Can we talk about late-game performance issues?

[Tollski]

So, I've played a lot of Stellaris this week and have gotten three empires past year 2400 and have with each one it has gotten to the point where the game goes so slow that it's practically unplayable.

To show my point I have timed how long it takes to go through exactly 1 year on the fastest time setting. (Note: only looking at galaxy map, no fleets moving or battles taking place or any player action, playing in fullscreen mode. PC specs: i7-3770 CPU, 16GB DDR3 RAM, GTX 660 ti GPU, Windows 8.1)
1000 star galaxy, year 2400, 159 colonies: one year took 6min 22sec (view map)
600 star galaxy, year 2408, 104 colonies: one year took 3min 10sec (view map)
400 star galaxy, year 2447, 172 colonies: one year took 5min 16sec (view map)
1000 star galaxy, year 2200, 1 colony: one year took 1min 0sec
600 star galaxy, year 2200, 1 colony: one year took 1min 0sec
400 star galaxy, year 2200, 1 colony: one year took 1min 0sec

As my results show, in the worst case I'm getting about a 6x slowdown, and that's without actually doing anything, when moving fleets to attack enemies it is far worse. Also, this is happening in every game in which my empire gets too large, no matter the galaxy size. This is quite frustrating because I'd like to keep playing until I have total galactic domination but it's just not possible with how slow the game gets.

I know I can't be the only one experiencing this because even in the multiplayer stream they did there were major slowdown issues in the last fights they showed.
I know Escher mentioned an imminent performance fix five days ago in this reddit thread on Monday and he speculated that they would have a fix released ASAP (mentioning as early as Tuesday), so I do not know if they have released this fix or not. Hopefully they do fix it though because the game is fantastic and I'd like to play my empires into the late-game.

 

[Jynks]

I've played a few game on 1K stars and have noticed practically zero performance issues. In fact the smoothness of the engine is one of the things I think is so great about this game... (though I wish I could mouse zoom into the planet view instead of pressing m)

 

[Tollski]

I've played a few game on 1K stars and have noticed practically zero performance issues. In fact the smoothness of the engine is one of the things I think is so great about this game... (though I wish I could mouse zoom into the planet view instead of pressing m)

How many colonies/systems did you control? I never start experiencing performance issues until I have a whole bunch.

 

[Jynks]

i dunno.. enough to be at the end of the gam.e

 

[Balkri]

I'm near 150 colonies in a 1000 star galaxy, with initial 30 empires. Every Time a ship moves is like a succession of pictures, like a mini pause every second. Combats of big fleets are not very fun to watch because of this "pauses" that happen everytime, and weaponds like missiles and torpedos make it worse [is the same that happened in the blorg multiplayer stream].

An as the Op say, the more you advance, the more lag you start getting.

Is far from unplayable, but can be a let down late in the game :/

 

[Tollski]

I'm near 150 colonies in a 1000 star galaxy, with initial 30 empires. Every Time a ship moves is like a succession of pictures, like a mini pause every second. Combats of big fleets are not very fun to watch because of this "pauses" that happen everytime, and weaponds like missiles and torpedos make it worse [is the same that happened in the blorg multiplayer stream].

An as the Op say, the more you advance, the more lag you start getting.

Is far from unplayable, but can be a let down late in the game :/

That almost perfectly describes combat for me as well.

 

[Salvaticus]

I forget how many stars there are... it's the exact middle setting (like 600 I think?)

Fleets move in stutter steps. Game days just appear to pause for extended periods. The framerate is perfectly fine, but the underlying processing situation is stalling like crazy.

 

[Misterawesome93]

I have a really hard time playing past 120 years before the game ends up like a slide show when I move fleets. I got so tired of waiting eons for things to happen that I got bored and started a new game before I even got a late game crisis which is a shame because so much of the game is really great but the slowdown makes it hard to enjoy it and it doesnt help that it happens even faster then in CKII.

 

[Baldamundo]

fwiw I'm 170 years into a 2000 stars on a laptop that's below minimum specs, and although it's gotten pretty laggy, it's still just about playable

EDIT: Okay, I've just tried going to war, and arguably "playable" was an exaggeration...

 

[Knotz]

My game got a bit stuttery but it was fine after the first hotfix. Though the most planets I've controlled was 10 so that might be part of the issue.

 

[Neutralista]

Ever since 1.0.2 the only major slowdowns I've had was in the Battle of Malar which was the first (and most decisive) battle of my war against an FE. 79k versus all but 2k of their fleet (so around 60k or so). That was the only major processing slowdown.

I still get stuttery fleet movement every now and then, but even during the Battle of Malar I still had fluid combat, so...

 

[jeppev]

I was also 155 years into my Crowtoss campaign, and now it just takes so long game to process days/turns, that fastest speed is equivalent to slow when you start a new game. This is on a 600 map with 2 arms =( I really loved that campaign and just got my Psi Jump drives and although the campaign can be played, for me it just stopped being immersive and fun.

So now I started on 400 star map aiming to befriend the Blorg and make them as great as space itself! =P

 

[meathome]

I have the same problems, 600 size galaxy i own 112 planets in 14 sectors and have fleets worth 130k power (hit the fleet limit of 1000 and its totally unplayable by now. System specs are intel i5-4670k overclocked to 4ghz 16gb of ram, geforce 770, running windows 10.

 

[Teutonizer]

That feeling when you're ran through 50 years of game on 5k systems...I guess my calculator will be melting in really late-game that way

 

[CptWilly]

I had some pretty serious slowdowns around 2450, 600 star galaxy, approx. 110 colonies. Major fleet battles weren't as terrible jerky as the Blorg stream issues, but definitely slowed way down. As you said, even outside of combat I was just sitting on fastest feeling an awful lot like normal.

 

[Person012345]

I can confirm the horrendous lag issues. I am running a GTX 780, i7-4770 with 16gb of RAM. I have 402 pops across 93 worlds and the game is just constantly lagging. 1000 star galaxy.

 

[blallo]

not sure if it's related, i don't have extreme lag 150 years in, in a 600 star galaxy, but instead once a month the date freezes for something like 5 seconds. in that time i can move around, i can issue commands to unit i selected before, but those orders are showed only when the date start running again.

 

[Dayer]

So, I've played a lot of Stellaris this week and have gotten three empires past year 2400 and have with each one it has gotten to the point where the game goes so slow that it's practically unplayable...

I've noticed this problem as well when I grew large enough, I expected it to be honest, on 1k stars with max empires and everything. The issue with slowdowns in most of these kinds of games is either a large amount of orders (e.g the ye old attack move issue) or a large amount of events. Since we know Stellaris is not spamming events like CK2 is, the large amount of orders is probably what causes the slowdown, as the game processes everything. This isn't really surprising, if you click on any planet in a sector the AI will (usually) keep switching the pops around all the time.

I wonder how the slowdown would behave if we had everything under our core by changing the settings.

 

[Nobody]

Can confirm a single year takes 5 minutes. 600 star galaxy 130 years in. But I have a large empire across 90 planets.

This is especially annoying because at this phase of the game almost nothing happens. No power can threaten me and all I do is wait for my fleets to build up and move to position for a war that is 10 years (Or 50 minutes) away from happening.

Not sure if it's related but a single core is always at 100%:

Spoiler: CPU performance

 

[[Q]uik]

multiplayer game - 1k stars, 100 years
As soon as a war breaks out, we go from constant 60fps to 40 in galaxy view and a horrific 20 in combat.. And we're 1000 years in- meaing there's like 150~ ships at most