In the past year, many players, including me, have reported the phenomenon of micro stuttering in game. The reason I created this thread is to point out something significant, I manage to discover regarding this factor of performance. Micro stuttering is not caused by bad developement. At least not in todays version of Empyrion. The culprit lays in hardware the player uses to play the game. It is the same rule applies to every game. But how I did find out? Simply by upgrading my PC. In the last days I upgraded from the legendery i7 2600K to a r7 3700X, from 4 cores 8 threads to 8cores 16 threads, keeping the rest of the hardware as is. The game is installed on an SSD and uses a GTX 1070 with power limit to the 70% of the default 180W capability, for testing and personal reasons. As things are for now the GPU is more than capable to perform adequate in 1080p providing 60FPS as my monitor is capable showing. I have posted an old video showing the micro stuttering. Pay attention to the MSI afterburner OSD and specially on the frametime graph on both cases. Many things have change during the developement of Empyrion from A8.6 that day to A11.5 today. The video bellow shows that micro stuttering is gone (almost?), while I run the game on a modern hardware. Are there FPS deeps during gameplay, specialy on areas where taxing conditions are met? Definitely. But remember same goes for many games out there. I understand some players do not like and maybe feel frustrated to play their favorite game while problems and bugs do exist. It is narutal to feel that way. But I think putting the blame on the developers or the game engine, all the time is not fair. There is a very good chance, the culprit lays withing player's hardware. Keep that in mind next time you raise your pitchfork. PS 1 : Further technical details : RAM on both cases totals totals 16 GB DDR3 for i7 2600K and DDR4 for R7 3700X.Both CPUs are overclocked to their average potentials. GPU power is limited on the 70% on both cases. Further tests I made resulted in conclusion that this limitation is enough for 1080p gaming. The game is always installed on SSD. Unity version has been changed. other than that. pretty much remains the same. First video is capture on Windows 7, while the second is captured on windows 10. PS 2 If I switch to Linux - Proton shenanigans, microstuter is gone too! The game is NOT Linux compatible, yet.
Planning to retire my old rig in the near future - i7 4790k Devil's Canyon 4.0 GHz, 32 GB RAM, GeForce 1080 for a new build: i9 9900XE, 256 GB RAM, sticking with the 1080 for now though, as the 2080 still needs to mature a bit more. But, I can say my current rig very seldom has any micro-stuttering. Typically the only time I've run into performance drops is right at the release of a new version update (11.1 was harsh, the first hotfix took care of whatever was driving things crazy when it rained), and this is almost always fixed by the first hotfix release after a version update.
You and I are running almost identical rigs, I do have two 500 gb SSDs running in raid 0 and see the same stuttering you've shown in the newer video, almost none seen: I do have issues while turning ships that the tail end stutters around the turn, I can barely see it happening to your ship so I'm hoping that has been addressed recently. I haven't been testing lately got the Long dark bug lol..., but I'll be back soon. I agree some issues complained can be laid at the feet of hardware/software not always development. Why upgrade (unless you have the gota get new bug, which has been tickling at the back of my mine lately) we can run Ark at 100+ fps consistently with our rigs with hardly any lagging. Like my cowboy dad used to say "If in it ain't broke don't fix it", I don't think he had met any PC enthusiasts.
It could be that my aging Mk I eyeball-cortex module has lost so much acuity that I'm unable to notice. But apart from very rare, abrupt catastrophic rendering glitches (crashed motobike and suddenly the whole world turned into a barren post-nuclear hell scape) , I don't notice any real performance issues with this game using my now outdated I5 cpu and mobo. I upgraded my RAM and GPU in the last year (and just changed my signature to reflect that). I never have bothered with the SSD, though I own one I just need to slot it in. The one game I noticed performance issues where an SSD would seem warranted was Warhammer 40K. Ridiculously long duration load screens.
Oh, 40k... I couldn't even look at it until Gladius. Then I devoured everything, and there was nothing left to look at. I did it all for the biomass, the biomass, So you can take this cookie, and stick it up your, yeah! stick it up your, yeah! - Tyranid version of Limp Bizkit, from the album "We Ate That Too"
For some reason I have the feeling that this happens for years now. I always think that it feels like there are two different people updating the game code on steam for us to download and play and that every other update we get the messy version. Of course I just specualte by what I see when I play the game and Ido not know if this is really what happens. I can not put my finger on what is going on. Your description thouhg ringed a bell and made me want to share this thought of mine.
I can't say I've ever experienced this. Here are my specs for reference. Win 10 i7-3930k 3.2GHz overclocked to 4.2GHz 32GB RAM @1866Mhz 2x GTX1060 6GB with Stock OC OS on SSD, game client on another SSD, world and save data on a pair of SSHD's in RAID 0 I keep FPS locked at 60, though I could probably kick it up to 80 or 90 without an issue.
I play dozens of different games on various platforms and Empyrion is the only game that does this, so please quit with the 'it's not a dev issue'. I have 16Gb system RAM and 11GB of Vram on a 1080Ti on a 7800x CPU. Most times the game starts with a 'Warning: low memory detected' error. The game runs at 60hz just fine (I lock it to my monitor) but I can't count the number of times I've died in game because of game stutters when there are a lot of enemies around, but it happens in space too, really obvious when I'm trying to change direction. I've tried reducing the resolution to 1080p and changing various graphics setting within the game, no change. A fresh boot before starting resolves the low memory error but I still get stuttering. My PC is well above the minimum game requirements so this should not be happening.
The fact that you get this message often tell us many things about your system and you. 90% the culprit is the user in such cases. Here is what you can do to verify. Create a new user and boot and log in windows with the new one. Go to start up applications and disable is not all as much as you can. I suggest in this step to disable even NIC, hence internet access. Start steam (offline mode if possible) and start Empyrion. With the configuration you have you shouldn't have the low memory warning. If you still do, manage your swap file better. Plenty of tutorials out there of how to do so. And for your info I still play on Linux and micro-stutering is almost gone. Many things have changed since last time I post here, Linux kernels, GPU drivers the game engine and of course the game itself. Three years is a very long cycle on software development in this case. The only moments I get small game hangs is while many buildings are about to be loaded on screen as I approach them either POIs or other and are all gathered in narrow area. Only then I see a spike on frame-time but after that all return to normal minus some FPS of course due to the increased geometry on view point of the player.
I recall experiencing the "Micro stutter" on my prior system - 2600k, GTX 1070, 32GB DDR3 1600. The FPS counter would remain a steady 60fps, but I could readily see the stutter - very apparent when strafing left / right. The "fix" at the time was to limit the game to 50fps, as it was an engine quirk. While overall fps was lower - my monitor at the time was only 60hz - the frame pacing became consistent, thus the whole experience felt smoother and the fps counter was accurate. Then, some time later, there were changes to Unity (IIRC) so the game was reasonably smooth at my natural 60hz vSync. Not perfect, but better. Moving from the 2600k to a 3900x - still with a GTX 1070 - in 2019 didn't see an FPS increase at all - still 60hz vSync - but there were less snags / judders certainly. Interestingly, the biggest single cause of fps drops for me is the HUD overlay. If there are multiple objects in detection range, fps tanks - this is with a RTX 3070 I got a while back - simply turning off the HUD markers will reliably turn 35fps back into 60fps - with all the same objects visible. There's something about the HUD overlay that causes issues. Basically, highly-populated area, good fps. Ping, lots of HUD markers, poor fps until they go away. What's even more strange about this is that neither CPU nor GPU appear to be excessively pushed when the HUD overlay causes an fps drop like this. Weird. Btw: talking low memory situations there was (is, perhaps) a Windows 10 BUG where standby memory isn't correctly freed up when needed. I started getting "low memory" warnings in multiple titles earlier this year / late last year. Regular tools showed me having 25+ GB of RAM free, yet I was having problems. However, resource monitor showed that Standby RAM was totally full - say from the last game I'd been playing - and was NOT being correctly freed up by Windows. I ran a little tool to purge all Standby Memory before running a game and all the issues went away. I've not had to do this for a while now, so I assume the Windows bug got fixed. Basically, I might run say Skyrim - heavily modified - for a couple of hours before switching to something else. That next titles would then see "low memory" reported. Inspecting the standby memory allocation, I could see that gigabytes of Skyrim data was still held and NOT freeing up, despite the game not running any more. Like I said, this appears to have been fixed now as I've not had to purge Standby memory for quite some time. I have 32GB by the way, so, double what I'd suggest a Gaming PC should have.
@Scoob 's Post reminds me to add that HUD markers do kill percentage of max FPS, as well as loading weapons, where player experiences spikes. Accessing constructors mostly on vessels with multiple of them , like 5+ and all active, result in a delay to. Finally, while accessing a constructor in general while is runs a batch already and you click to add more items in the queue, there one always gets spikes caused by every single click of the mouse.
Accessing things like Constructors doesn't appear to affect FPS for me, but there is often a notable delay before the devices UI opens. I will examine that further if I get the chance later. I was double-checking the HUD overlay fps drop last night and could consistently see the fps drop just after a Ping - space playfield, me in a CV - which didn't happen when the HUD was turned off. Weirdly though, with the HUD fully on, I'll do the ping, the various contacts will appear and the FPS will drop, then it will recover over a couple of seconds while the HUD pings are still displayed. However, if I turn off the HUD just after the ping, the fps recovers right away. Weird. I can confirm that there was not discernable change in either CPU or GPU load during the low-fps situation. Note: I am just looking at the game's built-in FPS counter which, in the past, has not always been a true reflection of the actual FPS.
