[?Bug?] Major Game Slow Down

from Elemental Forums

Good Evening Stardock

You may (or may not) have noticed that my beta testing has decreased significantly since the release of 0.990. There is a reason:

Ever since 0.990, everytime I have had more than several river tiles revealed in a game, everything has been slowing down considerably to a 'choppy drag'. It's to to the point where I can no longer play the game effectively.

To compound the issue, now in 0.992, even revealing ocean tiles has this effect and I very most unfortunately cannot play.

Not sure what changes have been done to cause this...but could you please look into the matter on your end and see how the river + ocean UI has been recently modified. Perhaps, include those modifications made into one of the 'higher performance' catagories and revert the previous settings for normal performance?

I've had to drop Anti-Aliasing down to 2x but still receive the issue. Ground cover has always been set to 'normal' for me...don't like the world over-crowded.

I know I don't have the best computer on the block anymore...I don't know what happened...it was the best when I bought it...

E8400 @ 3GHz/3GHz, 3.25gig RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, WinXP sp3

If you require further information, I will be more than happy to provide it.

Thanks

GFireflyE

2,742 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

You may want to post this on the support forum, or better yet send the boys and girls at SD an email.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting mqpiffle, reply 1
You may want to post this on the support forum, or better yet send the boys and girls at SD an email.
End of mqpiffle's quote

Changed.

Has anyone else been experiancing this??

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

 

I haven't seen anything like this.  If you want to post your debug.err we can see if its kicking out a bunch of errors.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

3.25gig RAM,
End of quote

How do you get 3.25 gigs of RAM? Is that free RAM memory (so you actually have 4)?

Obligatory question- Are you running the latest version of your video card drivers?

I noticed a slowdown in .99, but that was after playing for a couple of hours. Quitting and reloading the game seemed to fix it. I think it was using 2.5 Gigs of memory. I see in .992 they fixed some memory leaks, which might help, too.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Derek, reply 3
 

I haven't seen anything like this.  If you want to post your debug.err we can see if its kicking out a bunch of errors.
End of Derek's quote

I loaded my 0.991 game with 0.992 beta and didn't have the problem with the oceans slowing down my machine. 

Will look for error again and send debug.err...

(on a brighter note....ctrl-N hasn't crashed on me since 0.992...yet) XD

EDIT: Well, I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment....started a game and it has a huge river and lots of ocean around me....yet no slow down. Last night after the 0.992 download, I started 6 games, and each time I reached the ocean, the game slowed right down to a crunching crawl.

I'll keep playing and if and when the problem happens again, I'll be sure to grab the files.

 

EDIT2: K. So, I think I know what the problem was. As it happens (or so I assume) rivers and oceans take more memory to view than regular land tiles do. When I ctrl-N multiple times (I would estimate 5+), the game really seems to slow down. I've been noticing it first when the rivers and oceans were displayed. But perpetuating the ctrl-N, the slowdown begins to happen even if only regular land tiles are showing.

I emailed the debug.err file as well as my save game (though I don't think it'll show you anything) to support@stardock.com, with subject heading  "FE slowing down with rivers & oceans".

No dump file has been created (since there has been no crash).

I restarted the game and loaded my game and the slowdown problem is gone.

Is this a type of memory leak or memory buildup that is being transferred over from new game to new game???

I'll play this game out for a bit and see if or how long it takes till it slows down again.

 

Quoting Lord, reply 5

3.25gig RAM,


How do you get 3.25 gigs of RAM? Is that free RAM memory (so you actually have 4)?

Obligatory question- Are you running the latest version of your video card drivers?

I noticed a slowdown in .99, but that was after playing for a couple of hours. Quitting and reloading the game seemed to fix it. I think it was using 2.5 Gigs of memory. I see in .992 they fixed some memory leaks, which might help, too.
End of Lord's quote

Yeah, I have 4....winXP only sees 3.25

Probably not running the latest version...but I would imagine late enough....

EDIT3: Checked my drivers. Was running 7/9/2010 ver 6.14.12.5896 ...so pretty recent. Nevertheless, I have now upgraded to 2/9/2012 ver 6.14.12.9573

Also saw some notes about XP multicore operation. Found out that I already have it. XD Going to look if update is needed...

 

EDIT4: Looks like I have the most recent update for winXP Pro: 7/1/2001 ver 5.1.2600.0 with the ACPI Multiprocessor PC active. Shows two CPU graphs in my Task Manager's Performances tab, but only shows a single CPU column in the Task Manager's Processes tab. Is this normal ??

 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Bump

 

So, in addition to the ctrl-N slowdown, I've also found out that multiple loading/saving of the game also grinds the game to a halt. Is this going to be addressed before final release?

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

 

Quoting GFireflyE, reply 7
Bump

 

So, in addition to the ctrl-N slowdown, I've also found out that multiple loading/saving of the game also grinds the game to a halt. Is this going to be addressed before final release?
End of GFireflyE's quote

I don't think so. Known garbage collection or leak problem. What I do: never load a game from within a game. Shut down FE and restart. I believe they have a dedicated engine guy improving performance in the background (quiet silent type, but I saw Brad post about him a week or two ago). Anyone stuck in 32 bit operating system is inevitably going to experience problems. I recently upgraded from 32 vista to win 7 64 (I also have 4 gb mem) and the second I did that... the extra 1GB memory available to the OS had a huge effect on game performance.

Anyhow, since you're on 32 bit with only 3gb available to the OS, recommend never loading a game from within a game and limit the ctrl-n stuff. If you ctrl-N, one you get the start you like save that sucker, shut down FE, and reload and start playing fresh. Might lower your blood pressure. Just some helpful advice of a guy who once had a 40+ post thread (all my own replies) about EWOM CTD's and out of memory crashes. I ran the guantlet once... paid my dues.  :digichet:

The engine is really stable other than these few known, but major problems.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting AlLanMandragoran, reply 8
 


Quoting GFireflyE,
reply 7
Bump

 

So, in addition to the ctrl-N slowdown, I've also found out that multiple loading/saving of the game also grinds the game to a halt. Is this going to be addressed before final release?



I don't think so. Known garbage collection or leak problem. What I do: never load a game from within a game. Shut down FE and restart. I believe they have a dedicated engine guy improving performance in the background (quiet silent type, but I saw Brad post about him a week or two ago). Anyone stuck in 32 bit operating system is inevitably going to experience problems. I recently upgraded from 32 vista to win 7 64 (I also have 4 gb mem) and the second I did that... the extra 1GB memory available to the OS had a huge effect on game performance.

Anyhow, since you're on 32 bit with only 3gb available to the OS, recommend never loading a game from within a game and limit the ctrl-n stuff. If you ctrl-N, one you get the start you like save that sucker, shut down FE, and reload and start playing fresh. Might lower your blood pressure. Just some helpful advice of a guy who once had a 40+ post thread (all my own replies) about EWOM CTD's and out of memory crashes. I ran the guantlet once... paid my dues. 

The engine is really stable other than these few known, but major problems.
End of AlLanMandragoran's quote

Definately some kind of memory leak happening.

I've been watching my memory usage for the game. Loading the game straight off takes around 835,000K of mem and every time I load from within the game, the memory usage shoots up another 200,000K. Also, exiting the city details window causes a jump in memory aswell, though not as significant.

Anyways, my machine lasts till mem usage is around 1.8gig....which starts time it starts to crunch the system.