sector and TP there
A few days ago my entire 15h gameplay went to nothing, both auto and manual saves are deleted, and I quit the game. X4 is a great game, with tons of issues, it's a glorious shitshow. When you play expect everything.
All moving parts in a game is more or less controlled by the cpu. so if your cpu is not good enough , the game will run slow, doesn´t matter if your gpu is high end. it is.. that simple.
im running a 16 core processor, amd , rtx 4700, running 1440p and it is smooth as butter. I do not overclock. Also i strongly recommend turning off Vsync. I wont go in to tech detail here, you can google what it does. TAA stands for Temporal Anti Aliasing. Temporal.. its using alot of resource because it is using previous rendered frames to perform the aliasing. Kind of the same tech as V-sync, that is using it to to avoid tearing in the image. Any way you put it, any kind of anti aliasing is taking on the gpu. If you are using dlss then it shouldn´t be necessary to use any anti aliasing as dlss already uses its own taa. in respond to taa and blurry picture... taa makes the picture more sharp than its other counterparts in anti aliasing..
I don't really care about having super smooth graphics, I care more about the content of the game and how smooth it runs. So I have always turned off any anti-aliasing in every game and have never had issues with performance, unless my pc was really underspecced. Turning on TAA and such new AA features has some weird effects on fast moving stuff. In Satisfactory, they have implemented the same stuff by going to Unreal engine 5 but all your items on conveyor belts have weird graphical artifacts because of this. Turning off TAA and such fixed that for me and even gave a performance boost at the same time. So the term "better or smoother graphics" also has a downside when moving things become too blurry and makes it less good-looking.
I blame windows, my core2duo from 15 years ago gave me faster execution then my i5 12600k, who needs the weather when sitting infont screen.
All I hear is high grade COPIUM . We have insane core counts on consumer grade CPUs in 2024 There is no excuse for a game to run this bad . If the game cant use the hardware then its the games fault, consumers complaining about the performance its not the problem.
Still
Its a management game
And you must be in the management screen 70% of the time
Plus
Your suggestions are meaningless
You build your stations so they be protected and efficient to your needs
You are not playing the game for the reasons of maintaining performance
Also
You build a fleet in order to see it fight
Not to send it to fight somewhere
else and simply see results
So in order to control the battlefield you have to go to strategic view
Its intuitive action
Game load tons of stuff
Your fpst go to shit
Then you return to battle sceen
That is also low fps because there are many ships and stations
To much calculation on every aspect
The solution is much simpler
Make being in first person mode intuitive
They did it in x3 so its not new
Separate galaxy view control
From local sectoral map control
This way while you are in battle you dont need to load galaxy computation
Another thing they did stupid
When out of sceen your ship is attacked you resive a massage
That you say to your ship what do …
Its a flash massage
In order to open menu and track what happened you need to go global map
Because its intuitive then play with menus to get to the massage or whatever
You need intuitively constantly pause the game because it takes time
Its same as fps shit
Stop everything
And go to loading the entire map
In x3 this was done smarter
Massage one click tanny
But even smarter
They could do local interact
(I dont talk about ignoring all and only see how ships disappear aftermath - its not logical because you need to restore supply where it was lost and its a big effort to find what was broke when you have hundreds of ships doing hundreds of jobs)
So ship report could be done differently
You get report
Options interact or ignore (live it to presets)
Interact opens small map of ship so you can evaluate fight ,run or give some orders
This prevents huge galaxy load
Computation
Give you info on who is being destroyed
Give you enough possibility to influence (increase survival) of your asset
And you are not thrown out of gameplay you are in
Instead of wasting 5-10 minuts
You invest 10-15 seconds
To give fast orders
Another thing ..
presets to behavior are to limited
You always feel that your assets are trying to kill themselves if you dont help them manually
This makes you distrust the system
When flee order is given
Ship stops … and fly to some random location
Its like worse then ignore the entire thing
But you cant ignore
There is no such option
So there are only two possibilities
Pay or do something stupid
This also makes you intuitively go to manual control .. big calculation again and again
There are so many easy solutions to avoid this calculation trap
But they are not used
At all
Well, the TAA might be fast, but it's known for horrible results.
Just use literally anything else PLS.
how about a challange??=)Play 2 insane mods:xenon hell and Xepocalypse.That would be a deathrun
that explains, but didnt help as i knew that already. as a x3 veteran thats just bad. most of the game for me is played on the map or in menus, the rare time i actualy watch (or even rarer: fly) my ship is while traveling and fighting. sadly in x4 the shipdesigns are so ugly and the ai flies like a drunken donkey that loses to a xenon scout while beeing in a corvette... therefore i still play more of x3 than x4. to me it even looks better, even for its age. i bought all x4 dlcs to support egosoft, but i stick with x3.
anyways, to compliment some x4 designs tho: that drill was good looking, also many freighters like the ides and hermes. Boron ships now look nice but..aggressive, compared to the big fishshaped x3 counterparts, splitships kept the design nicely and here and there we got a diamond of a ship. i would also compliment some designs like the xenon k and some teladi ones (wich i liked more flying in their mixed wreckships) but i think they are taken over from x rebirth so i should compliment there for them lol
this comment wasnt funny.
I love the game so much, but sometimes in my late game I hit 10 FPS in my own System because I put like 10 station in a cluster and it's insane.
I honestly think Egosoft should make a smaller scale of the already existing game. There is just so much empty space in sectors that I don't think it's worth having just because of scale ,as well as reduce the sector count. It should exist like a new game smaller so it doesn't bother people who have the computing power for the bigger game. So the smaller one will have less populated areas with less space so it doesn't feel like a flying in the nothingness for hours. And since there will be less stuff simulated then the fps will be stable for a lot longer unless the players let the universe run for long periods of time. The other option in my opinion could be custom sliders where they can set a limit to what the ai can build and do so it doesn't go above a certain threshold.
To be fair in 2024 games not having multi threading, especially a game like this needs to be checked. I have 16 cores, bloody use them! not just 2!
This is a common misconception. multi-threading doesnt always mean more speed. Even with multi-threading many things like calculations and simulations have to be done in sequence. YOu can do them in multiple threads but you still have to wait for one thread to finish before you start another, otherwise you have waht is commonly referred to as "race conditions" which can cause crashes or bugs.
I came here looking for a fix and walked away with a explanation that made me appreciate the game a bit more. I'm okay with a jumpy map as long as my combat is smooth and fluid.
Great explanation, well done Capt. Thanks a million for this, I hope this helps some players understand how the game works in the background.
Glad you agree on this
No performance issues at all. uwqhd constant about 100+ fps.
i dont know what kind of pc you have, but this game ist even running on my friends old laptop, just the sinza is broken. there are yust a few options in the graphic menu that have to stay turned off. and you should dont use any mods...
I'm more annoyed by fighter AI than any performance issues, great game :)
That's probably related. The CPU is crazy busy trying to think for all these moving pieces. There's only so much it can spare for each ship.
@@ZlothZloth fighters dropping out of travel drive too early and being pants is nothing to do with performance, but I understand what you're trying to get at.
@@ThatGuyKal Ugh, yeah, I don't know what the story is on that. 7.0 fixes that for large ships, but I haven't looked to see if it helps with little ships.
If you have less than $1,600 invested in your pc, you shouldn't really be complaining about any computer game performance. This applies to anyone in these comments. Spend money & it works always. Don't got money? Stop playing a game and go get another job. Easy. I've never had a problem with this context.
No excuses for poor optimization. Game engine uses only up to 1-2 cores of 20 available on my machine.
wheres your game at?
@@zerotheliger you mean hardware? It's Asus Zenbook with Intel i9. OS is Ubuntu.
Have 40-50 fps avg. With in-game map it's ~30. Settings are high.
just drove through würselen seeing the egosoft building, what a shock :D
noice :)
You mean it's shocking that its's not a shiny high-rise with glass all over it? :)
@@Osmone_Everony let's just say it helped keep some things in perspective :)
If somebody wants to see it, here's the link to google street view:
www.google.com/maps/@50.8408709,6.1093512,3a,75y,224.64h,94.82t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1stW3K07oxcqUu74cx7w3xXw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
I only get about 24fps in large fights. I didn't realise it was my CPU that was the problem, not the game. Can you recommend an upgrade? I'm currently using a Ryzan 9 7950X 3D. Or maybe it is that the RTX 4090 just isn't good enough for low settings at 1440p?
Your CPU is good at performing tasks that need a lot of cores, but is not like the top-choice for streamlined processes like games. A 7800x3D would do probably better. Even a 5800x3D probably. Your CPU is great for video rendering and 3D work, but single core performance is what X4 benefits the most from. Weird to say that, since your CPU is so expensive, but it's just the truth.
@@CaptainCollins I appreciate your reply but, if the game is well built then shouldn't it take advantage of more cores? Especially for the simulation side of it. Most simulation work now is done on GPUs with their thousands of tiny cores because of how multithreading friendly simulation work is. So for this type of game you should be looking more at a top end AMD Epic for its many lower spec cores rather than a CPU with a lower core count but better single core performance. Or even using a 2nd GPU as a simulation processor.
Having multiple cores is not a new thing ether. So saying you should have a good single core CPU to run a modern game seems rather backwards when for years the market has been moving to more and more cores. It has been well known for a long time that multithreading processes is the way to get the most performance out of any CPU past the early 2000s.
it feels to me that over time game developers have gotten lazy when it comes to performance. Blaming the hardware instead of looking at how to use it effectively. During the early days of gaming it was 'we will use components of the system in ways no one ever thought of to make the game run well' now its 'your PC has too many cores so it will run bad'.
It is a real shame when the game is so good.
I9 13900kf has the most powerful single core performance of any cpu but it’s at the very cheapest about $580 and at the most $800
@@JY-qy2obif people are having problems with 7950x3d or 14700k+ then the problem truly is NOT the cpu. This game needs proper multithread management. There truly are no excuses for that.
Your performance makes no sense. I have a 7950X (non 3D) and a 3090, never had any FPS issue with X4 running on a 4K resolution - my lowest are around 40FPS and I'm in the end-game as well, with tons of stations being simulated (gonna probably restart for 7.0 like I do on any DLC)
I'm not saying the game couldn't use a better workload distribution with more threads to leverage high-cores CPUs available today but it shouldn't be that bad considering your specs.
I'd check the rest of your system and running processes for RAM utilization, CPU, system interrupts (e.g. webcam driver issues which are common).
You absolutely need an afmf or some frame generation technology to play this game. Performance is abysmal on big stations
I don't have much of an issue with performance, well a bit but its not the deal breaker for me. Its the AI that break it for me. I understand that everything need to be simulated, and there is out of of sector calculation and in sector etc. But I feel like there should be less entities in the game in general but better performing or should I say smarter AI instead.
How do you feel about the minimum/recommended settings on Steam? Thankfully my PC exceeds the recommended settings, but sometimes it struggles. No idea what it would be like playing with the minimal hardware. Maybe people have different definitions of what is playable.
I've got an R7 5800X, and an RTX 3080 and it runs well for me. 45+FPS even by my bigger stations.
I've got ultra settings, except fog. I think I turned on FAA. 1440p.
It ran decently on the 1060 and i5 I had before finally getting my hands on the 3080. Medium-high gfx and 30ish fps by stations. Still looked quite pretty. 1080p
I'm an old gamer so anything above 24fps is fine by me, great game.
I like the last sentence, maybe this IS a generational thing :) I can still remember games that looked like slide-shows (thinking of Prince of Persia for example).
9:10 "Too much stuff around you", that's exactly why I don't like mega-factories. Why many players build stations with dozens of wharves and hundreds of other modules and even brag about it but then complain about bad performance is beyond me.
I've struggled with this game for performance reasons as well, and it's the mid-late game that seems to absolutely kill the experience despite my hardware. CPU: 5800x, GPU: 6800, 32 GB RAM and PCI-E GEN4 nvme drive. I feel like I shouldn't have any issues even at late game with that setup. But who knows, maybe I have a config issue somewhere I haven't tracked down yet.
Anyway, what's your advice? If you don't build mega stations, then the alternative is to build a vast amount of traders to move resources between each other. If you want them to produce then you need a bunch of medium miners and trader doing there thing. Isn't that more of a "same but different" problem? I haven't really understood what the optimal setup is for stations versus traders. Not to mention that traders require every station to have a satellite near them to update pricing? Don't all these things kill you performance wise? The other issue is that because the patrol sector order doesn't respond to friendly ships being attacked, protecting traders doesn't really work either.
It's been a little bit since I played so I don't remember sector names, but the HAT region that links to the Xenon sector (Tharka's Cascade?) for me is a good example of how the game just starts to tank. From what used to be 60+ fps or even more becomes sub-thirty later on when fighting around there. I've personally attributed that issue to the amount of trade ships I have going in the background and the satellites revealing the area that's tanking my CPU.
I am one of those guys that enjoys building enormous shipyards and mega factories. Though I try, mostly, to not complain when the game curses my existence, lol!
@@jasonwright8546 i was one of those with closed loop shipyard HQ mega station. i dreaded going inside my own sector XD
So expecting a game to run consistently when doing normal things the game allows you to do is beyond you? Interesting.
@@Rakshasa84 Ultimately yes, it's a similar issue. Some mods may help to a small degree, I'll explain. Some mods will improve factory output by 5x or whatever, and some will shorten the output timer. These help reduce the amount of "factory" pieces, making MegaFactories smaller. In short, X4 knows it cannot handle huge amounts of "pieces", so it's intentionally designed as a "starved" universe, with as few pieces as possible, but enough to make it lively.
Massing traders/miners is just as bad, if not worse, due to increase more "load" by adding their calculations, not of just their own, but in respect to other pieces that may interact with them. However, you could get a mod that modifies the Cargo amounts per trader/miner so they can move more at a single time, reducing overall "pieces" and "load". But, more cargo simply slows ships down, and you'll have to make more edits when modding, in short, there's a relationship between the two. Or, the wares could be modified to each consume 1 "space" in the cargo hold, which can be simpler overall. In any case, an extra mod edit should be made for "ware mass", I think there's a mod for this. Simply, it counteracts the wares from slowing down the ships when overloaded beyond their "vanilla limits". The ships were designed in a way to carry "just the right amount" as per their class, so you'll have to edit a lot if you go this route, or find a mod that already fixes that.
Regardless, there's a parallel relationship with factories and traders, doesn't matter if it's a MegaFactory. The more factories there are, the more "outputs" that need to be added to "calculations", typically "buyers/sellers" (traders/miners), since each "piece" is trying to get the best offers. Sprinkling mini-factories everywhere is moot, 5 mini-factories 20 pieces each is no different from a single mega-factory that is 100 pieces, except a mega-factory can be tucked away in OOS. Mini-factories everywhere, especially in IS will add a lot of "load" if you have to keep rendering them and their IS calculations, instead of keeping them tucked in OOS. Plus, they will clog the UI, and can drain performance more in Map Mode. Map Mode still processes things, except it's showing them to your face now, so having a ton of "pieces" in the Map Mode will hurt, a problem when you sprinkle stuff around. You notice this when you move to a blank area on the Map, and then go somewhere with tons of "Map pieces". And I don't need to mention showing orders and stuff, in general, mini-factories aren't a solution, they present other problems.
Since ToA DLC, the salvage wrecks are a pro and negative. It's helpful for "cleaning" up since they salvage wrecks. Wrecks do take up some power since they need to be saved for a timeframe until they despawn. ToA helps with Manticore removing the wrecks, except there's not enough "cleaning" up because they are few. Even in OOS, I'm sure a bit of power is allotted to the wrecks, since wrecks can be salvaged OOS. We can't despawn wrecks since they are essential to ToA's economy. Natural salvage, not combat salvage, were added, and they also take some power. In short, with each addition to X4 expanding, it will keep getting tougher to maintain any high performance. Economically, "resource deposit pieces" can be reduced, but the individual deposits can be raised. Instead of 1k small ore rocks, just make 100 large ore rocks. Improve the yields and adjust the regen rates, same for natural salvage. Gas, I'm not sure because those are "fields", not sure if they have yields. But, you can make highly concentrated "gas fields". Ever wonder why miners "prefer" certain regions to mine over others? It's because of that "density", hence the resource probe exists. Miners choose the most optimal place 5 jumps away instead of directly in front of them, there's why it happens. Hinting at 18 Billion.
i spend more time on the map managing my fleet than i spend in cockpit flying myself
thats where the problem is
Just get their programmers to review and rewrite parallel processing. It's not easy but many newer games did it far better.
only 5 mins in, recently got into this game, so take my words with a grain of salt if you like, but i also have had years in the industry, so i would note, satellite coverage, is stopping it from being a fully simulated travel to being seen/known by the player, this had the greatest impact on performance in my honest opinion, i had to destroy around 30 percent of my map coverage, because my game was just down to a 1980 cpu. and it tore my FPS no matter what sector i was in, from being a solid 120, to under 50. this is where they need to do the most optimization, my cpu and gpu are not really going past 40-60 percent usage, and gpu isnt going past 30 percent, the only time it does, is why i am near a mega factory, which i have learned, so i place them, far out of the way. the game DOES have SEVERE issues on optimization, its not just random that 30 percent of the comments on steam releases are this game is slowing down, buggy etc, they DO need to do work, while it is nice, that your standing up for them, they need to be realistic about what DOES need fixing. ive put 440 hours over past 2-3 weeks, yeah i know, i no life things, but i live on the pc. i work on the pc, it just is what it is, but again, they need to do some optimization, and yes, that does take man power, and yes, it will take away from them doing other things, in a temporary sense, but they do need to fix it, x4 games, strat games, are usually some of the easiest to run, BECAUSE the are 80 percent or 98 percent in some cases simulation, as long as the cpu can handle it, your good to play, as big of a gam as you want, if i put more then 200-300 or god forbid 500 ships, in a sector, moving, this game CRAWLS!!!!! this can be better, but on a differnt note, i love your videos, they have given me so much help over the past 2 or 3 weeks leaning this game. and understanding lots of the nitty gritty, one thing, they also need to work on, is this, modified game doesnt get support crap, because of their own arbitrary rules, only currently 8.9 percent of their player base, is able to forward gamereports for optimization, they by their own hand, are hurting them selfs, just because a game is modded, or "modified" certainly does NOT mean, all of their data, is useless to put into fixing the game, THAT IS THEIR BIGGEST MISTAKE IVE SEEN YET, absolutely deplorable choice. and in turn, they have under ten percent of an "official" player base, the rest are all called modified players. and all that data, is THROWN OUT.... this is terrible. i can only imagine, the number of things, that could be fixed, if that had use atleast some of that data. sure, a mod, will throw some red in the mix, but players who use, modified starts... or players who use trainers, for what ever their own reason is.... that DATA is 100 percent good. maybe 99. again, love your stuff, love this game too, its tons of fun!!!! but, they are making some terrible choices, so im just saying, dont defend them blindly, this company isnt THAT transparent, or amazing. they could be, but they choose NOT TO BE.
1 word would make all this lag go away: threads
u know , there"s few sectors full of mines and a lot of meaningless decorations . remove that and u can play this game on pentium 2 pc
Would've been nice if game wouldn't simulate entire sectors every time a pilot video calls me
I have not been and to get myself to play this game again because of the stealing+selling faction ships without consequences.
most of the time we are sitting in a worst looking excel than in a cockpit. the gui and ux should be fantastic there, not the fps. now, no both.
Maybe we should pressure egosoft to migrate this game to the unreal engine?
X4 is a great game but the late game is just not playable on a medium computer.
It is what it is
Absolutly right. For the X Games you need high end CPU for calculating the whole universe. The Ryzen 7800X3D is very very good for X4.
And nobody really needs high FpS on a map.
A high-end CPU that won't be used properly. Its still single-threaded, so you need to focus on single-thread performance, so fewer cores to allow for higher clock rates. Better off actually nerfing that CPU.
Remove satellites will make he map running better is what I noticed.