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Force the game to use DX9


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4 hours ago, Lutzkhie said:

The game relies a lot on CPU and not on GPU so forcing it to DX9 wont make any changes to the performance.... I think

Correct.

 

8 hours ago, xkzt0 said:

Can I force the game to use DX9? I'm having problems

Forcing the game to use DX9 won't solve anything.  Most games out there today have performance problems because of the graphics interface.  ONI does not have this particular problem.  The graphics are relatively simple and straightforward.  There isn't any complex 3d shading going on and even the most basic video cards should be just fine handling the graphical load of ONI.

INSTEAD, ONI uses a LOT of the CPU's computational power, and this is where the performance problems come in.  Every cell that has been explored has a series of computations performed on it every 'tick' of the game -- which appears to be 4 times a second. 

Another bottleneck is memory bandwidth.  All CPUs have a memory cache that they temporarily store the data they're currently working on.  Most of the time, this data is pre-cached and available right when the CPU needs it.  However, because of ONI's huge number of calculations, this cache is being emptied and refilled almost continually.  The data comes from your RAM, which is much slower than your CPU.  Thus swapping data from the CPU to the RAM becomes a performance bottle neck.

A third bottleneck for performance is the total available memory of the system.  With ONI and Chrome running, my system uses about 8.7gb of RAM.  On a 1500 cycle base, my system has been using around 10gb.  I have 16gb available, so this is not a problem.  However, a few patches ago when there was a memory leak, it was possible for me to run all the way up to the capacity of my RAM.  At that point, disk-swapping would start to occur and performance would tank.  If your system has 8gb of RAM or less, you may be running into this particular problem.

 

In other threads, we've shown that and older processor can do as well or sometimes even better than newer CPUs when dealing with ONI simply because of how the newer processors are optimized.   For example, I have an i5-2690s from around 2015 that will gladly run at 60fps for most of my game play.  This is partially due to the fact that newer processors are optimized for multi-threaded operation -- which definitely improves performance for most modern applications and operating systems.  However, because ONI is running calculation after calculation, it benefits from single-threaded optimizations.  Thus the older processors, which were optimized that way, tend to do slightly better.  Others have also shown that the memory bandwidth to the CPU itself can increase/decrease performance.    DDR3-1600 performs better than DDR3-1333, and triple-channel performs better than dual-channel slot configurations.  Removing my GeForce and using my motherboard's intel graphics option did not change the performance of ONI at all (though it pretty much killed all other games I run). 

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