Multie Core use and efficiency, questions.

[caerr]

It's not just AoE weapons specifically, however they seem to cause the worst kind of performance hit for me. Like you said, maybe something to do with so many hit calculations happening at the same time. My game also ran smooth when nobody was firing, and then below single digits.

This somehow reminds me of PSG slowdowns from the X space sim series.

[Raap]

I tried your scenario myself now, and I definitely have significant slowdowns when the space port is firing its AoE weapons. Seems to be smooth when only the ships are firing on the space port however.

Regarding AoE weapons, I wasn't necessarily talking about hit calculations though that could certainly be part of it. But if that was a problem, then the whole game should slow down even if you were viewing another system at the time of the battle, since it would indicate a CPU bottleneck. It could be just the huge sprite or whatever that makes up the actual AoE graphics; it's probably much more graphically intensive than the rather small laser and torpedo sprites, especially when there's dozens of them at the same time.

I guess modern video cards just aren't designed with intensive 2D graphics like these in mind.

[caerr]

Out of curiosity I did the scenario again, but this time I monitored my cpu and gpu usage. I was expecting to see either gpu or cpu at 100%, or something simple like that. Unfortunately that wasn't the case.

Single core usage seemed very high, even while paused. Gpu got occasional spikes up to 80%, but was idling a surprising amount of time.

I don't really know what to make of it, it may be that this aspect of the game isn't fully optimized yet.

[Raap]

Yeah, same as me. It's usually maxing out one core and sometimes parts of another, and the GPU usage is usually around 0%. Since this isn't 3D, the video card isn't really using its potential(shaders, geometry and such). Not sure there's anything the developers can actually do about that problem though. Unless hardware acceleration isn't already implemented. It could be the game's using the CPU for both graphics and gameplay.

[Setekh]

It's not using a hardware renderer. That's why your video card is practically idling.
It's rendering 2d images via the software renderer (CPU)

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Setekh

It's not using a hardware renderer. That's why your video card is practically idling.
It's rendering 2d images via the software renderer (CPU)

While the 3d hardware is not in use, the software renderer still has to generate all those textures (and size, as in pixel size, matters. A 1024 x 1024 texture will render faster than a 2048 x 2048 texture, etc)...hence the slowdown. This is the reason the modding guide suggests that added in shipsets all have their .png set to 200 x 200 in size.

Even with 3d, the biggest drain on your graphics is not the geometry, but the textures, shaders and shadows...however, a high poly model would be harder on the system.

For example, if the game were 3d, many of the ships in my shipset would be very stressful on the graphics renderer, the geometry in some of those models is in excess of 150k polygons after subdivision.

[Nibelung44]

I don't want to appears trolling, because I would really like to play this game (an excellent design anyway), but I can't (play it). Because even paused, I get stutters and hiccups... And I have a very decent computer (4 core, 8 gig of RAM etc.). I updated my video driver to no avail also.
That it only uses software rendering don't surprise me though. Windows display a bit slowly with several apparent refresh seen.

[WoodMan]

Scrolling isn't exactly smooth in the sector view and such, its actually smoother in parts where there are less stars, the screen even actually scrolls faster there and then when I get to the dense centre of the galaxy it scrolls slower.

As for zoomed in, turning down the nebula background graphics to low made a massive difference.  I get slow down when around loads of Kaltors and also when fighting battles near Gas Giants(thats weird) but I would estimate, not having actually recorded it using Fraps, that its more around the 15fps mark at these points.  At other times, there is generally no performance issue other than scrolling while zoomed out.

[J HG T]

ORIGINAL: Nibelung44

I don't want to appears trolling, because I would really like to play this game (an excellent design anyway), but I can't (play it). Because even paused, I get stutters and hiccups... And I have a very decent computer (4 core, 8 gig of RAM etc.). I updated my video driver to no avail also.
That it only uses software rendering don't surprise me though. Windows display a bit slowly with several apparent refresh seen.

Strange...
I have 3.2 Ghz P4 and 1 gig of RAM and I can play the game just fine. Only when the fleets and battles start to get really big the performance starts to suffer greatly. It's still fully playable even with these slowdowns.
Hope the patches optimize the graphics-engine more.

[Data]

ya, we'd need like a gaalian graphics-engine with some cool module and artefact [:)]

[Raap]

ORIGINAL: Setekh

It's not using a hardware renderer. That's why your video card is practically idling.
It's rendering 2d images via the software renderer (CPU)

Think there's any chance we'll see hardware rendering in a patch? I'm not completely sure myself how much work such an endeavor would take, but it would greatly lessen the need for further multithreading( which I've heard is very difficult to program) and at the same time allow much more stuff to happen both on-screen and in the game in general, since it frees up CPU cycles. Think it's too much to hope for?

[Data]

i don't think it's too much to hope for but it's not clear yet how many of us are affected by this....not that a minority should be marginalized, mind you, but i suspect that Elliot cannot work on all the stuff floating on this forum simultaneously and prioritizes