Performance Help

[N0nprofitpuma]

Hey guys

I've found that early on in the game I can maintain a solid 60fps but the larger my colony gets, the worse my performance is. I have a colony of 32 duplicants and my frame rate hovers around 20 and reaches single digits. All I have running is ONI and Steam. Anything I can do to improve performance? I've attatched a copy of my dxdiag results for reference. I've also tried running in windowed mode instead of fullscreen. 

DxDiag.txt

[vonVile]

Get rid of 2 dozen Dupes. There's no reason to have more than 6-8 Dupes running a colony.

[Lifegrow]

15 hours ago, vonVile said:

Get rid of 2 dozen Dupes. There's no reason to have more than 6-8 Dupes running a colony.

Wait, what ?

How can you possibly say that - I've got colonys that span half the asteroid - with some of them it takes almost a full cycle just to cross from left to right

[Ted n Emily]

I am also having a performance problem where as after about 120 cycles the game starts taking more and more memory (actually it also happens if I run the game for more then an hour) until I can no longer run the game at any speed other then normal or the sound goes funny and it eventually slows down so much that I have to use system manager to close the game.  I am using build 210794, so if this problem has been fixed in further releases this won't be an issue.  Changing screen res does not help.

TnE

 

DxDiag.txt

[vonVile]

9 minutes ago, Ted n Emily said:

I am using build 210794, so if this problem has been fixed in further releases this won't be an issue.  Changing screen res does not help.

Thermal Update has made the memory problem way more manageable. If you don't want to update to the TU Beta and stay with what you have until the update next comes out, which will be very soon, the best thing to do is don't use the Overlay buttons at the top right and instead use the build creation overlays to see pipes, wiring, and gases.

[Ted n Emily]

I am using the T U.  I did notice a better memory usage though, the older version would start with about 3gig of memory, but the T U version starts with way less, but over time still takes more and more mem, even if nothing is happining and the dups are idle

 

[Lifegrow]

I've said this a number of times, and also shown it on stream - some of the easiest ways to lag the holy hell out of your game (from my findings) are as follows :-

1. Having ridiculous amounts of "unreachable" dig orders, with only 3-4 reachable tiles, i.e. a 4 high strip mine that spans half the asteroid in width. 
2. Having lots of build orders in an non-dug out area, i.e. planning your huge electrolyzer factory in a frost biome that you havn't dug out yet. (proved this on Belaneers stream like 3 nights ago - he built about 1000 ladders and instantly shat the bed)  
3. Vast amounts of unintelligent piping, i.e. piping where the gas packets appear to "bounce" at t-junctions or dodgy connections.
4. Huge amounts of unswept material on floors, or huge amounts of high priority sweep commands but with no available compactors.
5. The moving of huge bodies of water over mixed-liquid tiles - i.e. the wibbly wobbly pure water/polluted water battle royale.

I have never experienced lag due to dupe number - most i've gone to is 50 dupes. I don't have a monster computer, nor do I build tiny bases. I'm aware that youtubers have done "100 dupe disaster bases" etc, and of course - the lag was unbearable, however they were confined to a 4x16 start area or something daft and spawned in like lemmings...

I do experience lag from time to time, but I know what's causing it, and it's fixed once I stop the 14 projects i'm working on and either have a good sweep up, or let my dupes get some stuff built/dug - everyone can be impatient  

[Moggles]

Regarding overlays I experience big performance drops with the power overlay.

I can force my FPS right down by switching between thermal and power overlays. If I hold middle mouse and rapidly move the camera around when in power overlay mode I can still see the thermal overlay behind it on the edges of my screen. The more I switch between the two and drag around the power overlay the worse it gets.

After a few hours of regular play using overlays my power overlay is crippling and I find it best to restart the game.

Has anyone else noticed this? I wonder if the overlays are stacking on top of each other.

 

Edit: It's not just the power overlay where I can see thermal overlay artefacts it's most of them to be honest. Power is just the worst performance.

[Ted n Emily]

I am having an issue with not being able to play above speed one when I get to around cycle 100 and it's very busy, the sound gets all weard, kind of jerky like and eventually (with less then a minute) the game lags so bad it is unplayable. I have read the above stuff from lifegrow and I do have lots of unswept stuff so I will work on that but I don't think that will get rid of the problem, it's not memory, at that  point it is using less then 2gig of my 5gig of memory.  I will do some cleaning up and get back to this post.

 

[Ted n Emily]

DxDiag.txt

 

oops, that was suppose to go in the above post.

 

[AlexRou]

2 minutes ago, Ted n Emily said:

DxDiag.txt

 

oops, that was suppose to go in the above post.

 

Your CPU is very weak, your graphics card is one of the weakest possible you can buy.

Not related but your RAM has a odd value 5120MB RAM, usually people have 2 or 4 sticks of RAM each with the same capacity.

 

The lags that happens when playing for a very long time are usually due to memory leaks which you have confirmed to not be the case (since it's only an hour or less), in those situations restarting the game helps.

Lags that happen soon after starting are usually due to your CPU not being good enough you can confirm by looking at the CPU usage (look at one graph per core not overall usage, if even one core is near 100% it will lag). The other cause for lags is the graphics card, but in ONI's situation it is more likely to be the CPU, but this does not mean the graphics card is not also contributing to the problem.

 

So based on your specs there is little you can do that would help without getting new parts at this stage of game development. You can try closing every other program but not sure how helpful that would be.

 

Also please buy the game, reaching cycle 100 means you've put in a considerable amount of time into the game. I'd say that is worth $20 even if you cannot play past cycle 100 for now. If you indeed bought the game then I apologize, but you have shown no indication to have done so since posting about buying the game.

[Ted n Emily]

First off, thanks for the reply, much appreciated it, I suspected it was my system, sigh, it is probably 10 years old, when playing the game the cpu usage is around 84% and memory is less then 1/2 of what I have.  I did go into task manager and toasted pretty much everything I could, didn't make a diff.  But I am starting a new game and keeping in mind the 5 things lifegrow mentioned.  I purchased a new video card (this one) about a year ago, wasn't sure if I should get a better one for this old system.  (there  is no point in having a 200 watt speaker connected to a walkman, hehe)

 

I had planned on purchasing the game about 2 days after I started playing it, and today I did (yeaaa)  To play this game and not purchase it would be an insult to the good peeps that made it, and to the people who support it.  (And good for you for saying that, I totally agree)  I can give you the receipt number if you like.  I have no problem  paying for a great game, even on the incredibly low monthy budget I have.  It was the first purchase I have made through steam and was a bit cautious , but it looks fine.  I don't know much about steam, do you have to actually have an internet connection to play ONI?

Thanks good peeps for your help.

 

[AlexRou]

Firstly no, steam allows you to play offline but you need to sign in at least once online and set it to remember you. (I have not tested ONI offline but it makes sense that it should run offline, it uses the internet to send some information to klei so idk if it will crash if there is no internet)

And no I wouldn't put in a new graphics card into that machine as it will not help you since the CPU is so weak.

And you've made one of the worst possible choice for a graphics card in terms of performance per $. This video explains that the performance of a ~$50 graphics card is not even 1/3 the performance of a ~$100 graphics card. With what you have, if you want to play any modern game with decent graphics at a decent FPS, I would suggest you go out and buy a new PC. For gaming you need to spend at least $1500 - $2000 for a decent PC that will be good enough for almost any game that comes out in the next few years. You might make it with $800 - $1000 but that is using older parts and some second hand parts. ($ are in USD)

Or if you only want to play games like ONI a >$800 machine might do it depending on if you can find the right parts for the right price.

 

[Ted n Emily]

I didn't really choose to buy it, the old one died and I just replaced it for 30 bucks, but thanks for the advice, it will be a long time before I can afford a real machine.

 

BUT... thanks to the advice from 'lifegrow', I started a new game and kept up with the sweeping (actually I let them do it them selves, I didn't know if you do not check the 'sweep only' they would do that), I found that I had to make probably 40 or more storage units by cycle 100, which means before ,I actually had upwards of a million Kg of stuff lying around, I can now play the game at speed two at cycle 130 with no lag (well, no real problems anyway) it still can not handle full speed, but given my processors, it's no wonder, thanks lifegrow, you made the game way more playable for me.  There is SO much to learn in this game, I love figuring out solutions to the problems that come up, routing pipes and wires, etc.. (thank gawd for autosave)   There are still some bizzare quirks in the game, but that is to be expected in alpha release I am sure.  And I know they will address them and fix them soon.  Playing with the debug stuff is a blast, I noticed there are hot keys you can set for 'plan 7' etc... 'alpha7'  what is the alpha key?

ok, went on a rant here, sorry, bought the game about 20 hours ago and haven't stopped playing it.  Sleep?  What is... Sleep?

forgot to mention, setting the  priority to high in task manager helped, usually doesn't in most cases and causes more problems then it solves

 

[AlexRou]

4 minutes ago, Ted n Emily said:

Playing with the debug stuff is a blast, I noticed there are hot keys you can set for 'plan 7' etc... 'alpha7'  what is the alpha key?

Can you screenshot that?

[Ted n Emily]

yep,... O geez, after I just put that file in here I figure it out, alpha 7 means the 7 on the top row of keys and not the keypad, I think.

 

[AlexRou]

5 minutes ago, Ted n Emily said:

yep,... O geez, after I just put that file in here I figure it out, alpha 7 means the 7 on the top row of keys and not the keypad, I think.

Well at least now you know :P, if its the keypad it will usually say num.

[Ted n Emily]

Yep, just tested that, get out your crayola crayon and color me thick, sorry for wasting your time on that one, after 24 hours of non stop playing, I shall refrain from posting more question, ugg