HOI4 Performances issues on high end PC

[TouchTheFishy]

Hello everyone,

I have played a lot of HOI4 the last year and it has always been working great! (60FPS for early years, a bit less on later years, as usual)

Last week I upgraded my config to the following specs:

- Processor : AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core Processor, 3.793 Mhz (up to 4.4GHz) , 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
- GPU : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB
- 16GB RAM
- MOBO: B450 AORUS ELITE
- Windows 10 64 bits

Now, HOI4 runs at 20FPS as soon as I hit "play" and seems to be struggling constantly. On various forums i have seen that it's a sign that the CPU is struggling to calculate but I am having a hard time believing that my 7 years old CPU had it easier than a 2020 CPU... Furthermore, i have checked on my task manager and my CPU is running at 35%

Tanks in advance!

 

[BeauNiddle]

FPS is a really bad metric for HOI4. What you want to be measuring is how long it takes a month to pass. (whilst running at speed 5)

Speed 5 is completely unlocked and will run as fast as your machine can handle it - often skipping the render loop. Thus you get a low frame rate. Speed 4 is a fixed speed and will always update the gfx so check what frame rate you get in that.

If you have a multi-core processor then 35% for the whole CPU is about expected. Check what each individual core is doing - one should be maxed out.

 

[jpd]

Without the specs of your previous system, it's hard to tell what the differences are, and what may be the cause.

 

[STABBY5]

I seem to remember them saying that FPS is lower on 5 speed due to the game purposely skipping frames to process faster. If days go by quickly then it is fine.

 

[bitmode]

Agreed, you probably mixed up speed 4 and 5 between your old and new machine. 60 FPS on speed 5 is very hard to achieve. For reference, my machine is strictly slower than yours (Ryzen 5 1400 3.2 GHz, Radeon RX 570, 16 GB) and I get the following times when I stopwatch the first month as Germany (console commands "human_ai" & "pause_in_hours 744"):

• Windows: 42.9 s
• Linux: 36.4 s

with ~24 FPS on both OSs (graphics settings are roughly equal but I did not compare them explicitly).

 

[TouchTheFishy]

Thanks a lot for the intel guys! It makes more sense now.

Probably, on my older build, speed 5 was limited by the GPU so the the CPU wasn't saturated yet hence the better performances.

Cheers!

 

[CrasherZZ]

I discovered a trick to get my game going when it slows to a crawl. If I'm watching a particular area and the game is stalling if I zoom the view way out the game speed picks up again. It must be because the display is no longer displaying detailed graphics when I'm zoomed out.

When I zoom back in the game speed is back to normal. If it slows again later on, I just zoom out again for several seconds. My PC is 6 years old but it was a highly rated at the time I bought it except for the graphics card.

I don't know exactly why that works but maybe someone else can explain it?