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Bug/Issue Software Bottleneck?

Discussion in 'Starbound Support' started by FierySwordswoman, Aug 3, 2016.

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What's YOUR experience with Starbound and Performance?

  1. Fine! It either never lags or my hardware obviously bottlenecks it.

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  2. Not fine! There's performance issues despite my system never being under a stressful load!

    72.2%
  3. Not fine! (Other)

    22.2%
  4. How do I monitor my performance again?

    5.6%
  1. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    Straight to the point:

    In complex scenes such as the Outpost or heavy rain, my FPS dips below 60, usually to ≈40.
    Looking at MSI afturburner, my GPU usage for Starbound at the time was about 70%. Starbound has never used more than 80% of my GPU at a time, even with graphics mods like ReShade and TANZ Lighting.
    My CPU was about 50%, again, with Starbound never using anywhere near 100% or even 60-70% like other demanding games like GTA V.

    My theory: The game's putting way too much stuff on CPU cores 0 and 1 (reason for 50% CPU usage). Most games spread out performance to other cores or even put the work on the GPU.

    I'm using a 560 ti 1GB @ stock and an i5 2400 @ stock (4x3.1ghz). Playing Starbound for multiple hours and neither show concerning usage with the GPU peaking at ≈80% briefly and the CPU peaking at 60% (Extra 10% most likely another application on the 3rd core if my theory holds).

    I'd think it'd be reasonable for Starbound V1.1 (or V1.2 if need be) to set a goal to either implement better CPU parallelization or at least put some more rendering on the GPU as an option. *Starbound has too few graphical options as it is, anyway.


    EDIT: Side-note, it looks my username's really outdated. How would I update that?
    EDIT2: Oh god, a lot of it is. Bloody 2013 account. I'd delete and re-make my account, but I did just spend like 20 minutes typing this....
     
    Last edited: Aug 4, 2016
  2. Kulsius

    Kulsius Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Yup, only confirms my words that game has no real idea of how to utilise anything that have more than 2 cores in it.
     
  3. Iris Blanche

    Iris Blanche Pudding Paradox Forum Moderator

  4. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    25% would be 2 cores of 8, so the same.
    25% would also probably be 2 cores of 4 hypethreaded, so the same.


    -What's absolutely baffling is my GPU usage. My GPU is considerably bad for this day 'n age, so for it to not hit 100% in a supposedly demanding game after adding some graphic mods to top it off is ludicrous. It's hit 100% in bloody Warcraft III after artificially beefing up the visuals. Is this like the Skyrim thing where basic visual effects like shadows are for some reason run on the CPU? I can't explain it any other way...
     
  5. Kulsius

    Kulsius Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    GPU ram is not being used that much here. Mostly PixelFillrate and maybe Vertex/TexelFillrate, I believe. It mostly uses GPU processor cores for that (there are hundreds of them, new better have thousands- just look at GTX960 cuda cores... scary...)
    As for Skyrim off-topic I can only say that
    1. Skyrim isn't as demanding game as people like to think. It COULD run on medium-high on my 15 year PC if video card had PixelShader3.0 support. (Fallout3, being build on same engine actually works and that 256Mb Ati Radeon x550 video card can even drag 25-30fps on it while having fraps overlay for fps.)
    2. Higher quality shadows are actually very power consuming calculations going on. For really good shadows, game engine has to count every light source, draw invisible "scan" lines in all directions and adjust brightness of everything light hits, while making shadower places darker. If said object moves (e.g. Player), it means that previous frame info is already outdated. And think of sun+forest... gosh, that's a lot trees, branches and maybe even leaves to count for... Not to mention different color light from different sources and semi-transparent things like colored glass or some gem... And if there is shiny metal shield on ground how do shadow apply to that thing? in short- it's complicated. It's not 2001 anymore where shadows were just dark-gray circle around player becoming more dense if player is closer to solid object counting downwards.
    3. Shadows might run on CPU because either your GPU isn't strong enough or software like PhysX decide that your CPU is better for that because it have less work to do anyway.
    if GPU was important in Starbound, people wouldn't be able to run game on integrated graphics. And I tried on my own laptop- it runs without much problem.
     
    Iris Blanche likes this.
  6. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    Still no excuse to screw over people who invest in something even slightly better than a cheap Best Buy pc.
    "If there's any lag to be had, we might as well all lag equally!" Ok, thanks Mr. Marx : P
    Take the commonly compared Terraria as an example. From personal experience a 2001 PC with a GPU incapable of loading a Minecraft world and a Pentium 3 processor ran Terraria just fine with some resolution reduction, yet adding huge mods and building superstructers while being a multiplayer host gives perfect 60 to my 2011 pc. There's a difference between accounting for those with weak PC's and deliberately screwing the game.

    Skyrim off-top:
    1: You're right, it's not, if you run PS3 level graphics. I believe I said earlier "There's a difference between accounting for those with weak PC's and deliberately screwing the game.", of which Skyrim is actually a decent example due to it being from the PS3/X360 Era.
    Also, I never mentioned that Skyrim ran poorly to begin with. Yes, my GPU is at 100*C from the ENB I made, but it's still playable at 50-60fps. Notice how my GPU is being fully utilized.
    2: Yes, shadows are consuming, but as you said this isn't 2001 anymore. Most dedicated GPU's now can handle some level of real-time shadows.
    Furthermore, this doesn't apply to Skyrim quite as much because it renders all the "sunlight and trees" as one large shadow, so the only real thing that affects performance shadow-wise is the resolution of said large shadow defined in the .ini
    Also, Skyrim has a very low upper-limit for the amount of light sources that can cast shadows. For example, interiors are limited to, I wanna say, 4 sources. That's why candles in the Winking Skeever don't cast shadows off the tables and long caves/tombs hardly have extended periods without any shadows at all.
    You're explanation of shadows and light-sources makes it sound like Ray Tracing/Global Illumination, which is definitely not the case with any game I know of due to it being insanely expensive.
    3: Bloody what? 90% of games don't even use PhysX, nevermind having the game's rendering dictated by it. Skyrim (and other games that do the same) runs shadows off of the CPU because that's how it was coded. People with GTX 1080's have the same exact shadows as people with laptops if you set them to the same quality.
     
  7. Iris Blanche

    Iris Blanche Pudding Paradox Forum Moderator

    Terraria is fully optimized instead of Starbound. Most things that has to be adjusted can only be done by feedback from the community. This is because of those different specs out there. It's also hard to provide really good performance and keep it on different systems. It also seems that starbound uses an own engine and therefore it's even harder to compare with other games because of this. There are so many aspects that have to be considered.

    ~ Iris ~
     
  8. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    Both have had their "1.0" release and thus both consider themselves in a "complete" state. Not "finished", as content updates can happen, but "complete".
    If Starbound doesn't consider itself "fully optimized" it should still be in beta.
    Starbound's had public alpha and public beta for a long, long time.
    Regardless of engine, I compared because them have very similar aspects.
    Both render exclusively in 2d sprites or 2d animated sprites. No 3d models that I'm aware of.
    Both consist of a world made of two layers of 2d voxels.
    Both use effects mostly consisting of colored light glows and particles.

    Some of starbound's projectiles cast shadows and most stuff is higher quality/more complex; thus the system requirements are going to be higher than Terraria, but not sub-optimal on a system that's used to running Battlefield 4 in High @ 720 60p. That's my issue, here. Comparing similar 2D sprite-based games should not have as much contrast as one running on a smartphone and the other being unable to achieve a steady framerate on a "gaming" desktop.
    I'm planning on building a new system in the next month with a GTX 1080 and an i5 6600k, but if my "Core Theory" is correct, even that could theoretically suffer from framedrops in Starbound when it also could theoretically run games like GTA V at super resolution.

    Don't get me wrong, I love Starbound, but this is a ridiculous issue that shouldn't be happening.
     
  9. Kulsius

    Kulsius Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Idk, as for you, but my old PC could handle minecraft no problem while terraria was almost like a slideshow and I couldn't ply it before I got myself laptop.
    As for game engine- it looks 2D, glows and lights look similar as terraria and in general you can even simplify it all as "grid with animated sprites pasted on" if you like, but things to consider are that they both use different engines, working on things different, making things like collision detection different thing (, idk about light specifics in here, but even light can be made to work in different ways and logic). As far as i know, both games use different programming languages and different modding support which also adds it's toll.

    Oh-oh... i5-6600k... you sure it's enough for gaming needs?
    And are you aware of faulty GTX 1070/1080 with Windows 10? Be sure you won't get affected. (Just friendly notice, I've had customers complaining.)
    And yes, Starbound will lag because no matter how good is the road if your car have only 3 wheels and 1 of them is wooden, you won't go 130km/h.


    1. had no intention to say (and i didn't?) that skyrim ran poorly. Senpai has no interest in your GPU utilization.
    2. Very little % of playerbase use anything better than GTX 960 and some people suffer with something as good as 2005 year technology for their gaming needs.
      Never said it was Skyrim specific example. Skyrim lights suck anyway, which is why Nexus is filled with mods that alter lightning and HDR. If you care enough, I could as well use S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat as an example as it have pretty nice graphics for time period it was made (And as i remember, xRay1.6 or w/e engine was used supports all Dx11 and lastest OpenGL graphic enchantments which makes game graphically compete with games released years after.)
      About shadows- yeah, I know, it's more of Global Illumination, but it's how it used to work in older games and only limitation allowing better fps was lack of light sources. And it was used in Doom together with rays to make it look 3D (Doom is actually 2D game engine with 3D render if you want to know that little trivia.)
    3. Don't know what you talking about, because GTA4, Mafia2, Edge of Space, WoT, all CoD since MW2, CS:S, Portal2 (idk about 1st one), Deadbolt, TrackMania, Worms Revolution, Pixel Piracy, Mari0, Flatout, Flatout2 and Skyrim itself use PhysX for sure! And that's just games that I tried, noticed and remember using PhysX on my laptop.
      When playing Skyrim, my CPU is working like 30% and i believe shadows run on GPU here as CPU load doesn't increase at all if setting shadows to best and getting that huge loss of fps.
     
    Iris Blanche likes this.
  10. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    Of course. My i5-2400 on a terrible motherboard is enough that my most CPU-intensive game only puts it at 2/3rds usage, a newer-gen one should only be better. The fact that it's an unlocked processor should help with non-multi-core games like Starbound, future games, and workstation uses as well. Faster Python-fu scripts!
    EH?! Really??
    If that's even a possibility I've got to research that, then. Thanks for the heads-up.

    Skyrim:

    1: Oh. Alright. : D
    2: 2005? If someone has a computer that old and is trying to run games, they should fully expect issues.
    3: Sorry, nope. Literally every game you listed does not officially use PhysX technology with the exception of Mafia II. IDK where you got you information from, but I'd double-check. Misinformation is a crime.
     
  11. sagenth

    sagenth Pangalactic Porcupine

    The only bottlenecks I have encountered are particles. Under rain I must go from x2 zoom toX3.

    On multiplayer, I encounter a fair amount of lag on a server when the population reaches somewhere between 30 and 40 players. Though that is obviously not the point of this thread, I thought it worth mentioning.

    "Yup, only confirms my words that game has no real idea of how to utilise anything that have more than 2 cores in it."
    That is a real shame. Granted it can be quite a task programming a truly parallel game engine, where each thread has been optimized and rarely stalls for another thread to catch up on the current frame.
     
  12. Kulsius

    Kulsius Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    And I sit here, with i5-2450, playing Starbound and Dishonored on my lunch break, trying to pretend I'm working on that Excel sheets that I'm supposed to...

    http://en.yibada.com/articles/13651...ot-glitch-at-high-dvi-pixel-clock-setting.htm
    This is one i mean. It's also reported that GameReady drivers fail to install pretty often.


    1. Yup, next time be sure to read more careful, I'm here not for fights xD
    2. Oh excuse me... That's actually insulting me personally... ;(
    3. I got that information from my personal experience. When game is utilizing PhysX, there is indicator (which is optional) showing when PhysX is utilised, All games I listed are from my personal experience with gaming. Just because game isn't added to "official list" doesn't mean it's not supported.
     
  13. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    Thankfully I hate anything that's not HDMI or DisplayPort.
    I just got done reading about the driver stuff. That's all back in May with the first driver release, and supposedly updating/fresh installing windows 10 fixes it. I'm building a new PC.
    I should theoretically be in the clear, so here's to a planned new 1080/70 and no more games at 720p! *drinks soda*


    3: I can understand if it didn't list Pixel Piracy and whatnot as using PhysX, but games like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto, some of the best-selling games ever? Doubt it.
    Also, most games really flaunt the fact that they have PhysX support. Example: I don't like Fallout, yet I couldn't avoid hearing about some patch Fallout 4 got to add PhysX support.

    Look up "Skyrim PhysX" (or some other game) and see what it says. I'd bet your 'physx indicator thing' just made an incorrect assumption. What would Skyrim even use PhysX for? Nothing I see runs off of it.
     
  14. FierySwordswoman

    FierySwordswoman Void-Bound Voyager

    Yeah, I noticed the same. The only other game that can lag me with particles is Battlefield 4 after a skyscraper collapses and covers the map with dust, and it still runs faster than Starbound's rain.
     
    sagenth likes this.

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