iuli24
Member
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
- Messages
- 37
- Reaction score
- 33
- Server
- Askone
- Main Pilotname
- Jul14n
- Rank
- 99
- Clan
- Fatal Ascension
My motions with this forum thread:
1.- attracting the interest of the developers and the community (even though I know they are busy with Tau Ceti 4 and the new CoC);
2.- improving the overall game performance;
3.- adding quallity of life improvements (I don’t expect change overnight, and I wont);
You will see more about all of these down below on this thread.
1 thing to keep in mind: I have been playing since march almost every day at least 3 hours a day. So I have had plenty of time to check and recheck every single thing that I found out about the game and I will add extra information down there.
First of all, I heard from various sources that Vsync / fps cap can’t or couldn’t be disabled because it would break the game engine or physics (which I’m pretty sure is false) and I would like some actual clarification from someone who knows if its true or not.
The top response I got from a big discord server is “ they can’t increase the fps past 60 because then your ship would fly faster, your techs would cycle sooner etc. About this exact thing.. no.. that 90% shouldn’t be the case, because if we’re going by this logic then those who lag in this game would get slower flying ships, slower cooldwons etc.
Example: 60 fps equals realtime game speed while 30 fps would equal half ingame speed. (which I checked and is false, the ingame speed remains the same).
Second of all, I do believe that vsync / fps cap should be removed and is an impediment in many situations, for many players, to reach an actual stable, high fps in higher systems like Sirius or Tau Ceti.
Third of all and the most important part, I’m not just hypothesising about this and the upcoming information should show that.
Yes, my computer is a laptop, that may or may not make people think that “oh it's overheating / underperforming / a potato and that’s the reason why I’m lagging even in lower systems”.
More or less important info: specs: i7 8750H (not a potato) a GTX 1050, and a single 8 gb stick of ram ( * this info will make sense later * ).
I came back to the game around march this year. Had a low level (~30) avatar in Gemini in solaria server and I thought to continue there instead of starting completely over. After I joined and played for a few hours in Prosperus, I noticed my framerate starting to dip quite low (low 40s) especially when some action was going on like killing a lot of mantis.
One of the weird issues, and one that many people can relate to, is that a simple game restart gets the fps back up. Yes that is a very temporary fix that for many lasts 1 hour tops and then they have to restart again.
Another very weird issue is that when the game is freshly started up, the fps still drops into the high 30s on heavy action, but it also comes back up to 60 when the action dies down, something which tends to not happen when I’m 30-60 minutes into the game.
1 possible explanation that I checked time and time again:
- overheating computer hardware:
No, I checked that already plenty of times. (after 2 hours of gameplay I average into the low 60 degrees celsius or 140 farenheit).
So, as a computer geek as I am, I started digging deeper because it was starting to break the game experience.
First thing that I did, and the reason why I specified that I had 1 stick of ram, is that I bought a 2nd stick so I could have dual channel memory (double the memory bandwidth). This did help a bit.. it raised my fps by 5 or so.. not huge.. not terrible.
The 2nd thing that I did, this happened when I grew into Draconis already, is that I found a way to overclock my memory speed from 2400 to 3000 mhz. (yes I’m aware not everyone knows what overclocking is.. and that they shouldn’t even have to do this in the first place but I did it anyway). This helped quite a bit more, gained another 5 fps, so from the 30 fps hell that I had in Gemini and upper systems, this was quite a huge improvement.
The 3rd thing that I did, this happened when I reached Siri, is that I found a way to make the game run on the GPU (graphics processor) that I wanted. I was always able to do this with any other game but with Pirate Galaxy I couldn’t quite figure it out for a very long time.
The breaking point for me was Armana in Sirius, it drops 4 big repair turret fields in 25hp increments, because it made my fps tank the lowest I’ve seen it ever in this game.. ~25 fps with big fps stutters and rubberbanding (sometimes 1-2 seconds of complete 0 fps) which for me was and is completely horrendous.
From that moment onwards I figured out how to force it to run on my Nvidia GPU and not my intel UHD630. Since I did that change I noticed the biggest fps jump ever. It raised my fps to a whole new playable level. It still wasn’t perfect as you can imagine hence the existence of this thread, but overall the complete 0 fps moments were gone, the rubberbaning was mostly gone, the fps on Armana was doubled (~50 instead of 25).
In case anyone wonders which file you need to select in your GPU control panel.. it's not at all Launcher.exe.
* If you do that the game still won’t run where you want it to, instead the launcher itself will.
This is the correct directory and file:
%AppData%\Roaming\Splitscreen Studios\Game Launcher\java_vm\bin\javaw.exe
The 4th thing I did was when I reached Earth (in Unrest). There, as you can guess already, the bad fps returned. It ran fine for very shorts amount of time (~10 min) and then it would plummet just like it used to. I literally couldn’t be on that planet for more than 30 mins or the fps would get close to siri armana level with the game still running on intel UHD630.
You guessed it
, after some more digging I found something very interesting. My CPU was boosting strangely (2 ghz then 4 ghz then 3ghz then 1.8 then 3 then 2 then 4 so on and so forth). Of course I thought “hm.. that is weird.. what if the microstuttering and the bad fps are caused by the CPU not clocking itself high enough for this game? What if I find I way to force it to stay at its peak all the time?”.
So I did find a way even on a laptop. In case anyone wonders what I used: ThrottleStop. This program allowed me to get fine tune control over the CPU clockspeed.
This was simply incredible.
| |
\/
And… I tested it.. over and over again.. and it worked gosh it worked so well. The first time I tested it.. I gave myself very bad conditions to make sure that I’m not overestimating its potential. Those very bad conditions were: Earth (in Unrest) with a full squad (paras hyans thunderbirds), killing tons of death squads and mantis and waiting at least 1 hour without restarting, relogging, relanding in the game. The fps without any manual CPU control was 35-40 while the fps jumped right back to 60 and stayed there indefinitely the second I made my CPU run at its maximum core clock consistently (in my case 4.1 ghz). Later on when I unlocked Calon, it worked wonderfully there also.
Side note: Yes I know that windows “high performance plan” exists and is a thing that I can use and of course I tried it. But there is a catch, it only makes the CPU frequency not go lower than is Base Speed which in my processor’s case is 2.2 ghz.. AKA not the solution for me.
One very last thing I did is disable hyperthreading (got rid of half of the CPU threads), while this might seem controversial at first.. it does increase the single core performance by ~10% which is not nothing especially for this game.
After all these tweaks.. I tested the worst out of the worst.. the mission “Battle for Earth” in Earth (in Unrest). And it was amazing.. everyone else was lagging into the 30s or lower while my fps, while not staying completely at 60, sat at an average of 55 with lows into the 50s.
And finally one of last topics I want to talk about in this thread is about Vsync / fps cap and why it should be completely disabled or at least have a toggleable option in the settings:
1. – Vsync is a technology that eliminates image tearing and can make the game run, in many cases actually, more unstable while also increasing the in game latency AKA jelly mouse and keyboard controls;
[It can sometimes relieve CPU bottlenecks but I sincerely believe that this game will run better with a CPU bottleneck than with Vsync forced on]
2. – it limits the fps and tricks the CPU into thinking it doesn’t need to clock as high when in reality it definitely needs to;
3. – even though you might not be able to see higher fps than your screen refresh rate (Hz), you can definitely and very likely feel the micro stuttering and drops in fps that are below 60;
4. – My reasoning being that is one thing to have 60 fps max with some drops into the 40s (or lower) and another to have 100+ fps with drops into the 60s.
Regarding the motions at the beginning of the thread:
1. - I sincerely hope I did not somehow offend or waste anyone’s time with this thread. My intention is to make the game be more enjoyable for everyone and I hope that at least some developer takes a look at my findings that came to a conclusion after a period of 9 months;
2. - If for some reason nothing changes even after a long period of time, at least I hope I helped some people improve their game experience;
3. – The quality of life improvements I would love for you guys to add:
- toggleable Vsync option;
- a slide bar to choose the render distance (because it’s a pain to guesstimate if a death squad will popin right in front of me especially in Tau Ceti);
- [optional but not at all something bad to add] two options for anisotropic filtering and antialiasing. (I can already do this with Nvidia control panel and honestly the game looks way better).
If anyone got this low into my thread :3 I would like to ask if you (GMs, CMs, Devs, the Community, etc) know how to disable Vsync / fps cap in the game files I’m all eyes and ears ^^.
Best regards,
iuli24.
1.- attracting the interest of the developers and the community (even though I know they are busy with Tau Ceti 4 and the new CoC);
2.- improving the overall game performance;
3.- adding quallity of life improvements (I don’t expect change overnight, and I wont);
You will see more about all of these down below on this thread.
1 thing to keep in mind: I have been playing since march almost every day at least 3 hours a day. So I have had plenty of time to check and recheck every single thing that I found out about the game and I will add extra information down there.
First of all, I heard from various sources that Vsync / fps cap can’t or couldn’t be disabled because it would break the game engine or physics (which I’m pretty sure is false) and I would like some actual clarification from someone who knows if its true or not.
The top response I got from a big discord server is “ they can’t increase the fps past 60 because then your ship would fly faster, your techs would cycle sooner etc. About this exact thing.. no.. that 90% shouldn’t be the case, because if we’re going by this logic then those who lag in this game would get slower flying ships, slower cooldwons etc.
Example: 60 fps equals realtime game speed while 30 fps would equal half ingame speed. (which I checked and is false, the ingame speed remains the same).
Second of all, I do believe that vsync / fps cap should be removed and is an impediment in many situations, for many players, to reach an actual stable, high fps in higher systems like Sirius or Tau Ceti.
Third of all and the most important part, I’m not just hypothesising about this and the upcoming information should show that.
Yes, my computer is a laptop, that may or may not make people think that “oh it's overheating / underperforming / a potato and that’s the reason why I’m lagging even in lower systems”.
More or less important info: specs: i7 8750H (not a potato) a GTX 1050, and a single 8 gb stick of ram ( * this info will make sense later * ).
I came back to the game around march this year. Had a low level (~30) avatar in Gemini in solaria server and I thought to continue there instead of starting completely over. After I joined and played for a few hours in Prosperus, I noticed my framerate starting to dip quite low (low 40s) especially when some action was going on like killing a lot of mantis.
One of the weird issues, and one that many people can relate to, is that a simple game restart gets the fps back up. Yes that is a very temporary fix that for many lasts 1 hour tops and then they have to restart again.
Another very weird issue is that when the game is freshly started up, the fps still drops into the high 30s on heavy action, but it also comes back up to 60 when the action dies down, something which tends to not happen when I’m 30-60 minutes into the game.
1 possible explanation that I checked time and time again:
- overheating computer hardware:
No, I checked that already plenty of times. (after 2 hours of gameplay I average into the low 60 degrees celsius or 140 farenheit).
So, as a computer geek as I am, I started digging deeper because it was starting to break the game experience.
First thing that I did, and the reason why I specified that I had 1 stick of ram, is that I bought a 2nd stick so I could have dual channel memory (double the memory bandwidth). This did help a bit.. it raised my fps by 5 or so.. not huge.. not terrible.
The 2nd thing that I did, this happened when I grew into Draconis already, is that I found a way to overclock my memory speed from 2400 to 3000 mhz. (yes I’m aware not everyone knows what overclocking is.. and that they shouldn’t even have to do this in the first place but I did it anyway). This helped quite a bit more, gained another 5 fps, so from the 30 fps hell that I had in Gemini and upper systems, this was quite a huge improvement.
The 3rd thing that I did, this happened when I reached Siri, is that I found a way to make the game run on the GPU (graphics processor) that I wanted. I was always able to do this with any other game but with Pirate Galaxy I couldn’t quite figure it out for a very long time.
The breaking point for me was Armana in Sirius, it drops 4 big repair turret fields in 25hp increments, because it made my fps tank the lowest I’ve seen it ever in this game.. ~25 fps with big fps stutters and rubberbanding (sometimes 1-2 seconds of complete 0 fps) which for me was and is completely horrendous.
From that moment onwards I figured out how to force it to run on my Nvidia GPU and not my intel UHD630. Since I did that change I noticed the biggest fps jump ever. It raised my fps to a whole new playable level. It still wasn’t perfect as you can imagine hence the existence of this thread, but overall the complete 0 fps moments were gone, the rubberbaning was mostly gone, the fps on Armana was doubled (~50 instead of 25).
In case anyone wonders which file you need to select in your GPU control panel.. it's not at all Launcher.exe.
* If you do that the game still won’t run where you want it to, instead the launcher itself will.
This is the correct directory and file:
%AppData%\Roaming\Splitscreen Studios\Game Launcher\java_vm\bin\javaw.exe
The 4th thing I did was when I reached Earth (in Unrest). There, as you can guess already, the bad fps returned. It ran fine for very shorts amount of time (~10 min) and then it would plummet just like it used to. I literally couldn’t be on that planet for more than 30 mins or the fps would get close to siri armana level with the game still running on intel UHD630.
You guessed it
, after some more digging I found something very interesting. My CPU was boosting strangely (2 ghz then 4 ghz then 3ghz then 1.8 then 3 then 2 then 4 so on and so forth). Of course I thought “hm.. that is weird.. what if the microstuttering and the bad fps are caused by the CPU not clocking itself high enough for this game? What if I find I way to force it to stay at its peak all the time?”.So I did find a way even on a laptop. In case anyone wonders what I used: ThrottleStop. This program allowed me to get fine tune control over the CPU clockspeed.
This was simply incredible.
| |
\/
And… I tested it.. over and over again.. and it worked
gosh it worked so well. The first time I tested it.. I gave myself very bad conditions to make sure that I’m not overestimating its potential. Those very bad conditions were: Earth (in Unrest) with a full squad (paras hyans thunderbirds), killing tons of death squads and mantis and waiting at least 1 hour without restarting, relogging, relanding in the game. The fps without any manual CPU control was 35-40 while the fps jumped right back to 60 and stayed there indefinitely the second I made my CPU run at its maximum core clock consistently (in my case 4.1 ghz). Later on when I unlocked Calon, it worked wonderfully there also.Side note: Yes I know that windows “high performance plan” exists and is a thing that I can use and of course I tried it. But there is a catch, it only makes the CPU frequency not go lower than is Base Speed which in my processor’s case is 2.2 ghz.. AKA not the solution for me.
One very last thing I did is disable hyperthreading (got rid of half of the CPU threads), while this might seem controversial at first.. it does increase the single core performance by ~10% which is not nothing especially for this game.
After all these tweaks.. I tested the worst out of the worst.. the mission “Battle for Earth” in Earth (in Unrest). And it was amazing.. everyone else was lagging into the 30s or lower while my fps, while not staying completely at 60, sat at an average of 55 with lows into the 50s.
And finally one of last topics I want to talk about in this thread is about Vsync / fps cap and why it should be completely disabled or at least have a toggleable option in the settings:
1. – Vsync is a technology that eliminates image tearing and can make the game run, in many cases actually, more unstable while also increasing the in game latency AKA jelly mouse and keyboard controls;
[It can sometimes relieve CPU bottlenecks but I sincerely believe that this game will run better with a CPU bottleneck than with Vsync forced on]
2. – it limits the fps and tricks the CPU into thinking it doesn’t need to clock as high when in reality it definitely needs to;
3. – even though you might not be able to see higher fps than your screen refresh rate (Hz), you can definitely and very likely feel the micro stuttering and drops in fps that are below 60;
4. – My reasoning being that is one thing to have 60 fps max with some drops into the 40s (or lower) and another to have 100+ fps with drops into the 60s.
Regarding the motions at the beginning of the thread:
1. - I sincerely hope I did not somehow offend or waste anyone’s time with this thread. My intention is to make the game be more enjoyable for everyone and I hope that at least some developer takes a look at my findings that came to a conclusion after a period of 9 months;
2. - If for some reason nothing changes even after a long period of time, at least I hope I helped some people improve their game experience;
3. – The quality of life improvements I would love for you guys to add:
- toggleable Vsync option;
- a slide bar to choose the render distance (because it’s a pain to guesstimate if a death squad will popin right in front of me especially in Tau Ceti);
- [optional but not at all something bad to add] two options for anisotropic filtering and antialiasing. (I can already do this with Nvidia control panel and honestly the game looks way better).
If anyone got this low into my thread :3 I would like to ask if you (GMs, CMs, Devs, the Community, etc) know how to disable Vsync / fps cap in the game files I’m all eyes and ears ^^.
Best regards,
iuli24.
