Performance Question

[sheepsy90]

Hello everyone,

I recently picked up the game and after playing the base version for two runs up to around cycle 150-200 and making some major mistakes I decided to give the DLC a try. I am currently running a base on cycle 300 with the DLC having two bases (main planet with 6 dupes) and 2 dupes on the secondary one. I started two rockets with CO2 and have revealed big chunks of the main map. I also send a rover to the third planet.

However I now experience quite the lag in the game and I wonder what can cause that. I have a lot of gasses around and read about previous issues in a 2019 thread about performance regarding the demanding calculations. You can find my system specs below but my main question here is where the problem lies - is it me? the alpha? the game itself?

Specs:

- Intel i7-7820HQ CPU @2.90 GHz

- DDR4 2400 16 GB in two banks

- NVIDIA GM108M [GeForce940MX]

 

I really enjoy the game but if it is not playable long term through to cycle 1000+ that's a little bit of a downer. Maybe it is simply the alpha being a debug build? What are your thoughts? Do you have had better experience without the DLC - should I maybe go back to the base game for a while?

Best wishes

// Sheepsy90

 

 

 

 

[sheepsy90]

Oh btw. I forgot to mention that almost everything outside my base is slimelung infected polluted dirt mixed with all sorts of other gasses. Wondering if the germs calculation has something to do with that as well.

[sheepsy90]

I turned my network off in the middle of the game. Now it stopped lagging - mazbe some network IO waiting issue?

[SharraShimada]

Okay... where to start... i guess its a laptop, because thats a mobile CPU.

So we have a huge list of possible problems here. But the most common:

1. Your laptop may run hot, and then throttle the CPU, which results in poor performance. The CPU can boost up to 3.9GHz, but only for a very limited time, and then its back to 2.9GHz, on a rather older CPU architecture.  You may want to download a tool like GPU-z to watch the temperatures. Everything below ~80°C should be fine, but the CPU will not boost (which is pretty useless for games though). Everything above it, may cause the CPU to throttle its clock speed, and then you lose.

2. Your hard drive. What do you use? Is it a SSD, or a mechanical drive? Given the specs of the rest, i would guess its still a hard drive. If this is a slow model (5400rpm) and is heavy fragmented, every asset the game requests from the disk, will take a long time, causing performance issues. 

3. Do you play with power plugged in, or from battery? If from battery, try to use the power brick. Windows will just throttle nearly everything to save power when not plugged in.

[sheepsy90]

Hey thanks for taking the time:

1. Yes it is a laptop so yeah i am aware of the throtteling but the usage of the CPU is not that high - however I don't know how to see indivdual core performance on Windows. I can check tmp and see what it does.

2. Its an SSD so shouldn't be the problem.

3. Power plugged in high performance profile selected.

-> As I answered to myself earlier - i turned on Airplane mode for weird reasons it seems to make an improvement.

[sheepsy90]

Well o back to sluggish I think you are right - its at 1.1 - 1.4 GHz Core speed. Will try my older I7 gaming pc later to see if that can keep up with at least 2 Ghz which shoudl be fien then. It's a desktop one and even though its an Intel Core i7 870 with 6gb ram and ddr3 well hopefully it still is better then getting a potatoe out of the field...

[TripLykely]

For what it’s worth, I play on a potato of a laptop and can attest to improved performance by managing gases and debris. While my PC never hums late game it’s playable. It actually seems a bit quicker with the DLC than base game for equivalent cycles. Consolidating storage and sweeping the entire map as you go or once mostly cleared helps as will filtering and isolating your gases.

[nakomaru]

Because we know the problem is your CPU is being throttled due to overheating, you have a strange sort of solution available.

You can try to use ThrottleStop to remove the throttling, but it is still going to throttle no matter what at 95C. Instead, what you can do with this tool is add a custom lower throttle, like 2GHz, so you can always play at a medium level of performance without facing that horrible 1GHz lag. This is what I did with my last laptop until I made another desktop.

Unfortunately, laptops are only as powerful as their cooling for high end processors.

[boiledDupe]

I had onedrive for documents sync turned on and it was chewing threw n/w since the saves are in Documents/Klei.  I worked around this by creating a conflict in onedrive so sync would skip for that folder (you can't turn off sync in a sub folder and preserve it on the machine :shrug:)

Same could be true if you have other cloud storage / file history turned on.

Is the debris a big perf hit?  I don't sweep too often, but maybe I'll make a dump pit (sweep only + auto dispenser + pit).

[Jann5s]

i play on a potato too and can attest that cleaning up debris helps a lot, next would be vacuuming out large areas that you don't need (or brick them in). Lastly, you can put automation to make sure long pipes are empty, i.e., only start the flow on demand, but this is a bit more work for less frame returns.

About your question on what to expect. ONI mostly runs on a single core (more like 1.5 if you are lucky) so in general it heavily relies on single core performance. I guess it is relatively easier for laptops as they are thermally constrained to load up many cores. However, don't expect any magic. Klei will probably find some performance when working on the DLC, but my guess is that it will be of the order of a few percent perhaps a dozen. In short, late game is bound to be a slideshow of you lack the CPU power.

[SharraShimada]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Because we know the problem is your CPU is being throttled due to overheating, you have a strange sort of solution available.

You can try to use ThrottleStop to remove the throttling, but it is still going to throttle no matter what at 95C. Instead, what you can do with this tool is add a custom lower throttle, like 2GHz, so you can always play at a medium level of performance without facing that horrible 1GHz lag. This is what I did with my last laptop until I made another desktop.

Unfortunately, laptops are only as powerful as their cooling for high end processors.

I would strongly advice not to use such tools. Throttling is for a reason, and that means it prevents itself from overheating. Yes it may be a bit too much of an impact, but if you tinker with it, you risk damaging the thing, and thats not worth it. 

Considering the age of the laptop, i guess its full of dust. Cleaning would help. Another thing would be a cooling pad (just a pad with additional fans to put your laptop on) to help the internal cooling by moving the heat away from the case.

[babba]

Hey @sheepsy90

If I would be my notebook then I would flex the sides open, so that only the keyboard and display are held in position.

As alternative you could fly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irkutsk

...Just make sure you had no humidity inside your case, playing outside at minus 58 Fahrenheit ( to avoid thermal throttling ).

Once the fans jam up, override everything in your Bios !!! Make sure to run an SSD, to avoid HDD disk freeze.

Can you please also bring me some Plutonium along ? Klei promised me radiation, perhaps you can bring some along from one of the swimming reactors ? Don`t play on battery, directly hook up to the reactor.

Happy ONi ! BTW great profile, I love it

[Gun4fun]

@sheepsy90 u can also use cooling pad for your notebook - good one will cost u like 25$. I'm using one with 200mm fan and it helped me a lot keeping my Clevo with i7 and 2xGTX980M in SLI cool. I know it's not cheap for some ppl, but consider it as a solution which will help other games too

[babba]

Good idea

Also remove the battery, its an additional heat blocker. Remove all case lids, open up all holes. It`s ONi in real life, strip everything which blocks and makes heat. If you got a nice cold heavy metal table - Good location If you find an AETN in your home, hook your notebook up to that

[Swoop5994]

i hope we will be able to pause background bases in futures updates. that would help for sure.

 

[The Plum Gate]

@sheepsy90, you may try opting out of the data collection and use. I don't know if that's possible, but there are references to opt in opt in ideep in the configuration files. Maybe something called data collection. You might also want to turn off cloud saves as well.

I don't know if it's possible to opt out of the data collection, but it's worth a shot.

The more of the map you expose, the more calculations there are, I'm sure having germs on every single object isn't helping, but it may help to store as much debris as possible. Take a look at your materials overlay ( the square ), and cycle through the categories, if there are spots where elements are moving rapidly in the simulation, the you have lots of calculations revolving around those areas as well.

Room calculation can also be tricky - so make sure space is closed.

The number one thing that causes odd behaviour in my games is when modifying networks of liquids or ventilation pipes - this always causes hitching in that particular system.

Duplicant priorities can also be interfering with gameplay - the pathfinding and decision making processes can be interrupted by proximity regardless of the priorities involved. So make your duplicant priorities skill related and consider simplifying the pathfinding of housed critters.

I noticed the logs for the game indicate there are f threads running for ONI, does anyone know how to increase these threads count?

[nakomaru]

2 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

I would strongly advice not to use such tools. Throttling is for a reason, and that means it prevents itself from overheating. Yes it may be a bit too much of an impact, but if you tinker with it, you risk damaging the thing, and thats not worth it. 

Considering the age of the laptop, i guess its full of dust. Cleaning would help. Another thing would be a cooling pad (just a pad with additional fans to put your laptop on) to help the internal cooling by moving the heat away from the case.

1. As I mentioned, you cannot override the hardware level throttle at 95C. I can imagine damaging an underpowered power supply by removing the manufacturer's throttle, but it's nearly impossible to damage an i7 through heat with this.

2. That's not what I was recommending anyway. Read again.　↓

5 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Instead, what you can do with this tool is add a custom lower throttle, like 2GHz

What I am saying is you can use this to set your CPU to run at a lower, medium level frequency which won't overheat, which is far better than ping-ponging between 3.9GHz and 800MHz. And I have used this tool to solve the exact problem the OP is having. Obviously this does not preclude obvious advice like cleaning it and not resting it on a shag carpet.

[babba]

17 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

...and not resting it on a shag carpet.

I want, I want !

[gabberworld]

dlc is in develop mode if im not mistaken, there is running huge debug at backround, soo yes you may see some performance drop.

it's in debug mode because developers hunting the bugs. they disable that in release build

[sheepsy90]

@all Thanks a lot for all your input. @babba I hope it will snow soon here in #Sweden but yeah otherwise I need to find a liquid nitrogen tank o.O

No but seriously - I think all of your input is very helpful. However I went with a different solution.

-> I am using GeForce Now which streams the Game and it is really really fast. I can actually recommend it -  it only does 1920x1080 - meh - but otherwise if you have trouble with any lags in ONI -> its 24$ for 6 month which is definitely worth it.

// Thx again @all comments