Help needed Micro freezing while playing online

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Muppet King, Nov 27, 2021.

  1. Muppet King

    Muppet King Ensign

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    Hello all!

    I built a new PC earlier in the year, it handles Empryion really well but I have horrible micro freezing that happens every 20-30 seconds. If I have Task Manager open on my 2nd monitor, I see Empyrion's EXE as using 95% of the GPU, when the split second freeze happens the GPU usage of the game drops to 48%, then shoots back up to 95%.

    I've tried setting some of the configurations in the Nvidia Control panel, updating graphics drivers. I don't think the micro freezes happen when I'm playing solo in creative. Does anyone have any ideas of what I can do to resolve this? This issue is making it tough to play on a server I rented, aiming, steering etc etc.

    Ryzen 5900
    64 GB of DDR4 RAM at 3600 MHz
    PNY GeForce 3090
    Samsung SSD 980 Pro 1 TB (Game is installed here)
     
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  2. Muppet King

    Muppet King Ensign

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    I think I was able to reduce or eliminate the freezes by reducing the character textures from full to one quarter. The freezing stutters come back if I move it up to half textures for characters. How weird! Not ideal, but it's a work around.
     
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  3. Muppet King

    Muppet King Ensign

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    Ok update time!

    If I'm set to Half Res for character textures, the game is silky smooth, if I up to to MAX Character Textures, I get freezes, the game will pause freeze for half a second, then resume. I have no idea why it's doing this, and the issue doesn't seem to go away or get worse with any other setting besides the character texture resolution.

    I played a lot in the past and never saw this issue on weaker hardware, weird to see it now. Has anyone else experienced or know something that could help fix this for me? Half res on the character textures isn't great.
     
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  4. Scoob

    Scoob Rear Admiral

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    I wouldn't expect you to have to reduce any setting to play perfectly smoothly considering your hardware. For the record I have a 3900x, GTX 1070, 32GB ddr4 3600 and a RAID0 M.2 SSD's. For me, even at just 1920x1200 (old monitor) the game is very much GPU-limited. I've turned down a couple of settings - the ones that explicitly say they are particularly taxing - and I see a reliable 60fps (vSync) for the most part.

    Empyrion seems to make fairly good use of multiple Cores and I certainly don't see one thread maxing out, causing any sort of single-thread CPU bottleneck. It's just GPU for me, which turning down a few settings resolves. So, I'd not expect an issue your side at all. Though it does strike me as really odd that you changing some client settings - the very same settings that I have maxed out - are actually giving you an improvement.

    I really can't think of any suggestions for you, sorry, it's just so darn weird what did appear to help - character textures of all things.

    As a sanity check, it might be worth testing a single-player world to compare experiences . Blueprint your assets in your MP game and bring them into a Single Player save - cheat via the console, so you don't need the resources - and see how things perform. I wonder if there's some quirk in MP with character textures? It might be worth examining network bandwidth too, just to see if there are weird traffic spikes when you see the freezes.

    Might be worth running this one via the devs in the form of a bug report. Perhaps not a bug as such, but certainly a weird anomaly.
     
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  5. Muppet King

    Muppet King Ensign

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    I appreciate the reply! I have no mini freezes when in single player creative, even with tons of huge huge ships near by. It seems to be isolated to MP only for some reason. Now that I have more info on what causes it and what fixes it, I'll go post on the bug forum to see if the Devs might have an idea on this. It's such a weird issue, but again I'm glad you replied, makes me feel like I'm not just shouting into the wind lol.
     
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  6. Scoob

    Scoob Rear Admiral

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    No worries. I just cannot figure out why changing that particular setting would have any impact at all in MP. Hopefully the devs can identify the issue.
     
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  7. dichebach

    dichebach Captain

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    When you say "character textures" do you mean the player avatar? If so, that is peculiar.

    On the other hand, if "character textures" is somehow a reference to the lettering used to label stuff in the HUD then that makes sense. There is a guy name of "Ling-something-something" who runs the "420 Chill" servers. Very knowledgeable about server performance. I seem to recall him recounting how he had deduced that one of the biggest impacts on performance were the text markers for radar pings that show up in the 3D HUD and that he had adjusted some settings to minimize this effect.

    The other thing that I personally noted was an issue with this app in years past (and it seems less of an issue today) is: escalating RAM use during a session, "fixed" by rebooting the session. Apps written in C# (as much of Unity apparently is) are infamous for poor memory maintenance and this past problem seemed like a textbook example of this infamous problem. In any event, it seems to have been tweaked so that it is no longer as noticeable.
     
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