I've been getting pretty poor performance since I upgraded to Windows 10, not the beta. i5-4670, 8GB RAM, GTX760 If there is more than one planet in the view the performance tanks, maybe 5FPS, even if there isn't really much going on. Graphics settings set to the lowest or highest have no impact to the frame rate. Steam overlay is disabled, no other programs with overlays, nothing of note running in the background. Any suggestions?
Can you post a DxDiag.txt? You can make one by pressing <WinKey>+R, typing "dxdiag", and pressing "Save All Information...". Upload the resulting file here using the "Upload a File" button on this forum. What you can also try is a clean boot to rule out any software from interfering even though you've already checked some of them. Instructions are here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135/
Good call on the clean boot. Performance was great with everything disabled, I slowly enabled items and narrowed it down to a service from winpcap (packet capture driver for Wireshark) that migrated over from my Win 8.1 install. Apparently it needs to be updated for Win10 and PA didn't like the old one. Performance is back to normal!
Actually it started out good (it was slow from the start before) but still got pretty slow (~10FPS with more than one or two planets visible) later in the game. I did a 23 minute locally hosted AI skirmish, 5 AI players, the AI was mainly confined to one planet while I was on another. Was keeping up a good frame rate (~30FPS) when any single planet was visible but would immediately drop of as other planets swung into view or I zoomed out to see the system, even though orbital involvement from the AIs was quite minimal. Is this to be expected? DxDiag attached.
Out of curiosity, have you updated your driver since the windows 10 update? Might be worth doing a clean driver install with the latest version for Windows 10, just in case something didn't get updated properly...
There does seem to be a drop when multiple planets are visible. I used the in-game statistics (<Ctrl>+P) to check my client FPS. In the PAX System I get about 50 fps when I have just landed on the lava planet. Rotating my camera so that the earth planet is also in view, it drops to about 30 fps. It makes sense though as there is more stuff to render. So I guess this is normal. I should add that I am rather insensitive to low frame rates. I can't really tell the difference between 60 fps and 30 fps or even 10 fps, so I had never noticed this before. There may be more optimizations you can do of course. So try @cdrkf's suggestions as well.
Tried I fresh install of my graphics driver, no effect. For an RTS getting down to 10 is fine, but once it starts getting down to 5 it's pretty choppy.
Well, the only other thing I can think of is that the amount of virtual memory is rather low. So if Windows doesn't have enough available to push the other program out the RAM, PA will end up using virtual memory itself, which would slow it down. So you can try increasing it to about 16 GB or so and see if that helps. Instructions are here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-virtual-memory-size (sadly for Win7, but should be similar for Win10)
I have everything set to system managed. Windows doesn't bump the size of the page file up on the fly as needed? Does PA have its own memory/swap management system that it uses when memory allocations fail? I'm not sure DxDiag is an accurate reflection of the page file in Win 10, I checked it with nothing going on and with PA loaded and running (it likes to use way more than 8GB of RAM) and the numbers were identical. Interestingly, I saved a game that I started last night that was in the 5FPS range, loaded it up again and now it is a solid 30FPS with everything in view. The saves don't appear to be very robust. The first time I tried to load no units displayed. Second time it loaded and everything displayed however there are a bunch of scattered radar blips that are nothing and all nukes/unit cannon units that were in transit when I saved went into orbit around their destination ... and sit there, round and round they go.
Yeah, for some reason Windows doesn't bump up the virtual memory sometimes. I've seen it happen quite a few times. I don't know why. And, no, PA doesn't have its own virtual memory. Normally you'd just let the OS take care of it, since as a program you want to push the competition into the virtual memory and use all of the real memory for yourself. Anyway, I'm not sure if that is actually the issue, but you can try it out and see if it helps and otherwise just revert the changes. You get the bug with the invisible units for save games? I always thought that was for replays only.
I would have been surprised if PA had its own virtual memory. I thought there was an off chance it was like Photoshop, where you can set how much real RAM it'll request from the OS and it makes its own scratch files for the rest ... granted I've seen those scratch end up in the 100GB range with large images ... so not too surprising they needed a system like that Yeah, saved games a couple of times now have shown no units. It seems to be the first time I load a save from a fresh launch of PA. Load the game the first time, no units, load the game again, units appear. I tried the virtual memory adjustment, sadly no effect. I've got two screen shots of the same game, both in the cronocam replay. The fresh one was running smooth. Notice the CPU difference. Before the restart one of the coherent UI processes was using about 30% CPU (a core and change), after it was fine ... allowing the PA process some room to think.
I'm out of things to try short of a clean install of Windows ... as much as I like PA I'm not willing to do that for one misbehaving game. I've removed Hyper-V, which installs a virtual network stack. I've re-installed PA clean (fresh download from Steam, deleted the local profile data as well) with no mods. The only mods I had active was Connect Buttons, Direct Connect, and the Awesome System Generator. It's pretty easy to reproduce; all I need to do is play a game or a saved replay and in about 20 minutes it starts going slow, down to 3-5FPS when looking at the whole system. PA is then stuck slow like that, even with a different round or within the system designer, until I restart PA.
Yeah, I hope someone at Uber will spot this thread because it does sounds like one of the CoherentUI subprocesses gets stuck in a loop and prevent the GPU from processing everything at full speed. You could try mailing support@uberent.com about it. In the mean time, you can try running PA with: Code: PA.exe --coherent-options="--renderer-process-limit=16" That will limit the amount of CoherentUI_Host.exe processes. Maybe that will change the behaviour enough to prevent the fps drop from happening. You can experiment with different numbers that 16 too.
Another set of screen shots after running through more replays. Seems the Coherent process going nuts isn't the cause. These were both taken shortly after loading the game from the main menu. "fresh" is how it is when the game first starts. "after run" was after I let it run long enough to start slowing down, then quit to the main menu and loaded the same replay again. The GPU got so bored in that "after" scenario that it clocked down to idle I tried setting the GPU speed to "max performance", just in case it was incorrectly clocking down, but that did nothing.
You could try playing with the Control Panel -> Power Options and try setting the power plan to high performance. Maybe that helps. There also may be power saving features in the BIOS that you could try turning off.
Alright, final bit of testing. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 as a "Windows to Go" instance to a USB3 hard drive and only installed the GPU driver, ran the same test, same result (slow after ~20 minutes). So at least that rules out any upgrade cruft causing conflicts. I also tried it with a fresh install of Windows 8.1, again just the GPU driver, and it was smooth! The screen shot is after a full run through the playback and some random seeking around for good measure. So, the problem is most certainly isolated to Windows 10. I guess not a lot of people are playing on it yet.
Nicely done! Interesting though. I wonder if Windows 10 has more aggressive power saving features, so could you try changing those settings? I also read some reports that Windows 10 is more conservative with respect to allowed CPU temperatures and starts throttling the CPU sooner than Windows 7/8. Could you monitor the CPU temperature as well and see if it coincides with the slowness? And, yeah, Windows 10 has about 6-7% market share now, which isn't a whole lot. That's still quite a number of players though.
I switched the power plan to max performance and disabled all of the power saving features that were still active in that plan to no effect. CPU frequency was visible in the other screen shots, it's about the same before/after the slowdown and in Win 8.1. I checked the temperature in the last test and found it to be about 45C. I've never seen the CPU temp go over 60C, that's during the summer with high load on the CPU and the GPU. 60C should be well below any thermal throttling thresholds. I play a number of other games, none of which has seen any slowdowns like this. Granted PA is the only OpenGL game that I have right now and is also the only one that consumes so much RAM. Win 10 does have this "compressed memory" feature, where instead of paging to disk the System process will hoover up a bunch of physical memory and compress pages into that instead. I seriously doubt that's the problem but I can't find a way to turn it off to test it. Either way, RAM allocation is about the same before/after the slowdown. I've always been curious about PA's memory use, since it seems to like to allocate absurd amounts of RAM and then not do much with it, since it allocates far more RAM than I have available and then the hard drive activity is very light. Win 10 adoption is higher for gamers, at least the ones that turn in the Steam hardware survey, at about 23%.
Yeah, 45°c is definitely fine. And so is 60°... I have no idea what else it could be. I hope some Uber-engineer will have ideas.
