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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
Defending a bad game design is a very dangerous trend. Developers feel they're not responsible and continue to lay shit under carpet and pretend everything is ok.
@viktorvasichkin9318 lets see your optimized universe simulation then my guy. people forget how taxing simulations are. its not an excuse its how the game is. if you dont like it dont buy it.
@@CaptainCollins What egosoft percieve dosent really matter. Because many of their customers obviously perceive it as such. Don't get me wrong, i love X4, but all this performance jank, combined with a big lack of features no immersive missions/objectives or real story (aka HEAVY wysiwyg sandbox sim.) At least we could expect a somewhat fluid exel sheet simulator.
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❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
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.
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
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...
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?
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 )
@@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.....
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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..
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.
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).
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 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.
@@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).
I’m very glad the TAA works so effectively, I have kept most the new graphics settings such as better reflections and high quality glow just because of that. Definitely the occasional blurry spot but it’s not noticeable compared to gaining 40fps and a bunch of graphical fidelity.
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.
Taking out factionsbig amount of ships helps massively with the tick rate. I several times ended up in terrible stutter in late game when owning a massive military-industrial complex. Once I understood the server tick issuem, I used that and simply launched a campaign or two to cut down or eliminate one or two factions and that solved it.
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.
You are correct. You must really control things and keep the number of ships down in quantity to keep refresh FPS at a good level. It kills my game at some point once I explore to much or build to much. graphic card is already set low. But still it fails over time
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
i had this described years ago that the old anti aliasing and the rest of the settings were made for up to 1080p, the dlss and amd equivalents are for 1440p upwards, there was a graphics settings indepth dive a few years back somewhere on youtube that explains it all properly indepth, but a lot of settings will try to use both and cause massive problems when one is meant to replace the other, or just doesnt actually work unless you are on the higher resolution screens. What you forgot to mention here is that the engine also changed in 6.0, where they went from an engine they have been used to and updating since 1999 to the blender based system they are now using, so all the updates took several steps backwards. There was always the in sector (IS) and out of sector (OoS) calculations where it swaps between physics based calculations to purely mathematical calculations, but now there is also in sector out of sight (ISOoS) calculations where positioning is needed to be a little more accurate and 3 dimensional while not needing all the physics, non of these calculations have reacted well to people thinking that they can run 3 to 6 screens all at 2k to 4k resolutions with maybe one set to 1080p for watching twitch and chatting ... the more screens you have at different resolutions also causes your OS to say "wait, we need to juggle this"
Mods can heavily impact the game too, if your running mods that increase even just the economy you will lose FPS They build more ships, more activity... guessing you can see why mods can lag, pick and choose carefully... start stacking the wrong mods even though they might seem usefull and you will end up losing up to 40 fps I love modded experiences, most games I can install up to 400+ mods without performance issues but you can't with X4 If your FPS isn't the best with vanilla definelty don't add anything to do with "economy boost" and "heavy war starts" just do gameplay and balance changes
I've played since the beginning of X2 and can say that X universe games are the most amazing sims I've ever experienced. Every thing they do is F'ing Magic (FM). I can do some impressive software design. I can't even begin to explain how they manage the simulation of an entire universe.
i deal with the "map server ticks", but lag when you visit your huge 1 big station for all production is so frustrating 😢 got 80 fps in empty sector, 30-50 in massive fight, but 5 fps in the middle of my hudge station (10-30 modules by products, all race/products/food in same station, maybe 100-200 traders with tons of mods, specially for trade), whatever graphic setting i use (low to ultra, fps stay at 5), i heard even last CPU and graphic card 2024 wouldn't change that (mine is 7700k@5ghz/gtx1080) Maybe will try your tips for my next start: small stations spaced 40km
My issue is more surrounding core optimisation. Right now it is too heavily dependant on a single core. I'm hoping they can eventually change this. I proposed a while ago that in future iterations they could split the game into slices/quadrants where they each get their own core, then have a single game core that only focuses on exchanging data between those cores/slices. Could even further refine it with another core dedicated to just the sector you are in. Essentially though, the idea is that the game breaks itself up into smaller 'servers' and then meshes them with a single core for handover. Would allow scalability where performance then becomes strictly dependent on how many cores you have.
Good info but the real issue is that the old engine can only use at most two cores where the data is further distributed to the other cores. This produces the lag. Once these 2 cores are choked so goes the game performance as the GPU will just be waiting for data from the CPU. I noticed this even if I lower the graphical settings, the GPU usage goes as low as 30% while my CPU is about 20% ( 2 cores sweating it out while the 6 cores are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the data) and my fps is still tanking at 30fps. Try doing a battle scene - an 8 core cpu with HT would reflect low overall CPU usage, low GPU usage and fps is still crawling at 30fps. The game should be able to use all cores simultaneously but it is not. This is an engine limitation. It is what it is because of an old engine. So the strategy game could now become think most of the time, explore - to a limited extent, build - uh oh, fight - duhhh, trade - ooops...
What I have noticed is once you have A LOT of ships, the game really struggles and became more or less unplayable in map view. When I say a lot of ships, I'm talking about 5000+ ships. So one tip here is to start replacing smaller ships with larger ones, for example L miners and L traders instead of only M miners and traders (not to mention S ships...). Use carriers for your S and M fighters. And for stations, you don't need connectors everywhere so that can save up on FPS with megaplexes, especially in-sector. So far, this current game is running fine for me with most settings on max (although I did recently upgrade my PC... Helps).
So, we have online - 40km radius offline - when we see icons in map offline offline - when map closed We know, that battle calculations are different for "online" and "offline". And i ask you: have we are differences between "offline" and "offline offline"?
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!
@@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.
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.
I like to teleport to a ship parked in the middle of nowhere when I'm using the map for management. Not that my FPS has ever been really bad. It's just peaceful. and there are some pretty views in X4, I'll just orbit Earth. Which is why I wish there was more ship intiriors like with the Astrid. It's the ship I use most often because you can actually walk around it. Hang out at the desk and manage the fleet from the map, or just stand there by the bed watching Earth rotate, Or tyring to find that little valley colony on mars, & wondering what that white pimple on the planet is.
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.
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
Pause the game while on map or just put offline trade and mining if you dont need it. Most of ressources while on map are taken by the trade and mining filter which, lets be honnest, takes a lot of ressources
One further thing that I've noticed that you didn't seem to cover in this video; In sector collisions seem to take up a lot of CPU power, particularly in asteroid heavy sectors. If you choose not to drive your own ship (IE hire a pilot and let them fly you around while you do empire management) these collisions aren't calculated in the same way and my FPS goes up a ton.
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
My processor isn't very good, but I can play reasonably well if I take a few precautions. On the maps I deactivate all icons, I try to keep my view close to the sectors, thus avoiding taking the image of all sectors, which slows down the map, I also avoid showing the menu that shows commercial ships, mining ships, etc.. already that on my PC this seems to require too much. As for the game itself, I have always liked factories that are focused on just one type of production and are more compact, never build a factory that produces several things because I know that this would affect my fps, small factories, even though they are close together, almost do not affect my fps .
Might need to pickup on this game again. Only thing I care about is the fleet AI. How’s the AI doing now? Does jump delay, turn rate still make a very disorganized fleet?
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.
I love to build massive shipyards and manufacturing Starbases, and the game lets me know it does not appreciate that, haha! That is my fault, and I cannot expect different results, unless I forked out the cash for a super computer. If you build like a reasonable person, and don't try to field massive fleets around enormous space fortresses, the game tends to run pretty well. I would love it if the game could support that, but with limitations of hard and software, that isn't going to happen with the game looking as good as it does.
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.
The explanation of TAA was very good. I have actually some short frame drops in 7.00. especially in sectors with a higher asset density. In the first years of x4 there was a memory leak and you had to restart the game after 1 or 2 hours, but that is fixed. Now i have no other performance issues. I play on a laptop in 1k with 64 gb ram and intel 11th series.
@@CaptainCollins Frag doch mal Bernd ob es Pläne gibt X für die Zukunft zu sichern. So als Stiftung oder so. Ich spiele die Games seit dem 1. Teil. Wäre echt blöd wenn Egosoft mal aus personellen oder wirtschaftlichen Gründen dicht machen muss. Es ist immer noch das beste Game ever. Trotz Bugs.
Uh, I always figured that the reason why the ships more distant to you where not appearing to move smoothly was just because you where receiving the position with some lag (as in a in universe reasoning for this) and not because the game was "badly optimized" or something... As for the "lag" on the map (as in the time to react to your input), I never noticed any but then again I tend to give up the game after a while and start anew so I never have a massive super space empire going on...
I thought this but then I played the game with zero mods. It performs great even in large battles even if I spam a sector full of stations and ships. You can't get 144 fps when it's under that level of load but it's not running at 30 fps like it is when it's heavily modded.
Another thing is X4 never utilises more than 5 threads. Currently I have i7-12700f and when I played X4 5.0 with my old stock cooler my cpu temperature was at ~70-90 C. I looked up why that's the case and discovered aforementioned problem. Now I have big tower cooler so I need not worry about my cpu overheating and manually assigning threads to X4 via task manager, but still I would like for X4 to use full capability of my CPU. P.S. It was at the time of 5.0, so maybe Egosoft have solved it, but I stopped looking into it for the reasons above =/
There are ways to improve this further, but they have to change the way they do calculations / handle simulations in the backend. For example, the economy of the game is extremely heavy on cpu time because each ship searches multiple stations at the same time, for where to drop it's cargo / pickup cargo from. How about that gets simplified with universal buy / sell orders? For example (simplified version): - Stations advertise in ONE place for the faction they are part of, the resources they need and the resources they have for sale - NPC ships of the same faction have access to this list, so they either randomly fill those requests in, or via some algorithm, but the important thing is they scan only ONCE for the resource requirements. (this doesn't sound bad, until you realize the universe can have thousands of stations / thousands of ships) - Player may or may not be given access to this list (should be given to it, at least via the trading ships) "How would that improve performance?" - Currently, 1 ship has cargo to sell, it then looks at: 1. Stations it has access to, if they require the cargo 2. Repeat step 1 until all stations have been accounted for (if there's 1000 stations it has access to, it will search 1000 stations) 3. Select the best from the list it just pulled and act on it Now imagine having 5000 ships in the universe doing the same thing, with 1000 stations Result: 5000x1000 5,000,000 constant calculations (just for trading). - The "different" method would be: 1. 1000 stations advertise their buy / sell orders in one place 2. 5000 ships look at the 1 place where the stations put the prices in (1 ship takes 1 order from the list) 3. Each ship "marks" 1 buy order as unavailable for others (something like taken), and if the ship cancels / gets destroyed, order gets released Result: 1000stations + (1order x 5000ships) = 6000 constant calculations for trading (this frees up 4994000 calculations) Why not multiply? Because the station orders don't need to be recalculated every time a ship needs to scan, this is only done once by every ship (as if you have only 1 station with all the resources) This will also remove the ships "standing idle" outside in space doing nothing while they scan. And yes, different approaches can be done for everything else as well, and that will improve the performance even more.
Trade stations exist for that. This would introduce a different set of issues. Using the trade station as the universal place, and the only place to make trades, if the trade station were to be destroyed/lost, everything upstream that contributes to the trade station (particularly factories) would break down. In that imagined instance, we're assuming the upstream have a forced role to ship their goods to the trade station to then create a market. If that's the case, that "universal trade hub" has to be indestructible. Also, it has to be a type of "neutral zone" where no interactions could potentially disrupt that, until after a piece (trader) leaves that neutral zone. Otherwise, it'd be a constant pulling the list, causing its own problem. The trade station already performs the duty of requesting fill orders, but I won't go into great details. Factories work in a method to fulfill the trade station requests. If a trade station is removed, the factories cannot sell/deliver their goods in your method. The fallback action is to allow the factories to also have their own market, to keep their wares delivered. It's like telling a farmer he can't sell his stuff to other people without needing a 3rd party/Supermarket to do so. That's just weird, when you can bypass the middle-man/Supermarket and go straight to the source/farmer and buy his goods directly, and most likely at a cheaper rate. All in all, that's the lite version. On 3, it's already there, after the ships make a pull, they reserve their trade. No one else can touch it, and it's marked off the list. And yes, if the ship is destroyed/canceled, it gets released. While I could cover more in detail, I don't feel like it atm. Generally speaking, what you're suggesting is already there, with a few things on the side. Though, a trade query isn't going to be the most heavy calculation bottlenecking the game. "Standing idle" would actually be useful since there is the least amount of calculation needed, but that would make the game appear dumb by community standards. If your ships get to that point, you should be removing them from service, freeing up CPU power for others that need it more. It's like road construction crew, paying 5 guys to stand around while one 1 is doing all the work. Remove the 5 standing around doing nothing, dedicate more resource to the 1 guy to be more efficient and effective.
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.
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 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.
I've got over 1500 hrs in this game. I've never had any serious problems with this game. I've only ever once built a mega complex and it was in Faulty Logic. It was about 500km from the gate. I put it out that far so I didn't have to worry about the highway or anything else causing my game any problems. I'm also playing on a laptop that's 5 years old that came out a year or two earlier. It should be common sense that if you put a bunch of stuff somewhere in ANY game it's going to cause problems. How many sandwiches did someone spawn in Stanfield to make the game crash? Same thing.
I started playing X4 on an i5-2500 processor and I didn't have much issues. But perhaps I'm a bit...generous in my expectations since I also played X3 Litcube's Universe on the same computer. Playing X3 Star Wars LU however...well, my system simply told me "No can do!"
I think a big issue is that they have SOOOOO many resources that are just kind of being underutilized and just keep adding more and more and more. Honestly if they gutted the code and broke savegames it would anger a bunch of people but I think that's probably what needs to be done to really fix things.
i don't think it'd require that, given saves are in XML format. Using that format to handle savegames more or less ensures you can do just about anything other than changing the name of ship types and it won't break saves. They just need to implement multi-threading.
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 played a LOT with Kingdom end on my gaming rig. Had battles with fleets of more than 100 ships and NEVER had a problem with stutter and not much with lag. Booted up a new game on the current patch 10/09/2024 and Just flying my ship by the Xenon gate in Hatikvah's choice causes stuttering, lag, and jumping ships. don't even think about engaging in combat, trying to line up shots on a Xenon M while the video goes choppy and the ship is doing mini teleports is useless. I am running it on a mid range rig with an I7 12.4ghz RTX 3070 and 32gb ram. In my experience they have dropped the performance ball pretty badly on this patch.
The performance is pretty good. But with larger empires your load on your cpu gets up af. because every little thing is simulated in the whole universe. These are thousands of ships flying around and calculations done for the economy. The problem is, the most people focus on CPU cores and not per core performance. And there is how you get more performance in game. Getting bigger GPUs is not making a difference. I upgraded from 2070 super to 4070 super, no difference in FPS. Now i get a new cpu focused on per core performance.
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.
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..
Have a question for you Sir Captain. I watched your review of vkb gladiator nxt evo with "star citizen". What was the result when you tried (7.00 X4) with the Gladiator nxt? Any issues? I see you have a real expensive HOTAS now.
I’m using one as a left stick in my HOSAS setup. I have it with the angled grip. Works just fine for the money. My right stick is a Virpil warbird-d base with a Thrustmaster A-10 grip. I use vkb pedals too. Great setup.
I don't understand much about it, but shouldn't the game run with the entire CPU of the PC? Since with that it would run much better, since I saw that only 1 CPU process works instead of all of them, I have an i5 13600k with an RTX 4070 and in bases it goes to 40 to 55 FPS and I have it in medium quality with fsr 1 in quality Correct me if I'm not right with this since I don't understand much, I only know that the game is dependent on the processor more than the graphics card😅.
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.
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.
True. The simulating everything doesn't count. Because Elite Dangerous does this also, even on planets and how they correctly rotate in the systems around the stars AND, also handles Multiplayer. So yeah. That just doesn't count.
My computer is mid at best now. It runs an unmodded game absolutely fine, unless I leave the game running on SETA for like 12 hours and it struggles. Even then, if I save it and restart my PC and take a break for like 20 mins it runs fine again. I never really have fleets bigger than 10 destoyers a carrier and maybe 100 fighters, which is already massive overkill for anything you'll face and can kill stations in non-glacial pace. If you mod the game with say Star Wars Interworlds (which is amazing) my game will lag at times but hardly the games fault.
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!
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.
friend of mine asked me why i have framedrops at high traffic stations, my answer was: dude im like... the server and did you see the 500 XL-Traders here? not to mention all the dude flying from and to this point? i think i never ever again will build the "Hub"
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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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
TAA makes moving objects blurry, but it requires less resources than SSAA, and visually almost the same
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.
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.
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.
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.
Defending a bad game design is a very dangerous trend. Developers feel they're not responsible and continue to lay shit under carpet and pretend everything is ok.
Believe me, Egosoft did not perceived this as defending
@viktorvasichkin9318 lets see your optimized universe simulation then my guy. people forget how taxing simulations are. its not an excuse its how the game is. if you dont like it dont buy it.
@@zerotheliger If it's not the exuse, then why bothering answering it?
@@CaptainCollins What egosoft percieve dosent really matter. Because many of their customers obviously perceive it as such.
Don't get me wrong, i love X4, but all this performance jank, combined with a big lack of features no immersive missions/objectives or real story (aka HEAVY wysiwyg sandbox sim.) At least we could expect a somewhat fluid exel sheet simulator.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
I subscribed to a mod removing all civ ships and it drastically increased my FPS
Mod name?
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.
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
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..
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.
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).
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 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).
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
I’m very glad the TAA works so effectively, I have kept most the new graphics settings such as better reflections and high quality glow just because of that. Definitely the occasional blurry spot but it’s not noticeable compared to gaining 40fps and a bunch of graphical fidelity.
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.
Taking out factionsbig amount of ships helps massively with the tick rate. I several times ended up in terrible stutter in late game when owning a massive military-industrial complex. Once I understood the server tick issuem, I used that and simply launched a campaign or two to cut down or eliminate one or two factions and that solved it.
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.
taa gave me a HUGE performance boost. Could make multiple settings higher and still got better performance
You are correct. You must really control things and keep the number of ships down in quantity to keep refresh FPS at a good level. It kills my game at some point once I explore to much or build to much. graphic card is already set low. But still it fails over time
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
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
i had this described years ago that the old anti aliasing and the rest of the settings were made for up to 1080p, the dlss and amd equivalents are for 1440p upwards, there was a graphics settings indepth dive a few years back somewhere on youtube that explains it all properly indepth, but a lot of settings will try to use both and cause massive problems when one is meant to replace the other, or just doesnt actually work unless you are on the higher resolution screens.
What you forgot to mention here is that the engine also changed in 6.0, where they went from an engine they have been used to and updating since 1999 to the blender based system they are now using, so all the updates took several steps backwards. There was always the in sector (IS) and out of sector (OoS) calculations where it swaps between physics based calculations to purely mathematical calculations, but now there is also in sector out of sight (ISOoS) calculations where positioning is needed to be a little more accurate and 3 dimensional while not needing all the physics, non of these calculations have reacted well to people thinking that they can run 3 to 6 screens all at 2k to 4k resolutions with maybe one set to 1080p for watching twitch and chatting ... the more screens you have at different resolutions also causes your OS to say "wait, we need to juggle this"
Mods can heavily impact the game too, if your running mods that increase even just the economy you will lose FPS
They build more ships, more activity... guessing you can see why mods can lag, pick and choose carefully... start stacking the wrong mods even though they might seem usefull and you will end up losing up to 40 fps
I love modded experiences, most games I can install up to 400+ mods without performance issues but you can't with X4
If your FPS isn't the best with vanilla definelty don't add anything to do with "economy boost" and "heavy war starts" just do gameplay and balance changes
I've played since the beginning of X2 and can say that X universe games are the most amazing sims I've ever experienced. Every thing they do is F'ing Magic (FM). I can do some impressive software design. I can't even begin to explain how they manage the simulation of an entire universe.
i deal with the "map server ticks", but lag when you visit your huge 1 big station for all production is so frustrating 😢
got 80 fps in empty sector, 30-50 in massive fight, but 5 fps in the middle of my hudge station (10-30 modules by products, all race/products/food in same station, maybe 100-200 traders with tons of mods, specially for trade), whatever graphic setting i use (low to ultra, fps stay at 5), i heard even last CPU and graphic card 2024 wouldn't change that (mine is 7700k@5ghz/gtx1080)
Maybe will try your tips for my next start: small stations spaced 40km
My issue is more surrounding core optimisation. Right now it is too heavily dependant on a single core. I'm hoping they can eventually change this. I proposed a while ago that in future iterations they could split the game into slices/quadrants where they each get their own core, then have a single game core that only focuses on exchanging data between those cores/slices. Could even further refine it with another core dedicated to just the sector you are in. Essentially though, the idea is that the game breaks itself up into smaller 'servers' and then meshes them with a single core for handover.
Would allow scalability where performance then becomes strictly dependent on how many cores you have.
Good info but the real issue is that the old engine can only use at most two cores where the data is further distributed to the other cores. This produces the lag. Once these 2 cores are choked so goes the game performance as the GPU will just be waiting for data from the CPU. I noticed this even if I lower the graphical settings, the GPU usage goes as low as 30% while my CPU is about 20% ( 2 cores sweating it out while the 6 cores are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the data) and my fps is still tanking at 30fps. Try doing a battle scene - an 8 core cpu with HT would reflect low overall CPU usage, low GPU usage and fps is still crawling at 30fps. The game should be able to use all cores simultaneously but it is not. This is an engine limitation. It is what it is because of an old engine. So the strategy game could now become think most of the time, explore - to a limited extent, build - uh oh, fight - duhhh, trade - ooops...
What I have noticed is once you have A LOT of ships, the game really struggles and became more or less unplayable in map view. When I say a lot of ships, I'm talking about 5000+ ships. So one tip here is to start replacing smaller ships with larger ones, for example L miners and L traders instead of only M miners and traders (not to mention S ships...). Use carriers for your S and M fighters. And for stations, you don't need connectors everywhere so that can save up on FPS with megaplexes, especially in-sector. So far, this current game is running fine for me with most settings on max (although I did recently upgrade my PC... Helps).
Your 5000 ships PLUS all the ships that they see. Yes sir, that's a heavy load for a simulation.
@@CaptainCollins would be easier with multi-threading.
So, we have
online - 40km radius
offline - when we see icons in map
offline offline - when map closed
We know, that battle calculations are different for "online" and "offline".
And i ask you: have we are differences between "offline" and "offline offline"?
Very nice Explanation video.
I must say that since the latest 'Pre-Timelines' build game runs a lot better ... at least on my Rig
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.
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.
So if I read you correctly, the engine also just doesn't unload assets that are not needed anymore because of distance etc.?
I like to teleport to a ship parked in the middle of nowhere when I'm using the map for management. Not that my FPS has ever been really bad. It's just peaceful. and there are some pretty views in X4, I'll just orbit Earth. Which is why I wish there was more ship intiriors like with the Astrid. It's the ship I use most often because you can actually walk around it. Hang out at the desk and manage the fleet from the map, or just stand there by the bed watching Earth rotate, Or tyring to find that little valley colony on mars, & wondering what that white pimple on the planet is.
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.
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
Hi ; With TAA, i gained between 25/35 fps with apparent same quality. It's huge and welcomed.
Pause the game while on map or just put offline trade and mining if you dont need it. Most of ressources while on map are taken by the trade and mining filter which, lets be honnest, takes a lot of ressources
One further thing that I've noticed that you didn't seem to cover in this video; In sector collisions seem to take up a lot of CPU power, particularly in asteroid heavy sectors. If you choose not to drive your own ship (IE hire a pilot and let them fly you around while you do empire management) these collisions aren't calculated in the same way and my FPS goes up a ton.
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..
My processor isn't very good, but I can play reasonably well if I take a few precautions.
On the maps I deactivate all icons, I try to keep my view close to the sectors, thus avoiding taking the image of all sectors, which slows down the map, I also avoid showing the menu that shows commercial ships, mining ships, etc.. already that on my PC this seems to require too much.
As for the game itself, I have always liked factories that are focused on just one type of production and are more compact, never build a factory that produces several things because I know that this would affect my fps, small factories, even though they are close together, almost do not affect my fps .
Might need to pickup on this game again. Only thing I care about is the fleet AI. How’s the AI doing now? Does jump delay, turn rate still make a very disorganized fleet?
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.
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 love to build massive shipyards and manufacturing Starbases, and the game lets me know it does not appreciate that, haha!
That is my fault, and I cannot expect different results, unless I forked out the cash for a super computer. If you build like a reasonable person, and don't try to field massive fleets around enormous space fortresses, the game tends to run pretty well. I would love it if the game could support that, but with limitations of hard and software, that isn't going to happen with the game looking as good as it does.
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.
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.
Thank you, this totally explains why my Hub or gigantic station at Getsu Fune is super laggy, since I built an everything-in-one station, lol.
The explanation of TAA was very good. I have actually some short frame drops in 7.00. especially in sectors with a higher asset density. In the first years of x4 there was a memory leak and you had to restart the game after 1 or 2 hours, but that is fixed. Now i have no other performance issues. I play on a laptop in 1k with 64 gb ram and intel 11th series.
Thank you, I got it explained by Bernd himself and how they did it.
@@CaptainCollins Frag doch mal Bernd ob es Pläne gibt X für die Zukunft zu sichern. So als Stiftung oder so. Ich spiele die Games seit dem 1. Teil. Wäre echt blöd wenn Egosoft mal aus personellen oder wirtschaftlichen Gründen dicht machen muss. Es ist immer noch das beste Game ever. Trotz Bugs.
Uh, I always figured that the reason why the ships more distant to you where not appearing to move smoothly was just because you where receiving the position with some lag (as in a in universe reasoning for this) and not because the game was "badly optimized" or something... As for the "lag" on the map (as in the time to react to your input), I never noticed any but then again I tend to give up the game after a while and start anew so I never have a massive super space empire going on...
good points thank you for the clarification particularly with the whole idea with the map, I never stopped to consider the server idea honestly tyvm
I thought this but then I played the game with zero mods. It performs great even in large battles even if I spam a sector full of stations and ships. You can't get 144 fps when it's under that level of load but it's not running at 30 fps like it is when it's heavily modded.
Another thing is X4 never utilises more than 5 threads. Currently I have i7-12700f and when I played X4 5.0 with my old stock cooler my cpu temperature was at ~70-90 C. I looked up why that's the case and discovered aforementioned problem. Now I have big tower cooler so I need not worry about my cpu overheating and manually assigning threads to X4 via task manager, but still I would like for X4 to use full capability of my CPU.
P.S. It was at the time of 5.0, so maybe Egosoft have solved it, but I stopped looking into it for the reasons above =/
There are ways to improve this further, but they have to change the way they do calculations / handle simulations in the backend.
For example, the economy of the game is extremely heavy on cpu time because each ship searches multiple stations at the same time, for where to drop it's cargo / pickup cargo from.
How about that gets simplified with universal buy / sell orders?
For example (simplified version):
- Stations advertise in ONE place for the faction they are part of, the resources they need and the resources they have for sale
- NPC ships of the same faction have access to this list, so they either randomly fill those requests in, or via some algorithm, but the important thing is they scan only ONCE for the resource requirements. (this doesn't sound bad, until you realize the universe can have thousands of stations / thousands of ships)
- Player may or may not be given access to this list (should be given to it, at least via the trading ships)
"How would that improve performance?"
- Currently, 1 ship has cargo to sell, it then looks at:
1. Stations it has access to, if they require the cargo
2. Repeat step 1 until all stations have been accounted for (if there's 1000 stations it has access to, it will search 1000 stations)
3. Select the best from the list it just pulled and act on it
Now imagine having 5000 ships in the universe doing the same thing, with 1000 stations
Result: 5000x1000 5,000,000 constant calculations (just for trading).
- The "different" method would be:
1. 1000 stations advertise their buy / sell orders in one place
2. 5000 ships look at the 1 place where the stations put the prices in (1 ship takes 1 order from the list)
3. Each ship "marks" 1 buy order as unavailable for others (something like taken), and if the ship cancels / gets destroyed, order gets released
Result: 1000stations + (1order x 5000ships) = 6000 constant calculations for trading (this frees up 4994000 calculations)
Why not multiply?
Because the station orders don't need to be recalculated every time a ship needs to scan, this is only done once by every ship (as if you have only 1 station with all the resources)
This will also remove the ships "standing idle" outside in space doing nothing while they scan.
And yes, different approaches can be done for everything else as well, and that will improve the performance even more.
Trade stations exist for that. This would introduce a different set of issues. Using the trade station as the universal place, and the only place to make trades, if the trade station were to be destroyed/lost, everything upstream that contributes to the trade station (particularly factories) would break down. In that imagined instance, we're assuming the upstream have a forced role to ship their goods to the trade station to then create a market. If that's the case, that "universal trade hub" has to be indestructible. Also, it has to be a type of "neutral zone" where no interactions could potentially disrupt that, until after a piece (trader) leaves that neutral zone. Otherwise, it'd be a constant pulling the list, causing its own problem.
The trade station already performs the duty of requesting fill orders, but I won't go into great details. Factories work in a method to fulfill the trade station requests. If a trade station is removed, the factories cannot sell/deliver their goods in your method. The fallback action is to allow the factories to also have their own market, to keep their wares delivered. It's like telling a farmer he can't sell his stuff to other people without needing a 3rd party/Supermarket to do so. That's just weird, when you can bypass the middle-man/Supermarket and go straight to the source/farmer and buy his goods directly, and most likely at a cheaper rate.
All in all, that's the lite version. On 3, it's already there, after the ships make a pull, they reserve their trade. No one else can touch it, and it's marked off the list. And yes, if the ship is destroyed/canceled, it gets released. While I could cover more in detail, I don't feel like it atm. Generally speaking, what you're suggesting is already there, with a few things on the side. Though, a trade query isn't going to be the most heavy calculation bottlenecking the game. "Standing idle" would actually be useful since there is the least amount of calculation needed, but that would make the game appear dumb by community standards. If your ships get to that point, you should be removing them from service, freeing up CPU power for others that need it more. It's like road construction crew, paying 5 guys to stand around while one 1 is doing all the work. Remove the 5 standing around doing nothing, dedicate more resource to the 1 guy to be more efficient and effective.
X4 is an amazing run without a single issue. Do not understand your video. Perhaps you run some aged pc from 2015 😅
Maybe not,,, mine is aged from 2013. And R9 200 gpu 16 gb cpu. X4 runs no problem..
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.
Capt. Iam currently running Ryzen 3 with 16 gb ram RTX 1060 video card absolutely 👍 no issues at all 🎉
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 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.
I've got over 1500 hrs in this game. I've never had any serious problems with this game. I've only ever once built a mega complex and it was in Faulty Logic. It was about 500km from the gate. I put it out that far so I didn't have to worry about the highway or anything else causing my game any problems. I'm also playing on a laptop that's 5 years old that came out a year or two earlier. It should be common sense that if you put a bunch of stuff somewhere in ANY game it's going to cause problems. How many sandwiches did someone spawn in Stanfield to make the game crash? Same thing.
I started playing X4 on an i5-2500 processor and I didn't have much issues.
But perhaps I'm a bit...generous in my expectations since I also played X3 Litcube's Universe on the same computer.
Playing X3 Star Wars LU however...well, my system simply told me "No can do!"
I think a big issue is that they have SOOOOO many resources that are just kind of being underutilized and just keep adding more and more and more.
Honestly if they gutted the code and broke savegames it would anger a bunch of people but I think that's probably what needs to be done to really fix things.
i don't think it'd require that, given saves are in XML format. Using that format to handle savegames more or less ensures you can do just about anything other than changing the name of ship types and it won't break saves. They just need to implement multi-threading.
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 think it's because I attack with groups of like 80 Behemoths/Phoenixs, and 100+ varied M sized ships. Yeah. Thats probably it.
I played a LOT with Kingdom end on my gaming rig. Had battles with fleets of more than 100 ships and NEVER had a problem with stutter and not much with lag. Booted up a new game on the current patch 10/09/2024 and Just flying my ship by the Xenon gate in Hatikvah's choice causes stuttering, lag, and jumping ships. don't even think about engaging in combat, trying to line up shots on a Xenon M while the video goes choppy and the ship is doing mini teleports is useless. I am running it on a mid range rig with an I7 12.4ghz RTX 3070 and 32gb ram. In my experience they have dropped the performance ball pretty badly on this patch.
If Egosoft uses FSR, DLSS would be a downgrade from that. It's a lower tech version of the same thing.
The performance is pretty good. But with larger empires your load on your cpu gets up af. because every little thing is simulated in the whole universe. These are thousands of ships flying around and calculations done for the economy.
The problem is, the most people focus on CPU cores and not per core performance. And there is how you get more performance in game. Getting bigger GPUs is not making a difference. I upgraded from 2070 super to 4070 super, no difference in FPS.
Now i get a new cpu focused on per core performance.
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.
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.
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 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...??
Have a question for you Sir Captain. I watched your review of vkb gladiator nxt evo with "star citizen". What was the result when you tried (7.00 X4) with the Gladiator nxt? Any issues? I see you have a real expensive HOTAS now.
I’m using one as a left stick in my HOSAS setup. I have it with the angled grip. Works just fine for the money. My right stick is a Virpil warbird-d base with a Thrustmaster A-10 grip. I use vkb pedals too. Great setup.
I don't understand much about it, but shouldn't the game run with the entire CPU of the PC? Since with that it would run much better, since I saw that only 1 CPU process works instead of all of them, I have an i5 13600k with an RTX 4070 and in bases it goes to 40 to 55 FPS and I have it in medium quality with fsr 1 in quality
Correct me if I'm not right with this since I don't understand much, I only know that the game is dependent on the processor more than the graphics card😅.
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.
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.
True. The simulating everything doesn't count. Because Elite Dangerous does this also, even on planets and how they correctly rotate in the systems around the stars AND, also handles Multiplayer. So yeah. That just doesn't count.
Would've been nice if game wouldn't simulate entire sectors every time a pilot video calls me
My computer is mid at best now. It runs an unmodded game absolutely fine, unless I leave the game running on SETA for like 12 hours and it struggles. Even then, if I save it and restart my PC and take a break for like 20 mins it runs fine again.
I never really have fleets bigger than 10 destoyers a carrier and maybe 100 fighters, which is already massive overkill for anything you'll face and can kill stations in non-glacial pace.
If you mod the game with say Star Wars Interworlds (which is amazing) my game will lag at times but hardly the games fault.
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 ;)
i spend more time on the map managing my fleet than i spend in cockpit flying myself
thats where the problem is
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!
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.
friend of mine asked me why i have framedrops at high traffic stations, my answer was: dude im like... the server and did you see the 500 XL-Traders here? not to mention all the dude flying from and to this point?
i think i never ever again will build the "Hub"
Or: build it and never visit it (like a true CEO xD)
They need to give us an option like "my comp sucks pls stop simulating the economy and give me a fake economy that doesn't tank my computer"