How is the performance of ONI?

[TheGCat]

When i see the reaction, i should maybe change the word again.

By the way, the part:

having deals with CPU manufacturers to sell "$2000 CPUs was a joke. How is it possible, that u don't notice it ? Are u a serious person without humor ? U have to be calm down and think about your own reactions.

 

[t0panka]

Guys guys chill lets keep the discussion on topic PLZ

 

Damn i didnt know its this bad. Now im curious how it will really run on my machine so i will install anyway

 

FYI i think Klei did say they will do performance updates at the end. I just hoped they did something trough these updates. I think they are well aware that the game has poor performance when people with Ryzens and top of the line Intel CPUs cant run this game steady. I have 100% faith in Klei but im also worried if they can make enough difference that this game will run properly even in late game

 

Also Klei is well known for 100% Early access experience. They did EA for all their games and all of them are awesome IMO. I also played Rimworld for a long time while it was in EA (recently released 1.0) and i never had any problems even with huuuuge bases and i play on MacBook not a desktop

[babba]

AMD has great multicore stuff for work since recently, for games Intel is still King. There is few cpu multicore games, people just don't notice as a lot of games are about graphics, feeding the gpu...With a wide range of cpus doing that job sufficient. Hopefully amd comes up with good single core turbo boost speed values in 2020 or 2021.

If I would be boss of a cpu company, I would design a 6GHz singlecore cpu for gamers with an extreme amount of level 1,2,3 caches.

The large caches are the reason which Xeons perform greatly on single threading(single core software, games) , despite having a zillion cores (unused by most games). 

[Zarquan]

I personally haven't had severe performance issues with ONI on a mobile i7 quad-core from 2015, 4th generation (I think).  ONI isn't multithreaded, so it is only using one core at a time.  I also save to a SATA SSD, which reduces save and load time.  The worst thing that has happened was when I was running a 60 dupe colony and they kept going idle because they weren't getting their turn on the CPU. 

Then again, I rarely run colonies for over 600 cycles because of the update cycle.

I hope they multithread it.  I hope they CUDA it.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Well, I started a new game with the Space Industry upgrade.  I'm only at cycle 300 and have yet to breech the surface, but I've got 10 dupes and a couple ranches.. and my FPS is still 60.  I have a 1700 cycle somewhere from a previous patch that runs at about 48fps with 80% of the map revealed.  That FPS reduction has nothing to do with my graphics card and everything to do with the number of calculations needed for ONI's simulator.

And as @babbahas stated, ONI is a single-threaded application like most games.  This means that I can play ONI while watching Netflix and running Windows in a virtual machine with no change to the performance of the game.

[babba]

Good posts

Ashes of the Singularity is a great cpu multicore game, on such games the non time critical stuff like displaying fancy stuff, explosions etc. can be run from another cpu core, feeding the gpu...That game also had a way larger dev budget and selling success than ONI.

Games with multiplayer give any developer grey hairs anyway.

I've sometimes got WorldOfWarships running on another core as I play ONI.

Some have waited 15 years to have AMD grow strong again.

In 10 years hopefully more general computation besides graphics can be computed by graphic cards. Too much idling gpu power... 

[Oozinator]

Round 2!

[Cipupec2]

3 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Well, I started a new game with the Space Industry upgrade.  I'm only at cycle 300 and have yet to breech the surface, but I've got 10 dupes and a couple ranches.. and my FPS is still 60. 

I am not sure where is the setting to show FPS, but using the latest version, Cycle 496, 12 dupes, most of the map revealed, no space stuff yet, I am running at speed 3 without noticeable issues, with dozen more apps in the background including youtube  

3 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I hope they multithread it.  I hope they CUDA it.

As far as I know multi-threading is the ability to execute multiple tasks under single process, which is extremely common and I bet that ONI is using it (either directly or indirectly though dx for example), while multi-processing is the ability to allocate these task among several CPU cores which is what I believe you refer to.

Anyway, multi-core support might help in ONI (I have no way of knowing), but generally speaking it isn't the sliver bullet that most gamers clamoring for performance believe it is since a lot of major tasks can't be run asynchronously, as far as I know its often used to offload background tasks like loading graphics and running music for example/

5 hours ago, DustFireSky said:

I have just told u my experience with the Early access games in the last years. My experience is how i said the bad results. If the game has a problem in the early access state, it will be mostly not solved at or till the release. U said it by yourself, all these games u named have the same problems. So, how can that be ?

I am not an developer, but as a customer is the only thing that counts, the result. It's not my business why the lategame is so bad, we pay for people, that give us a great game and a game that runs smooth, yes, also in the lategame state.

Factorio for example made a great step forwards about the performance! If i compare Factorio with oxygen not included, i would say, Factorio is the more difficult game to make. And u must build really really big in Factorio to get down the FPS. Just a few % of the players can do that or are willing to do that.

I know what Early Access is, but the most developer think they can abuse the state and excuse all what they do with this. And also the customers are saying all is fine, because it is Early Access. They scream louder at the release and don't understand why the game is released, but not finished. Do u know such situations ?

What is the excuse if the game leave the Early Access and it is still bad yet and not finished ? U can always find excuses for everything.

I am not dismissing your experience, just noting that this is an early access and you are an early adopter with everything that comes with that; That while the non-preview release is more stable it is still an early access; this isn't excuses but the reality of game development, they have a specific workflow and optimizations tend to be the last step (it is silly to waste time optimizing code that you haven't finished working on, or maybe they did but its tied to something else they still didn't released) and that its hard to judge game performance if you are unfamiliar with programming, its not what you see but goes underneath like path finding calculation which is coincidentally the issue with jetpacks and that new animal that people have been complaining about; finally if you don't enjoy the process then may consider excising patience until the final release 

[Cipupec2]

Btw for those looking to optimize performance, make sure that you don't have anything running in the background. I just loaded a cycle 1213 sav posted here, and my game was laggy I looked at the task manager (win: Ctrl+Shift+Esc ) and noticed that I was close to maxing out my memory (which resulted in windoes caching stuff to disk, a major performance hit) but after turning off some background apps I had It runing on speed 3 with minor hickup for saving. (still got chrome with 30tabs on though..)

[babba]

Helpful intended information compilation post

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Boost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Turbo_Core

@

--------------------

...and/or map size generation of 25% and/or filling 50% of tiles with Neutronium. Happy ONI

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

[Zarquan]

2 hours ago, Cipupec2 said:

As far as I know multi-threading is the ability to execute multiple tasks under single process, which is extremely common and I bet that ONI is using it (either directly or indirectly though dx for example), while multi-processing is the ability to allocate these task among several CPU cores which is what I believe you refer to.

Anyway, multi-core support might help in ONI (I have no way of knowing), but generally speaking it isn't the sliver bullet that most gamers clamoring for performance believe it is since a lot of major tasks can't be run asynchronously, as far as I know its often used to offload background tasks like loading graphics and running music for example/

ONI is single threaded. 

Many of the tasks in ONI are either embarrassingly parallel or almost embarrassingly parallel.  For example, the thermal interactions between a tile and the tiles to the corners are unrelated.  Meaning they could be done concurrently.  Same with germ growth rate.  Same with pathfinding.

In fact, it is so parallelizable that I think that some of it could be done on the graphics card.  CUDA works by doing the exact same thing with multiple pieces of data.  This could be done with the thermal calculations and, perhaps, the germ calculations.

Essentially, this is the sort of program that is almost an example you might show in a parallel computing course for what sort of programs should be parallelized. 

However, this does not mean that the current implementation is easily parallelizable.  But the problem itself is easily parallelizable.

[Cairath]

I really hope that you mentioning CUDA is an offtopic show-off of your knowledge and not an actual implementation suggestion... primarily because it is not like CUDA can be run on every GPU.

[Cipupec2]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

However, this does not mean that the current implementation is easily parallelizable.  But the problem itself is easily parallelizable.

You might be right, that in theory its easily parallelizable, but I believe that it is definitely not easily done so in practice hence why its used so rarely. Also keep in mind real life constraints that add to the devs cost benefit equations, like target audience, minimum spec goals, target platforms and availability of mature software supporting that for them (win, linux, mac) etc..

Also that there is really nothing we can do to affect the devs except maybe entertain them with spectacular cat fight. What you can do is make performance guide like: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Maximizing_framerate to help people.

EDIT: BTW screw cats, I am dog person, might post pic of my amazing fake husky later on.

[Zarquan]

35 minutes ago, Cairath said:

I really hope that you mentioning CUDA is an offtopic show-off of your knowledge and not an actual implementation suggestion... primarily because it is not like CUDA can be run on every GPU.

True, but it can run on mine! That would make me happier!

But I think that all GPU makers should implement CUDA or some similar variant because it is so useful when applied to certain cases.  Like this one.

[Cairath]

7 hours ago, Zarquan said:

True, but it can run on mine! That would make me happier!

But I think that all GPU makers should implement CUDA or some similar variant because it is so useful when applied to certain cases.  Like this one.

No, there is a good reason games are not written for CUDA, CUDA threads would timeout before they'd do anything for the game

 

As a fun remark, having programmed for CUDA before, I'd commit sepuku if ONI modding had something to do with it xD

[Zarquan]

9 hours ago, Cairath said:

No, there is a good reason games are not written for CUDA, CUDA threads would timeout before they'd do anything for the game

 

As a fun remark, having programmed for CUDA before, I'd commit sepuku if ONI modding had something to do with it xD

That's true, CUDA would introduce some problems.  One issue could be latency.  Debug fast mode would require at least 50 batches of information every second.  Though the card could do the work, it would have to synchronize once every 1/50th, and that could cause the data to not be ready for the CPU yet.  I need to do some reading on that. 

They won't and probably shouldn't use CUDA, but I would like it if they did, mostly because so few people do and I would like to see it done somewhere in consumer software.  I would like to see the graphics card get more use in standard applications that don't have massive 3d graphics requirements.  But GPU manufacturers would have to agree on a standard before this can happen

I still think they should parallelize with multithreading, as every multicore computer supports it and the problems in the game are almost designed for it.

[t0panka]

16 hours ago, Zarquan said:

But I think that all GPU makers should implement CUDA or some similar variant because it is so useful when applied to certain cases.  Like this one.

CUDA is proprietary BS from Nvidia which doesnt like to play with others

[Zarquan]

3 minutes ago, t0panka said:

CUDA is proprietary BS from Nvidia which doesnt like to play with others

Hence some similar variant. 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Like someone mentioned around here, avoiding your dupes using jet suits does improve your FPS. I had something around 5FPS improvement when I made sure my 3 jet suits could not be used. Just restricting the exit door of my jet suit room was enough for this.

Also loaded a save file where there's no space. Man, such a huge difference.

[Oozinator]

1 minute ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

..avoiding your dupes using jet suits does improve your FPS..

Shrink map to 50%, use only three dupes, kill all critters, don't touch space biome and FPS will be >25 FPS on Triplespeed.
Avoid automation, to hold load/save times low. ^^

[KittenIsAGeek]

23 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Like someone mentioned around here, avoiding your dupes using jet suits does improve your FPS. I had something around 5FPS improvement when I made sure my 3 jet suits could not be used. Just restricting the exit door of my jet suit room was enough for this.

Also loaded a save file where there's no space. Man, such a huge difference.

What about simply restricting which dupes have access to the jet packs.   You can set a door with permissions in front of the jet suit -- and only let a particular dupe (or 3) through. 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

21 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

What about simply restricting which dupes have access to the jet packs.   You can set a door with permissions in front of the jet suit -- and only let a particular dupe (or 3) through. 

I think the main issue is the pathing. Restricting access to a handful of dupes will only lead to a small average FPS improvement because the jet suits will be used less. But I suspect the FPS drop still being there when a dupe decides its pathfinding based on jetsuit usage.

That being said, I do run a base with 37 duplicants. So they did use them almost constantly.

I am not a fan of adapting my playstyle to crank up FPS, I'm not really doing anything outlandish. That being said, if there is one obvious way to improve FPS a little bit without throwing significant parts of the gameplay away, it's stop using jet suits.

[TheGCat]

7 hours ago, Oozinator said:

Shrink map to 50%, use only three dupes, kill all critters, don't touch space biome and FPS will be >25 FPS on Triplespeed.
Avoid automation, to hold load/save times low. ^^

Right That will be works, but then u don't have to play the game.

At first, don't start the game, so u get 60 FPS at third speed forever in your thoughts Problem solved.

Another solution: Maybe we can start a tiny challenge. Something like: "Build as small as possible". Build one washbasin, a toilet, some pipes, and close the game. Guaranteed good FPS for everyone. And ONI's name should be changed to "How to build a bathroom by Tim Taylor" (For people without a humor sensor, it is a joke)

Like ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said. Why changing my playstyle ? If I have to do it, the fun disappears.

Another fun part we have talked about at the first postings: The system requirements from steam who Klei has chosen are the smallest possible... I have read the fact in some steam threads on other games.

Minimum should be 4GHZ

Maximum should be (Burn the nuclear reactor)

That were a true story.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Given I've seen oozinator's way of replying from time to time, my guess he was being cynical 

[TheGCat]

 

5 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Given I've seen oozinator's way of replying from time to time, my guess he was being cynical 

It's one of the ways to suffer the situation. Some are joking about the situation, some other take it cynically and so on. Everybody needs his own way. The result is still the same.