Upgrading PC for late game Stellaris - what do i need? Do SSDs help late game lag?

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TheRomanRuler

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So i know CPU will make biggest difference, but what else?

Atm my PC is:
Ryzen 7 2700x, i plan to upgrade this to Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
RX 6600. For Paradox games should be easily enough. I used to run R9 390, i doubt it limited my perfomance in any Paradox game either.
32 GB of DDR4 3200MHz CL16 ram. Would upgrading this to DDR4 3600MHz CL16 do anything in this game? 32 GB is at least easily more than enough.
I also got M.2 NVME 3500/3300 MB/s SSD. I have yet to try it with Stellaris, does it help late game lag at all?
OS is Windows 10 64 bit.
I have also enabled SAM/resizable bar though i doubt that does anything in this game. Or does it?
 
It is all about single thread performance (STP), which is usually a bottleneck. Your new CPU has higher STP than the old one by 30%.

Other stats were and are good.
 
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Having the game on a SSD mostly impacts loading times, but the impact there is huge. I'm not entirely sure how much faster my loading times are exactly since I moved the game to my SSD, but it easily feels 10x faster. This applies to all PDX games and more broadly to any game that uses a lot of relatively small files.
 
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So i know CPU will make biggest difference, but what else?

Atm my PC is:
Ryzen 7 2700x, i plan to upgrade this to Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
RX 6600. For Paradox games should be easily enough. I used to run R9 390, i doubt it limited my perfomance in any Paradox game either.
32 GB of DDR4 3200MHz CL16 ram. Would upgrading this to DDR4 3600MHz CL16 do anything in this game? 32 GB is at least easily more than enough.
I also got M.2 NVME 3500/3300 MB/s SSD. I have yet to try it with Stellaris, does it help late game lag at all?
OS is Windows 10 64 bit.
I have also enabled SAM/resizable bar though i doubt that does anything in this game. Or does it?

  • If you don't have ANY SSD, get one and move Windows and games etc. to it.
  • If you have SSD of any kind then upgrading one to larger or faster will not really improve late game performance of Stellaris. if Stellaris is not installed on SSD for some reason then I suggest moving it there.
  • Remember to check your motherboard's CPU support and update BIOS before installing 5800X3D.
  • I did a quick and dirty benchamrk of 3800X vs 5800X3D while ago. I suspect you are going to see even larger increase when going from 2000-series CPU as they didn't have that good single thread performance.
  • If adding multiple NVme SSDs also read the motherboard manual how it affects PCIe-slots, SATA etc. as depending on the exact chipset and configuration there is possibily that some of them gets disabled.
  • Resizable BAR doesn't have effect in Stellariis, maybe if you were using Intel's ARC which pretty much requires that setting.

Sorry about double post, but I just finished my really quick and dirty comparison of AMD Ryzen 3800X and 5800X3D in Stellaris. The exact save game used for the tests is attached to this post.
  • 3800X completed 98 days in 70 seconds, 1,4 days/second.
  • 5800X3D completed ~144,25 days in 70 seconds, ~2,06 day/second
  • Increase of 47%
 
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Best cure for late-game lag is getting yourself an M1 Mac.

This fix works on any galaxy size and any map settings.

The trick is that the game crashes between 2300 - 2400 and corrupts its saves so you can't even transfer your save to another platform.

Absolutely refreshing to play at early-game speeds all the time.
 
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  • If you don't have ANY SSD, get one and move Windows and games etc. to it.
  • If you have SSD of any kind then upgrading one to larger or faster will not really improve late game performance of Stellaris. if Stellaris is not installed on SSD for some reason then I suggest moving it there.
  • Remember to check your motherboard's CPU support and update BIOS before installing 5800X3D.
  • I did a quick and dirty benchamrk of 3800X vs 5800X3D while ago. I suspect you are going to see even larger increase when going from 2000-series CPU as they didn't have that good single thread performance.
  • If adding multiple NVme SSDs also read the motherboard manual how it affects PCIe-slots, SATA etc. as depending on the exact chipset and configuration there is possibily that some of them gets disabled.
  • Resizable BAR doesn't have effect in Stellariis, maybe if you were using Intel's ARC which pretty much requires that setting.
Have had Sata SSD for ages with my windows installation in there, though only recently got 2TB M.2 SSD where i put games (though not ones like gamedev tycoon that really dont need it).

Yeah my MOBO and bios support it.

Sounds awesome, but any idea how it scales in late game if i make galaxy bigger? Its propably not linear 40% scale to everything. I desperately want more factions in the galaxy, i might keep pop growth and available planets very slow and small though.

Yeah second NVME would disable (some of) my SATA stuff.

Makes sense, did not think it would do anything.
 
Sounds awesome, but any idea how it scales in late game if i make galaxy bigger? Its propably not linear 40% scale to everything. I desperately want more factions in the galaxy, i might keep pop growth and available planets very slow and small though.
My test was late game in huge galaxy. See the quoted thread for the exact settings I used.
 
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Best cure for late-game lag is getting yourself an M1 Mac.

This fix works on any galaxy size and any map settings.

The trick is that the game crashes between 2300 - 2400 and corrupts its saves so you can't even transfer your save to another platform.

Absolutely refreshing to play at early-game speeds all the time.
It's really sad that pdx dont support the M1/2 natively yet :(
that really prevents me from playing right now
 
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A new better optimized engine. If your speccs are good enough, it's the engine that'll eventually give out.
 
Don't set your expectations too high. I recently upgraded from a i3-8350k to an i9-13900k and still experience late game lag. The difference for me is that I now play on medium galaxies instead of the smallest and can get to the late game now.
 
Don't set your expectations too high. I recently upgraded from a i3-8350k to an i9-13900k and still experience late game lag. The difference for me is that I now play on medium galaxies instead of the smallest and can get to the late game now.
I wonder if 24 core vs 8 core makes a difference. Games that utilize less cores will heavily underperform more cores you have.
 
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you want to run stellaris no lag, start building a real life O Class matrioskha brain and pray.