[Answered]Nvidia GeForce GTX 750Ti

You don't know what you are talking. You try it for yourself, use the in-game stats rather than FRAPS if you like and download Open Hardware Monitor to see your GPU/CPU usage and you'll see what I mean. Early game I get good frame rate and good GPU/CPU utilisation. Late game this all changes. P.S. I'm not running the game through Steam. If it was something on my computer which was causing this, then you would expect low GPU/CPU utilisation right from the start of the match. I love how people comment without checking this out for themselves. Do you know what GPU/CPU utilisation you get during a match? I'm an IT technician so I do know a thing or two about computers. The server/client relationship in PA is quite unique. Do the test and post a screenshot of your results... Then we'll talk.

I know what I talking about for sure. There is reasons on client which might cause slowdown of client in late game, but those aren't related to server performance at all. If you press Ctrl+P three or four times you'll see server and simulation performance here.

Server should be 30FPS and this is basically how fast server-side able to push updates to clients. I can say for sure that if this value remain 30 then none of your problems related to server-side.

Simulation performance should be 10FPS and this is actual gameplay and this might become slow, but usually it's can't affect "server" performance.

Forget everything I said about sever side performance then, and just do the test. Then explain to me what could be causing it. The first step for troubleshooting is often seeing if you can replicate the issue on another computer. If you see the same thing on your computer then that rules out any problem with my computer (usually).

General rule of thumb, SXX is usually right. Think of him as PA ninja, so much so that they named a unit after him

Show me your test results to prove that you don't have the same problem, or just be quiet. Comments like that are not helpful. There is no logical reason for the low CPU/GPU usage. If you have a logical explanation and can prove it then let's see it.

You should know that not everything happen in programming world is visible.

Example #1: there is small CPU/GPU/RAM/etc bottleneck somewhere in part of client code which isn't multi-threaded. Obviously this small bottleneck might not use 100% of CPU core because it's just one of threads slowdown and everything else waiting for it. In early game client have store little of data, but in late game it's have tons of data about current game state and history for ChronoCam. E.g everything server send to you is stored in RAM and this is why ChronoCam damn fast. In this case recconect might freed some memory and make game little faster again.

Example #2: Coherent. It's browser inside PA which is's extremely complicated software with a lot more code than PA itself. Game might be waiting before Coherent process something or refresh UI view. UI is written in JavaScript so it's can be hard to tell why it's slowdown game even when not using 100% of CPU. Take old problem with Knockout as example.

PS: Also measuring GPU load in % it's just dumb idea because it's not CPU. It's die contain several completely different and unrelated peaces of logic: own memory controller, video decoder, vertex blocks and tesselator, texturing units, whole shader pipeline. So you just can't take some number and say like: hey my GPU load is NN% because it's will only indicate if GPU doing something or not. For example if your GPU will be bottlenecked by VRAM limit this monitoring tool will never show it and VRAM bottleneck is pretty often reason of performance drop in PA.

I can say for sure that game client won't lag just because server running slow. Pretty easy way to test it:

1. Start game with dummy sandbox AI.
2. Build a lot of Doxes (better) or Fireflies.
   A lot it's 2000-3000.
3. Now make server lag:
   - Put doxes on patrol on pretty small area. Soon "physics" will kill simulation.
   - For fireflies make them patrol whole planet. In this case pathfinding and history/client updates will kill "server" performance.
4. I can say for sure server will lag soooo badly, just check it with Ctrl+P output.
5. I as well can say for sure your client will show tons of stuttering, but your FPS will remain high as always even if server will be mostly dead with 2FPS simulation and 5-10FPS "server" tab.

I done tons of such tests and pretty sure I'm right.

Here's a screenshot from another game which I get high frame rate and 100% GPU usage. This is the case for pretty much most games I have ever played. If a game is not being bottlenecked by the CPU then I would expect the GPU to be running at 100%. So in PA what is the bottleneck? In my initial post I should NOT have mentioned the sever, that was just a guess. My point was that purchasing a more powerful GPU or CPU for this game would be pointless as it doesn't even properly utiliuse the power of my GTX660 and Core i5-2400. So what is the bottleneck? Coding? Will it be something they fix?

As I said in the post you have just replied to... FORGET what I said about the server lagging, that is just what someone else told me was the problem. If it's not the server, then what is causing low CPU/GPU usage? In pretty much every game I have ever played, if you are not being bottlenecked by the CPU (i.e. 100% cpu usage) then you should be seeing 100% GPU usage.

Alright...

My Computer Specs:


My PA graphics settings:


I created a game with two planets(1 smashable, 1 not).

As a baseline I took screenshots of all the performance at the begging of the game(Only have 2 mex and 1 power)

Client: 60fps
Server: 30fps
Server Sim: 10fps(This is normal, you can read Forest's blog or search around on the forum to find out why)
-----------------------------------------
Client:


Server:


Server Sim:
http://store.roosterteeth.com/
​

I then played out a regular game, here is the unit count:

Client: 10fps
Server: 29.7fps
Server Sim: 10fps
--------------------------------------
Client:


Server:


Server Sim:



Here is my network usage, as you can see it is stable:


​

Conclusion:
From the start of the game to the end change:

Client: -50fps
Server: -0.3fps
Server Sim: 0fps
​

As you can see the server performance stays completely the same(Give or take 0.3). However the client performance dropped severely. This shows that the performance drop is in fact due to the client not the server.


The bottle Neck:
There are many things that that could be causing the bottle neck. Right now PA is not fully optimized so that could be an issue.

Another bottle neck could be CPU GPU syncing, its actually quite fascinating to read about. Pretty much the CPU has to tell the GPU what to do. This means that the GPU is limited by how effectively the CPU can dispatch commands. To get the commands the GPU can CPU have to sync up, meaning the GPU has to stop and wait for the CPU to give it commands(b/c the GPU works a lot faster than the CPU). This means that because of the GPU having to stop and get commands it will not be working at 100%.

Why the server doesn't effect the client(By Forrest, an Uber dev)

Actually it's only point I want to made because there is too much misunderstanding of how client/server work in PA so I want to argue about that. Too many people think don't

Few months ago main bottleneck was UI, but situation might be changed since then.

If this wasn't fixed in most recent versions you can just run system editor, create and generate some large planet and then just try to move mouse over 3 top UI buttons. For me it's give 25-50% FPS drop (link). I suppose problem in live game might be a lot worse.

It's quite obviously devs want game work fast, but I have no idea how much of UI problems under their control. E.g they using external closed source middleware so possible they can't fix some problems even if they know about that.

PS: Keep in mind there also number problems which is not even related to PA like drivers specifics, OS specifics, HW specifics. This why in some cases game might work better for user of integrated graphics that for other guy with $100+ GPU. Unfortunately OpenGL support isn't perfect on every GPU or drivers.

Many of those problems won't be worked on until Uber finalize engine features because game changed a lot between updates and some random problem appear and disappear. As I understand for now they mainly track problems within game at moment.

Like how you hide your intranet IP address.

Already going to hack your 127.0.0.1... !

Yea lol. Even though its just my local IP's

Pshshhhh! My ip is 192.168.128.25! Don't tell anyone!

^^^