How I improved my FPS

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Warning: this post contains information on overclocking the CPU. Overclocking can lead to damaging your system. I or Klei Entertainment are in no way responsible for any damage to your system. It's recommended you do your own due-dilligence and do quite a bit of research into overclocking, or let it be done by someone who has experienc with it.

I was fed up with my low frame per seconds. I have an 850+ cycle game with 37 duplicants where I breached the surface a long while ago. On the lowest speed fuly zoomed out (normal camera), my game would have a FPS between 14 and 18 FPS. That's barely on the edge of playable. I took steps to increase that without having to significantly alter the way I play the game.

-The first thing I did which had a noticeable impact, was stop my duplicants from using jet suits. Jet suits exponentially increase the pathing options for duplicants which especially in the space biome will severly hit the FPS. I did not deconstruct the suit setup, but I restricted access to them, which has the same effect. High skilled duplicants are often faster anyway in exo suits.

-The second thing I did was not really born out of a FPS need, but had a significant impact as well: in order to decrease duplicant travel time, I build tubular transport across long distances. Duplicants will prefer to use the transit tubes, which further limits pathing.

-I have no shove voles on my current asteroid, but I suggest keeping only a few in a confined space and outright kill off the others. Shove voles can go pretty much anywhere, which increases pathing which decreases FPS again.

-A bit more controversial: I use sandbox mode to get rid of all the loose chunks of regolith. I have way too much of it, and these loose chunks do have a big impact. Infact: it's best to keep resources categorized in compactors. Loose resources all over the map tend to increase pathing of duplicants. Having them stored at the some spot will optimize this.

 

That was not enough for me. I ran a rather old i7-950 processor, which had overheat issues. I don't know why because it was actually ran in a detuned state (just to keep it from melting!), around 2.9 ghz. Since I had those issues to begin with, I decided to replace the processor. I had to do quite a bit of research because I'm basically running a very old socket, LGA 1366. At first I thought about buying a W3690 processor, which is basically the best processor you can get for that socket. I did discover some caviats about that though: first, for games like ONI single thread performance is much more important than overall performance. My original i7-950 processor was basically good enough for almost any other game because those games were gpu demanding instead of cpu demanding. So I only needed improvement in the single thread performance. Second, a lot of the "lesser" processors are actually the same architecture as the better ones (there are differences still probably in build quality), meaning the gap between those processors can be significantly decreased through overclocking. So I eventually settled for a X5675. I also bought a quite cheap Artic Freezer 13 along with it. I still was running the stock cpu cooler and when you overclock you need to have something better. The freezer 13 essentially is a bigger and more efficient heat sink than the stock one. I personally had the unfortunate problem where the heatsink was too big to fit in the intended orientation (with the sculpted metal plates facing outwards to the back of the pc case). Instead I had to orientate it facing downwards onto the graphics card, which is far from ideal. If you are looking yourself from upgrading your cpu cooler, make sure to keep size in mind as on compact motherboards you might run into the trouble. Despite the compromises, the change of the cpu and the cooler resulted in a, no kidding, 40°C drop in temperature. the i7-950 was running almost 80°C in idle despite having done things like cleaning up the stock heat sink, changing the cooling paste and detuning the chip. This vs the x5675 ran in stock settings at 3.07ghz. That already translated in 1-2 FPS improvement. Pushing the chip with explicitly stress testing programs like Prime95 it did go over 70°C. From what I gather is that if you stay below 85°C-90°C after a long run of prime95, you are more than ok with cpu temperatures.

The real magic however sits in overclocking. Having gone through all the trouble of researching for a good cpu and improving cooling and finally having achieved good low temperature to start with it, I started to overclock the chip. Again, it's very important to note I or Klei Entertainment will not be held responsible if you try to just replicate my results and end up ruining your system. Care has to be taken! I recommend to use 3 programs: CoreTemp, Prime95 and Cinebench. CoreTemp keeps track of your CPU temperatures. You will want to keep track of temperatues while you use Prime95, which will put your CPU under maximum load. It's best to run Prime95 atleast half a hour each session to be 100% sure your CPU is handling it. Finally, Cinebench is there to put performance number on your current cpu performance.

As mentioned, single thread performance is what makes the FPS in ONI. The higher you can push this, the better performance you will get. There are 3 important factors in the eyes of a novice like myself (I will leave others to correct me) for basic overclocking in the bios: CPU ratio, BCLK frequency and CPU voltage. It's best to put CPU ratio as high as you can first and lower your BCLK is back to around stock frequency. This is because enhancing BCLK puts also more stress on RAM and other components. Putting the ratio on highest first got rid of one variable atleast. The next thing I did was upping the BCLK frequency step by step (meaning upping it a little, boot to windows, run prime95 for 20-30 minutes and repeat) until my computer acting a bit glitchy, a bit stuttering. After that I made one last step on the BCLK, ran prime95 for 5 minutes and it gave me a blue screen of death. This happens when your cpu does not have enough voltage. At that point I increased the voltage. Increasing the voltage will rapidly increase core temperature. I ultimately stopped overclocking at around 3.75ghz as I did not feel comfortable getting higher. There are people easily getting to 4.2ghz, but they have a better cpu cooler and have it better installed. It's really depending on your own case.

I currently run the game between 28 and 36 FPS on normal speed, which is fluent for me. I am satisfied with that. I am running quite an old motherboard, meaning the motherboard itself is outdated, but also I can't run any of the newer processors which would give an even better step. It's important to do your own research and experimentation.

 

[babba]

Welcome to the club

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

6 minutes ago, babba said:

Welcome to the club

Yeah thanks. I also want to emphasize you shouldn't do this just for one game. Although the main motivator for me was ONI, I did have that processor which was having massive heat issues. Eventually that processor would have given out, so I had to replace it anyway. It was a fun little project!

[babba]

The latest Tropico, Planet Coaster, 2Point Hospital, Kerbal Space(with part/physics mods), Cities Skylines(especially with lots of mods), the last Xcom(e.with mods), Prison Architect,Factorio and many more single core heavy games will benefit from permanent fast(er) and stable single core speed, especially any kind of game of game from the simulation genre ( including tycoon,manager,colony and builder games ). Cpu overclocking is also great to get the maximum out of existing gpu(s). Few games will utilize more cpu core(s), if they do - Good.

I play all of these games and lots  from other genres.

Enjoy ONI faster

[Rainbowdesign]

Any suggestions for lategame and laptop (no overclocking) ? I have between 2 and 6 fps playing. I had the impression the huge ocean under my base does its share of harming performance.

I deleted all now all dupes except 2 all critters the water the lava  and i get 9-10 fps. I think most impact had it to delete the critters i had a rather full stable and a big amount of fish.

[babba]

- Filling all empty map tiles with Neutronium will recover FPS ( if one fills 25-75% of the map with Neutronium )

- Playing with a smaller generated map or not excavating much

- Dumping tons of too-much-resources

- Playing via connected mains grid, not by notebook battery

- Few dupes, few automation, no jetpackers

- Checking if the (mobile?) cpu is thermal throttling ( cpu speed stepping down due to excessive heat ). If it is, one can try to improve notebook cooling.

- If playing on a standard Win10 installation, the game and OS typically need 8gb ram

[TheGCat]

I have also overclocked my PC. As a little side note. If u overclock the CPU with upping the BCLK AND using the power saving mode, u do a bad choice. If the PC idles u have an higher power consumption with a higher BCLK as a higher ratio instead.

The most CPU's clocks them self down to 12 (Ratio)x100 (BCLK) = 1200MHZ , when they are idling. If u increase the BCLK to for example 125MHZ u have 1500MHZ at idling. As a result u burn more useless energy and waste your money. If u have disabled all the power saving modes, don't do that! This is only recommend, if u overclock like an crazy chipmunk. For example for a new world record with LN2

Overclocking with the multiplier or the BCLK depends on what u want to do. A CPU with the "K" (open multiplier) don't need to overclocking with the BCLK. And if u have an bad Motherboard, u cannot setup all needed settings for a good running.

I have overclocked my I7 3930K to 42x100 = 4200MHZ (All Six Cores with 1,255V) Temperatures are good. Idle 35C and 60 at work. I could overclock it to 4,5GHZ, but i am pleased for the moment Performance increase in ONI 10FPS at the third speed. GOOD.

 

[Rainbowdesign]

4 minutes ago, babba said:

- If playing on a standard Win10 installation, the game and OS typically need 8gb ram

I know mine has 8gb but feels excessive. I played around started a new game converted elements tried a bit around: result spawning 24 dupes who have nowhere to go and do nearly nothing drops framerate from 40 to 20 just by having them be there...

Also i think that cannot be all maybe one more important thing is the amount of loose elements on the map like if you dig something out. Atleast i feel that the longer the game takes the slower it gets even after removing stuff with the sandbox.

[babba]

The i7 3930k is a good cpu for ONI - Max Stock Turbo Frequency 3.80 GHz and nice cache sizes.

https://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-Core-i7-3930K-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-3-80-GHz-boboost cpu

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3930K+%40+3.20GHz&id=902

 

1/3 more speed is possible compared to the latest stuff, if one has deep pockets, has fun and time to mess with hardware. But its a good performing cpu already.

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

11 minutes ago, DustFireSky said:

I have also overclocked my PC. As a little side note. If u overclock the CPU with upping the BCLK AND using the power saving mode, u do a bad choice. If the PC idles u have an higher power consumption with a higher BCLK as a higher ratio instead.

The most CPU's clocks them self down to 12 (Ratio)x100 (BCLK) = 1200MHZ , when they are idling. If u increase the BCLK to for example 125MHZ u have 1500MHZ at idling. As a result u burn more useless energy and waste your money. If u have disabled all the power saving modes, don't do that! This is only recommend, if u overclock like an crazy chipmunk. For example for a new world record with LN2

Overclocking with the multiplier or the BCLK depends on what u want to do. A CPU with the "K" (open multiplier) don't need to overclocking with the BCLK. And if u have an bad Motherboard, u cannot setup all needed settings for a good running.

I have overclocked my I7 3930K to 42x100 = 4200MHZ (All Six Cores with 1,255V) Temperatures are good. Idle 35C and 60 at work. I could overclock it to 4,5GHZ, but i am pleased for the moment Performance increase in ONI 10FPS at the third speed. GOOD.

 

[TheGCat]

2 minutes ago, babba said:

The i7 3930k is a good cpu for ONI - Max Stock Turbo Frequency 3.80 GHz and nice cache sizes.

 

Sure, u are right. But how u know, it's not enough for ONI. And everybody who reads our statement think, all is fine, because they don't build big

[KittenIsAGeek]

I have an i5-4690S running at its stock 3.2GHz and I don't really have much trouble with ONI. 

[TheGCat]

Babba, send this person your savegame. NOW.

[babba]

I love the ONI community, we all sit in the same FPS boat...

No offence, but the only people which have no frame rate problem with the game have not done a lot in the game. Even running the game with a hydrogen cooled cpu at 7GHz, the 0.1 FPS save games will stay at that value.

No offence, lets all stay happy

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

FPS posts from the past

 

Maybe you can find something helpful in these threads. Happy ONI.

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/96484-100-kw-200-kw-500-kw-powerline/?tab=comments#comment-1097668

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/95053-how-well-does-oni-multithread/?do=findComment&comment=1079798

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/95016-frame-rate-optimization/?do=findComment&comment=1079420

ONI scales exactly to this list, so the game runs best on the top 5, 10 or 20 fastest single thread cpu`s. So one can make a tradeoff between price and ONI FPS.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

ONI Low Budget CPU Tip, good single core performers:

"Old" Intel i3 6100 @3.7 GHz or newer i3 7350k @4.2 GHz - High base clocks, decent caches, but both have no Turbo Boost.

ONI Enthusiast CPU Tip, higher budget: i7 6700k 7700k 8700k 8086k, i9 Series . I rather recommend the i7 Series for ONI, as the i9 series has too many cores and too much shared resources. Howerever - Great cache sizes on the i9 series.

Wish I could recommend AMD for ONI, but not with their current low single core performance. ONI also strongly benefits from large CPU level1/2/3 caches and of course single core turbo boost, if supported by the cpu and with proper cooling.

Intel is getting a bit in to panic mode in view of current and upcoming AMD stuff - Good !

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

1 hour ago, DustFireSky said:

I have also overclocked my PC. As a little side note. If u overclock the CPU with upping the BCLK AND using the power saving mode, u do a bad choice. If the PC idles u have an higher power consumption with a higher BCLK as a higher ratio instead.

The most CPU's clocks them self down to 12 (Ratio)x100 (BCLK) = 1200MHZ , when they are idling. If u increase the BCLK to for example 125MHZ u have 1500MHZ at idling. As a result u burn more useless energy and waste your money. If u have disabled all the power saving modes, don't do that! This is only recommend, if u overclock like an crazy chipmunk. For example for a new world record with LN2

Overclocking with the multiplier or the BCLK depends on what u want to do. A CPU with the "K" (open multiplier) don't need to overclocking with the BCLK. And if u have an bad Motherboard, u cannot setup all needed settings for a good running.

I have overclocked my I7 3930K to 42x100 = 4200MHZ (All Six Cores with 1,255V) Temperatures are good. Idle 35C and 60 at work. I could overclock it to 4,5GHZ, but i am pleased for the moment Performance increase in ONI 10FPS at the third speed. GOOD.

 

You mean the power saving mode in windows? The BIOS showed a whole lot of idle power options on its own, which I left enabled.

For the record, I personally can't go above a 25x multiplier. I increased it to the maximum after which I basically had to increase the BCLK.

[babba]

*Handing a nice hot coffee to you*

What do you mean with "We cant have nicer things"? IMHO there was regular nicer things added to the game by Klei since the game was made available - On a regular basis.

Well, the maximum game speed decreases or increases depending on the players system spec. Thats probably not democratic, but thats how it is. I wouldnt call it accommodating fans, its more technical enthusiasts who want to get more out of the game. Most players are not game programmers at Klei, so thats a possible resort where players have control over - Speed tuning our hardware.

In terms of the Simulation genre...ONI is a Simulation genre weightlifter, like the First-Person-Shooter genre games Doom or Quake being top dogs in their genre back then. May not be obvious at a first, second or third glance.

[crypticorb]

I greatly appreciate your research @ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy, and I will be using most of your strategies to optimize my ONI experience.

One thing of note, and this is directed at the developers:

Why is this necessary?

I don't believe I've ever had to screw around with overclocking or forcing single-core limitations on a game in my 150+ steam library, and I have a lot of CPU heavy games in the lineup, as well as indie games, beta versions, horrid PC ported console games, everything.

Not even Don't Starve or Don't Starve Together in the beta versions ran this poorly in my memory, and to let things get this bad in the endgame is poor foresight by the developers.

/rant

[Lifegrow]

28 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

One thing of note, and this is directed at the developers:

Why is this necessary?

Considering we've been asking for multi core support for over 18 months now, and considering we've never had a single official response from the devs relating to a remedy/stance on the, let's face it, late game misery - i'd assume (and feel free to quote me on this) that right now they simply cant do jack about it.

Suck it up folks, got to wait until this turd gets polished a little  If we look back 6 months the game was in a far worse place, so when we DO get optimisations, they do make a massive difference, however - currently things are obviously in a bit of a trough. 

Spoiler

(full disclaimer, I am statistically the number one crybaby about late game lag, so by "suck it up" I really mean "if you want someone to cuddle up and cry with" I have an ample man-bosom waiting for you. xox)

 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

7 hours ago, melquiades said:

Accommodating fans are the worst.

So, the game runs like **** (late game), then, the solution is to have a better cpu.

 

This is why we can't have nicer things.

I don't see it that way. I could have waited for the developers to make optimisation to the game engine. That would have probably made my game have a fluent fps as well.

But, I didn't want to wait. It's too great a game to keep my hands off. Although this game pushed me into going through the trouble of research, buying stuff and changing the parts, if it was purely for the game I would not have done it. Again, my old cpu was toasting itself. I had to change it somewhere in the near future. Now I stretched my current pc build for another couple of years atleast.

It's also quite a cheap option. In my case I also had to buy a cpu for roughly 50 dollars. But most people with desktop pc's can start doing what I or others did with just replacing the stock cooler with something better. For 30 dollars, some good research and a tackling overclocking in a sensible and patient way you can easily achieve what I did. Infact, if you do I expect you to do better because I did not buy the best cooler for the price range and I was forced to fit it "wrong" due the motherboard having a useless built-in heat sink blocking the installment of my cooler in the correct fashion.

[babba]

IMHO one entire Klei update ( 2 months wait time for us, where 1 month currently seems to be worked on the ONI game ) should only be spent on FPS improvements, with no new game content.

IMHO new content gets pushed in to the game, dragging the FPS further down and then we receive new-content-recovery-FPS-patches from Klei which recover 3/4 of the FPS lost by the newly added content.

[Rainbowdesign]

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

multi core support

This is a nightmare with unity3d which DOES NOT SUPPORT MULTICORE and likely will not anytime soon.  However i am sure it can be done to some degree by moving things that can be asynchronous to a different c# thread and pass messages to the original thread. But still i think it will be unlikely to come soon.

6 minutes ago, babba said:

 

IMHO new content gets pushed in to the game, dragging the FPS further down and then we receive new-content-recovery-FPS-patches from Klei which recover 3/4 of the FPS lost by the newly added content.

True but the problem is that the last real performance update was the tubular update which was pretty cool but hmm how long ago ? a year?

[TheGCat]

16 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

You mean the power saving mode in windows? The BIOS showed a whole lot of idle power options on its own, which I left enabled.

For the record, I personally can't go above a 25x multiplier. I increased it to the maximum after which I basically had to increase the BCLK.

Both! Windows and the Bios power saving modes. Settings like Intel Speedstep, C1E and similar. All fine so far.

[Rainbowdesign]

3 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

 

It's also quite a cheap option. In my case I also had to buy a cpu for roughly 50 dollars. But most people with desktop pc's can start doing what I or others did with just replacing the stock cooler with something better. For 30 dollars,

For a single game in the library upgrading the pc makes oni quite expensive. What do laptop user do btw? no overclocking there, also not everyone can afford 50 dollars as example people in the second world. i have some friends in asia as example. And i heard its pretty popular in china.

[SakuraKoi]

1 minute ago, Rainbowdesign said:

What do laptop user do btw?

If they cannot eat liceloaf let them eat fruit cake!

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Just now, Rainbowdesign said:

For a single game in the library upgrading the pc makes oni quite expensive. What do laptop user do btw? no overclocking there

Again, I wouldn't have done it for just ONI. In my case it was convenient due the overheating cpu. Somebody else might find it doesn't tick off their boxes. As babba mentioned, there are a lot of single core games to benefit for this. Don't do this for just one single game. Think it through.

Laptop users are unfortunaly screwed. There is no way around that.

[TheGCat]

4 minutes ago, Rainbowdesign said:

True but the problem is that the last real performance update was the tubular update which was pretty cool but hmm how long ago ? a year?

Sure, but the performance increase was based on simple shrunk the map. So, the next time they can't shrink the map again. It is still small! And shrinking a map is for me personally not an option to optimize an game. It is the laziest one. U get really quick a better performance with zero investments. We will see where it ends. I hope it will better.

The most people who are complaining are using a good desktop pc and play the game to the endgame with LARGE Bases and over thousand of cycles. All the others who believed in truthfully of the steam requirements are in a sunken boat. I can't believe u can enjoy the game with a dual core cpu with 2GHZ...