Have recent patches made performance worse?

[Rattenmann]

for the past few months i did not play Stellaris. Just picked up the latest DLC and started a new game.
For reference: I never had the game slow down or stutter on me, not even once. Before today,...

I am talking about a "lagfest" like performance i am getting now. Not just low frames. The frames are all over the place, ranging from 8-60. Much worse is the percived lag tho. The game feels unsmooth from the very first year. Not just into a long game, but right from the get go.

So i went to check what the bottleneck is and i am puzzeled now.

GPU usage is between 2% and 55%. With an average of 17%.
CPU usage is between 17% and 66%. With an average of 43%.
Memory usuage is about 5.5 / 16 gb.

So i can not see any bottleneck here. Not even remotly close. Why in the world can a game lag and NOT even hit 2 digit fps all the time if the maximum load is sup 70%? My rig is sitting at 40 degree while playing and it can easily hit 65 degree while under heavy load in other games.

I just don't understand what is happening here, but i sure as hell don't enjoy the experience i am getting out of my shiny new DLC. :-(

Any known workarounds for this, or... any ideas what else i could check? I did follow all the tech FAQ guideline stuff and did EVERYTHING listed there, without any change to the result whatsoever.

Thanks in advance,.. hope to be able to enjoy the game again soon.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Nope.

I run the game on a four year old laptop and it seems to be doing OK.

 

[LCS73]

Absolutely. My game ran near perfect on 1.5. 1.6 and 1.61 has been absolutely horrible, especially the 1st of every month.

 

[Fourthspartan56]

Either it's the same as before or somewhat better, it's hard to tell.

 

[Rattenmann]

Strange. I really don't see any bottleneck on my end. And honestly why would there be. I got 100 hours into the game without ever dropping below 60 fps and without any lag,... not sure which patch i last played on tho.

Logging in and starting a game today felt like a total brick wall. And as posted before,.. all of my hardware components are barly used by the game at all. All the parts act almost like idle. The temps are just 5 degree over idle. And playing Endless Space 2 yesterday i definitly saw that all the parts CAN be used fully by a 4x game haha. That game maxes out all i have.

Unsure what i can try / change at this point. Guess ill wait for another patch and try again.

 

[lifehole]

Performance issues are rampant on 1.6, and 1.6.1 did not fix it. You are not the only one.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

The beta patch has this note in it:

• Fixed event that was endlessly firing in the background, causing a performance hit

But I personally have not noticed a substantial difference between 1.4 and 1.5 or 1.6.

 

[Razzlie]

I've felt that performance has steadily improved for me, but I haven't played 1.6 beyond early game yet.

If I encounter issues I'll report back in this thread.

 

[Rattenmann]

Performance issues are rampant on 1.6, and 1.6.1 did not fix it. You are not the only one.

I just tried to use the 1.6.1 beta patch and it actually seems to fix the issues i had. The CPu usage went up to an average of 55%, GPU went up to 33%.
Now my FPS is capped at 60 and the laggy feeling is gone,... strange that this patch can fit it for me, but not for others tho.

The beta patch has this note in it:

• Fixed event that was endlessly firing in the background, causing a performance hit

But I personally have not noticed a substantial difference between 1.4 and 1.5 or 1.6.

I too saw this patchnote, but felt it was strange. IF something keeps firing in the background... would it not act like a burntest? I mean, it should either push the GPU or the CPU to the limit in order to even notice any performance hit, right? An almost idle system does not really correlate with an endless loop in the background.

Anyways, 1.6.1 seems to have fixed this for me. At least in the past 30min i was able to play smoothly. Personally just glad the issue was not on my end, since debugging a bottleneck without actually having one is not a fun task at all ;-)

 

[MadDjinn]

I've been finding on the 1.6 patch that it does feel slower. Not lag per se but the game just starts to crawl and the days don't fly by nearly as fast.

It could just be a coding problem wrt drivers or amd vs Intel/nvidia though, which is why some would notice and others wouldn't.

 

[zechio]

...I too saw this patchnote, but felt it was strange. IF something keeps firing in the background... would it not act like a burntest? I mean, it should either push the GPU or the CPU to the limit in order to even notice any performance hit, right? An almost idle system does not really correlate with an endless loop in the background.

Anyways, 1.6.1 seems to have fixed this for me. At least in the past 30min i was able to play smoothly. Personally just glad the issue was not on my end, since debugging a bottleneck without actually having one is not a fun task at all ;-)

It's actually pretty difficult to use a true 100% of a modern CPU. You have to load balance multiple cores/threads. In games, there is naturally no direct effort to balance the load: Instead, they take what can be multi-threaded, and do so. However, especially with heavily inter-connected games like PDXs Grand Strategies, there is an enormous amount of waiting on the main thread. ( You can not have 2 things changing the same thing at the same time. This is very bad. As such, 1 will naturally have to wait for the other. )

This gets further compounded by the fact that games do not simply run at the full speed of the CPU all the time. If you did, you would get an old issue cropping up: It used to be that games ran on different speed CPUs would run at different speeds. This can be rather hilarious playing one of these old games on a modern CPU. In modern games though, they are time limited, to keep things in sync across different CPUs/players. ( Until you do fall behind of course, then you get lag problems. )

The final bit to this is that the event probably wasn't very process intensive. Instead of single handedly loading the CPU, it was just a substantial overhead. From there, if you happened to have a lot of other stuff happen as well, THEN you would lag. Notice also how this could easily create a difference player to player, compounded with the fact that the trigger for the event bug might not have occurred for every single person.

Voila: It now perfectly describes what we saw. ( I too had a hitching very frequently, that smooth between hitches, and has since been completely fixed in 1.6.1. )

As for my personal experience: 1.5 was very smooth, 1.6 had the above hitching, 1.6.1 is smooth through the days, but has a noticeable hitch at the end of every month. ( Similar to a save hitch, though my auto-save is semi-annual, and I have confirmed there are only saves every 6 months. ) All of this is just before 2600, and I have an i7, 6700k at stock.

Since it's monthly, it's probably something like an AI update that is losing a cache, and recalculating from scratch.

 

[Oscot]

I have experienced no lag in any situation since 1.4, and that was when I had 1 million plus fleetpower, and it was obviously a rendering problem because it only happened when I was looking at my doomstack in system view, and it was trivially avoided by not looking at my doomstack in system view, and even then it wasn't that bad. I have never had an issue with long save times or 1st-of-month slowdown.

Do all you guys use, like, 20 mods concurrently or something? I never use any, which might explain why I run smooth as butter and y'all don't.

 

[zechio]

I have experienced no lag in any situation since 1.4, and that was when I had 1 million plus fleetpower, and it was obviously a rendering problem because it only happened when I was looking at my doomstack in system view, and it was trivially avoided by not looking at my doomstack in system view, and even then it wasn't that bad. I have never had an issue with long save times or 1st-of-month slowdown.

Do all you guys use, like, 20 mods concurrently or something? I never use any, which might explain why I run smooth as butter and y'all don't.

Nope, completely stock.

As I said, it's likely situational.

Some people also won't really notice it. ( Like how some people don't notice 20 FPS vs. 60. ) ATM it's only like a 1 or 2 second hitch. Mainly noticeable because if I try to click on something during this time, nothing happens for a moment.

 

[grandad1982]

1.5 was good. 1.6.1 is a bit janky I'm finding.

 

[Jorrhast]

Absolutely. My game ran near perfect on 1.5. 1.6 and 1.61 has been absolutely horrible, especially the 1st of every month.

I second this. 1st day of month is horrible, the rest is fine for me though, no noticeable lag.

 

[Elfwind]

Absolutely. My game ran near perfect on 1.5. 1.6 and 1.61 has been absolutely horrible, especially the 1st of every month.

Same performance has really taken a hit. It becomes unplayable sometimes.

 

[zukodark]

In 1.5 I have played multiple games to the endgame, with very little lag until I entered large endgame battles, and even if I had opened tons of other programs on my computer at the same time.

In 1.6 I have not played a single to the endgame, due to the same issue the guys above me mentioned. Strangely, the game seems just as laggy for me now on small galaxies as large (800/1000).

I have not tried 1.6.1 yet.

 

[Wenla]

1. day of the month stops my game for 5 seconds now. I can stand it, but I don't like it.

 

[LCS73]

Yeah, I ran into the same freezing issue on the smallest possible galaxy.

 

[Robotkiller]

If some people are experiencing issues and others aren't, it may be due to hardware configuration. I recommend posting hardware specs, at the very least CPU and GPU. I've avoided 1.6 like the plague so far, so I can't give my performance assessment.