I still get 30 FPS in hoi4 late game with an RTX 3090

[KubiG37]

Actually if you'd just pause the game your FPS should skyrocket (it's still capped by the game I believe though).
But you'll never ever get great FPS running the game at MAX SPEED, because then it will just run as fast as your CPU can compute the game mechanics and AI, and graphics is just "lagging behind".

 

[Kazakk]

You are playing on speed 5, which advances the game as quickly as the CPU allows. It is like a fast forward button, not running the game normally. Typically just one frame is rendered per game hour on this speed.
It only makes sense to measure fps at speed 4 or below, which try to advance the game at a defined rate.

Imagine going with speed 5 with a computer from 2050
A year will go by in one second

 

[DGuller]

Mock the OP all you want, but I just quite my anarchist Spain run, because the game was just impossible. The problem with most Spain runs is that unless you cheese it a lot, you come into your own sometime into the end of WW2, by which point the game slows to a crawl, never mind the occasional 15 second freeze when something big happens. Maybe instead of doing focus trees for Burkina Faso, Paradox should think about what level of complexity is bottlenecking the CPU, and whether it really is all that necessary. I for one could live just fine without having 90 different flavors of basic equipment.

 

[RAID186]

You can blame Paradoxes trash engine all you want, but the game is running so many calculations it's not even funny. No other games offer quite as much as PDX for an AI like this.

No CPU will run it well, and Paradox will probably be unable to improve it all that much. Call them incompetent if you want, but even a team you'd consider competent wouldn't be able to do it.

 

[FOARP]

You can blame Paradoxes trash engine all you want, but the game is running so many calculations it's not even funny. No other games offer quite as much as PDX for an AI like this.

No CPU will run it well, and Paradox will probably be unable to improve it all that much. Call them incompetent if you want, but even a team you'd consider competent wouldn't be able to do it.

In too minds about this: obviously the OP is just plain wrong because they don't understand that this is a CPU issue and the GPU doesn't handle it.

But on the other hand, Paradox do have a bad habit of creating good-on-paper-bad-in-practise numerical mechanics that by game-end would require a Cray super-computer to run smoothly, and which typically crash by game-end as well. Vicky 2 is a classic case: by game-end you've typically got endless Liberal-Anarchist rebellions, a world without resources, and war every five years.

In HOI4 the end-game problems appear to be simply division-spam and equipment-bloat. They're getting on top of division spam but the basic concept that every country makes its own weapons, regardless of whether it is essentially a pre-industrial society, creates endless piles of essentially-identical equipment everywhere in the world that are surely eating into CPU-time. Issues with the planner and focus-trees are probably also contributing.

This are problems with core elements of game play and date back probably to the start of development of the game. Since they're so basic, they're also really hard to patch so all this "why doesn't Paradox fix this instead of releasing country-packs" talk is misguided - these issues may not be patchable (for comparison, HOI3 had many basic issues that were never patched because they were basically unpatchable).

 

[jpd]

The local piles of stock do not create lag. They're just numbers in an array. These are only accessed by two actions. First one is increase, which is the output of the production lines, or the transfer of the stockpile slot of nation x to nation y (in the case of lend lease). The second one is decrease, and that one is only triggered when divisions are lacking equipment. As long as a division has all it wants, no equipment is drawn from the stockpile.

All these arrays eat is memory. It takes room to hold them. This will only translate into actual CPU time if, and only if you are severely lacking in the computer memory department, and your system needs the swap file to hold part of this data.

 

[Shaka of Carthage]

The local piles of stock do not create lag. ... All these arrays eat is memory. It takes room to hold them. This will only translate into actual CPU time if, and only if you are severely lacking in the computer memory department, and your system needs the swap file to hold part of this data.

So does this imply that division spam is what increases lag? My current experience is with a modified Kaiserreich, which does have a mechanic for significant reduction in divisions. Yet I do experience a lag in late war (post '43). Always wondered what is causing the lag, kinda assumed it was related to whatever data was being stored on hard drives (ie memory file swapping).

 

[kettyo]

you can run HoI4 on your board graphics it doesn't matter.

This isn't necessarily true as board graphics might suffer rendering everything at 4K for example.

I have a weaker dedicated laptop GPU, an Nvidia 1050 and i have to disable multisampling to render acceptably in 4K. Even this way GPU usage is in the 95-100% range but map panning is relatively smooth. If i max multisampling out GPU usage will be steadily at 100% and map panning will stutter a lot.

No problems whatsoever in Full-HD resolution.

 

[kettyo]

Imagine going with speed 5 with a computer from 2050
A year will go by in one second

Not necessarily. Most of the game operations run on a single core so it mostly depends on single core power. But CPU development tends toward more cores than more core frequency i think because of energy efficiency reasons.

 

[DGuller]

You can blame Paradoxes trash engine all you want, but the game is running so many calculations it's not even funny. No other games offer quite as much as PDX for an AI like this.

No CPU will run it well, and Paradox will probably be unable to improve it all that much. Call them incompetent if you want, but even a team you'd consider competent wouldn't be able to do it.

If the game is running so many calculations that it can't run properly, then maybe you should ask the game to run less calculations. This isn't factoring number into primes where the computational complexity is not under your control, as a developer you shouldn't ask more from your code than it can deliver with the resources at hand.

 

[kettyo]

If the game is running so many calculations that it can't run properly, then maybe you should ask the game to run less calculations. This isn't factoring number into primes where the computational complexity is not under your control, as a developer you shouldn't ask more from your code than it can deliver with the resources at hand.

You practically asking for dumbing grand strategy games down for performance reasons. This isn't a good answer i think.

I'd rather play a more complex game slower than a simplified one faster.

Have to note that there are already quite some simplifications there like air war with teleporting planes etc.

 

[kettyo]

In HOI4 the end-game problems appear to be simply division-spam and equipment-bloat

As well as tons of planes. And also now country bloat because of collaborations.

 

[Gamer4you]

That lad has the same FPS than mines, and i’m playing with a GTX 850M.
How can you not see the difference between a GPU and CPU lol

 

[jpd]

So does this imply that division spam is what increases lag? My current experience is with a modified Kaiserreich, which does have a mechanic for significant reduction in divisions. Yet I do experience a lag in late war (post '43). Always wondered what is causing the lag, kinda assumed it was related to whatever data was being stored on hard drives (ie memory file swapping).

Can't comment on your specific case without knowing the system details. You can always run Process Explorer (downloadable from Microsoft) to peek into the details while the game is running.

But, the further along in a campaign you get, the more data about the state of the game needs to be recorded. The divisions is only part of that. You also have things like province/state history (just like the other paradox game titles do). That, too, needs memory to store it all. If you don't have a lot of system RAM, then at some point you run out of available physical memory, and the system will start swapping.

Keep also in mind that modern video boards like to lay claim to a lot of physical system ram to extend their on-board VRAM. My new NVidia 1660 super, for example, comes with 6 GB VRAM on-board. But it still lays claim to an additional 8 GB of physical RAM to extend it's memory pool to 14 GB. And what the GPU gains, is lost to Windows for application data. So, if you have something similar, and have 16 GB RAM installed, well, congratulations, you just lost 8 GB and have only 8 GB physical memory left.

You can view how much you lose through both DxDiag and Process Explorer. In Process Explorer, you need to do a bit of calculating yourself, using the upper limit for the Commit Charge value. This value is always twice the amount of physical memory available to Windows. If you divide that number thus by two, then you know how much physical memory is available to Windows. The difference between that number and how many RAM you have installed is in use by your video board (or any other piece of hardware that has laid claim to a chunk of main RAM).

 

[DGuller]

I have 128 GB of RAM, I'm going to assume that my Anarchist Spain game wasn't swapping to hard drive. It was still unbearable.

 

[kettyo]

I have 128 GB of RAM, I'm going to assume that my Anarchist Spain game wasn't swapping to hard drive. It was still unbearable.

Wow, why that much?

I have 16 GB and never came close to being short. I have to note though that i don't edit videos. Have edited pretty large photos without any memory shortage.

 

[Terry Newton]

But, the further along in a campaign you get, the more data about the state of the game needs to be recorded. The divisions is only part of that. You also have things like province/state history (just like the other paradox game titles do). That, too, needs memory to store it all. If you don't have a lot of system RAM, then at some point you run out of available physical memory, and the system will start swapping.

K

Does this mean that we could test the province history related component of the lag by saving the game when it starts lagging and reloading to that save to reset the history so the accumulation starts again? Does this history start from a load or from the beginning of the game?

In the modified Kaiserreich we play, there are not large air force counts either. This seems to leave history as the only part our mod of Kaiserreich does not substantially reduce.

 

[DGuller]

Wow, why that much?

I have 16 GB and never came close to being short. I have to note though that i don't edit videos. Have edited pretty large photos without any memory shortage.

I do data science as a hobby.

 

[kettyo]

I do data science as a hobby.

That's cool! Enjoy dude.

 

[jura28]

I think it's not about CPU either. I'm running on RYZEN 7 2700, usually speed 3. And it's still terrible experience late game. Especially now since I can compare to CK3, which is perfectly optimized. Sadly, HoI4 is a disaster in this matter.