1.50.1 beta1 severe hiccups & freeze

[Nibelung44]

Hi,

Since this beta, things are much more worse for me in the 'hiccups' / 'stutters' departement. I now even get freeze of 15 seconds, the app not responding!

Before, when all 4 cores were running, I had hiccups ... If I forced the app on one core, it ran smoothly.

Now, whatever I do, I get constant hiccups and even freezes...

Is it multithreading related? This is almost unplayable for me now.

[Webbco]

This is interesting as I have a dual core processor and it runs a lot smoother than before. Could it be a quad core related issue?

[Nibelung44]

I notice that all 4 cores are used now... But why this stuttering ... I'll try using only 2 cores, just to see what's happening.

[tornnight]

I have a 4 core system and it works perfectly as before. It also used all 4 cores before.

Sometimes it's the memory that becomes the bottleneck.

[Spacecadet]

If you built your own system make sure you have the chipset drivers installed for your MB, this could be a cause.

Another cause could be an IRQ conflict, which is a bit more involved tracking down.

There could also be a Graphics card setting that could be causing this.

Don't really know the details/history of your system, so it's really hard to tell.

[Nibelung44]

ORIGINAL: tornnight

I have a 4 core system and it works perfectly as before. It also used all 4 cores before.

Sometimes it's the memory that becomes the bottleneck.

8 GB here.

[alexalexuk]

im seeing an interesting "pause" now when i zoom into a colony or group of ships, only lasts around 2 seconds, not sure if this is related

[tornnight]

ORIGINAL: Nibelung44

ORIGINAL: tornnight

I have a 4 core system and it works perfectly as before. It also used all 4 cores before.

Sometimes it's the memory that becomes the bottleneck.

8 GB here.

Memory bandwidth, not memory amount. In fact, 8 GB can be slower than 4 GB unless the system is demanding it.

[Nibelung44]

That's really the only app I run after booting Seven, so I don't see how I can lack of memory here.

I updated my graphic driver to the November 2010 one. No changes, so, am I stuck?

[Litjan]

Background programs? Only thing I can think of.

[VarekRaith]

ORIGINAL: Nibelung44

That's really the only app I run after booting Seven, so I don't see how I can lack of memory here.

I updated my graphic driver to the November 2010 one. No changes, so, am I stuck?

It could be any number of things.
Post a DXDiag.

[Erik Rutins]

Nibelung44,

Elliot will investigate this when he returns from vacation.

In the meantime, did setting the affinity to just one core change anything? Have you turned off all background processes to see if one of them could be causing the performance issues you are seeing? The expansion with and without the latest update works very well on ATI and Intel dual and quad-core systems running Windows 7 64-bit here. With the update it's smooth as silk on those systems.

Regards,

- Erik

[Nibelung44]

This don't change much in fact ... I generally start with only small hiccups and then 20 mn later it increases to much more annoying problems. I also notice that at time the sounds have a bit of static... For example when adding components, you get this small click sound... After playing a while, the sound is always accompanied with some statics.

Perhaps this is my audio driver which is screwing everything, I don't know...

I generally boot up the PC just to play (this is my game PC), and aside the anti virus in the background, there is not much active before I launch DW. So I'm a bit stuck here. I have a good PC but DW (expansion) is far from running smooth. [:(]

[elliotg]

Hi Nibelung44

It's pretty hard to guess what might be going on here - yours is not a typical situation.

It's possible that it's related to multi-core usage - what you're describing does sound a bit like thread blocks, though I've never seen DW have problems like that before. But it could also be hardware related - particularly memory bandwidth/throughput as mentioned above.

I would recommend making sure there are no other CPU-hungry processes running (launch Task Manager and switch to the 'Processes' tab, sort by CPU column).

In the next update we'll add an option to turn off multi-core usage, so you can try that.

Thanks
Elliot