Unreasonably poor performance ?

Hi,

For some reason I get pretty poor performance, even just in basic scenes like the platform with the red ship. I've got an R9 290, and an FX-8350, with no integrated graphics (it's definitely using the 290). I keep reading about people with lower-end AMD cards getting fine performance, or others with the same CPU getting fine performance, etc. So I don't understand why my game runs really choppy when I'm looking at anything other than totally empty space. Also, I can run my other demanding games pretty well.

It makes very little difference to the performance whether I use Normal, High or Extreme settings, either. All of them are borderline unplayable without Render Interpolation, which just hides the lag.

Thanks

 

Well I have an R9 290X card and I run just fine. the problem is that AMD software is terrible at rendering physics. the graphics will hardly make any difference because it is the physics that is hard. but even if i take that into account you should not lag on basic scenes. my card is perfectly capable of running on highest asteroid density and render distance with grapics on extreme. there should not be any reason for you to lag.


EDIT: I looked into the specs of the card. the 290 is the little brother of the 290X apparently, and my 290X gets around 50 FPS on all the highest settings. since your card is slightly worse it looks like it is not a bug or anything, both the game and the card are just badly optimized for each other. you'll have to play with a slightly lower render distance it seems.

 

And yet I do though :/

Without Render Interpolation it's unplayable. Render Interpolation hides the lag just a bit.

 

Not the card. I have the same one R2-290. Extreme settings very good performance. But I have an i7 which probably is processing a little faster.


Thinking about it now, aren't they doing something regards core usage in the near future. I think its in the 'to do' list, not sure.

 

Processor, that's most likely your problem. This game is not graphic-demanding, It's processor-demanding.

 

From my expierience, the graphics card is the limiting factor in SP or as a client for low-end systems.
I've a 7 year old notebook with a 2x 2.1 GHz Core2Duo and an nVidia GT 230 M and 4 GB RAM. My sim speed is at 1.0 despite the dated, relatively slow CPU compared to todays CPUs.'
But even in 800x600 resolution and "Low" settings, I bary get more than 20 FPS when looking at empty space and this drops to 3-9 FPS when looking at ships or other structures. Unplayable.

 

It'll be your CPU that is causing the lag. The 8350 is a great CPU (i have the same one) but it doesn't have the best single threaded performance. Space engineers isn't very well optimised for multi cores yet. If you watch task manager you'll see CPU usage sat at 13-15% which is one core out of your 8. You might also want to check that your CPU isn't throttling itself or something silly. If it gets too hot it will turn the clock speed down to cool itself, you'll notice this if you're on stock cooling as your PC will sound like a jet engine.

As for someone who said AMD cards don't process physics as good, that's true... if you're talking about PhysX because PhysX only runs on Nvidia GPUs otherwise it'll fallback to the CPU but from what i can tell this game doesn't use PhysX so that's a moot point.

Like i said, i have the same CPU and an AMD 6950 GPU and i'm not really experiencing many lag issues when i'm not mining but i mainly play MP. I know that the dedicated server hammers the CPU as i watch it eat a core of my Xeon so i'm guessing most of the processing is offloaded to the server in MP making SP a but more CPU heavy.

 

ATI Radeon 5770 with 16GB RAM and a ~2.3 GHz processor and i still get fairly playable framerates on all but the largest projects.

 

bump up the core voltage a bit, and the memory voltage.
bump the base clock from 200 to 210.
bump the base cpu multiplier up by 1 on both modes (turbo and normal) and there you go.
all FX chips can reach pretty close to 5 ghz/core.
be it the fx4xxx series or the fx 9xxx series.
i got an fx6300. its verry happy with 4,8 ghz setting.
and it makes vast difference in space engineers, with the stock settings i had lag problems.
with current settings i get around 25% better performance in everything.
passmark gives 1647 points for signle core, 8040 for cpu mark, physics 474.4
in comaprism cpu boss says fx8350 has 1525 in singlecore, and for cpu mark it gets 9134 points.
in theory with badly or not optimised software i can get away at about (% better than your current cpu.
give it some juice and its all fine.
its AMD. no onverclock, no joy.

 

Bumping up voltage "a bit" is pretty vague. Possibly dangerous advice if the person reading that has no idea what they're doing.

For starters, I would make sure you disable APM in your BIOS. Depending on your motherboard, if it's one of the 900 series chipsets it should be easy to disable that in the BIOS, but if it's an 800 series chipset you'll have to go a completely different route with a little bit of software coding that opens up as soon as Windows starts...

The motherboards these FX chips run on throttle down the voltage and FSB to "cool" down the VRMs which causes the CPU to drop to 3.1GHz under load, and overrides any overclock you may have. It's called APM and can be switched off in the BIOS of the newer 900 chipsets but not on older chipsets. It doesn't really hurt the VRMs which is why I put "cool" in quotes, because that's why you have case airflow and (hopefully) heatsinks on the VRMs.

Also, depending on your motherboard, you may not even have beefy enough VRMs to run the 8 core chips. You might have better luck disabling a module or two (2 cores/module) and running as a 6 or 4 core chip. The 8 cores really need at least 8+1 phase VRMs, with 8+2 prefferred, but a bare minimum of a 6+1 or +2 phase. If it's only got a 4+1 phase VRM... I'm sorry.

 

Since last couple of weeks mining is very cpu demanding. (It was also cpu demanding before but now it is like crazy.) They are not fixing it because they are building a completely new multiplayer. I hope it comes quick, I can't play.

 

Moving to technical help

 

Alright, I've got a 900-chipset motherboard so I'll have a look into APM. Also, my computer does tend to sound like a jet engine, but I just figured that's down to the stock cooler not being particularly efficient - my CPU idles at 20 and gets to around 50 under heavy load, so I don't think that's particularly worrying.

And yeah, though I do have a fair bit of technical experience and the like, overclocking isn't something I'm familiar with.

The Motherboard is an ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0



I get 50fps just looking at this red ship. 50fps isn't too bad but the especially weird thing is it doesn't really feel like 50fps either, and it feels pretty choppy, especially when I'm stopping moving after flying.

 

50C is pretty toasty for a CPU with a maximum temperature of about 55-60C.

 

The maximum safe temperature is 62C, and the highest temp I see under 100% load is 54.4C. And that's only briefly, before the cooler ramps up and brings it back closer to 50C. The cooler is just the stock one though and sounds like a jet engine, so I have just ordered in the so-hyped Cooler Master 212 EVO. Might bring it down a few degrees too. People say the AMD stock coolers suck at just about anything a cooler can suck at and I'm inclined to agree.

 

People are right. I have the 8350 as well and the stock cooler was a joke, IMO. I also went with the 212 EVO cooler and it keeps temps around 43 for me.

 

I read the thermal paste is equally bad too, so generally not looking too good on the stock cooling side of things. I got some "Arctic Silver 5". With any luck, those two will get me decent temperatures like yours.

I'm thinking replacing my battered old cheap case with something a bit higher end could be a good next step too, but that might wait for another day.

Also, after finding GTA 5 very laggy, I did a fresh reinstall of my graphics drivers. That may have been at least part of the problem here. I had a lot of trouble trying to install those when I first installed the graphics card (and at the same time I installed a new hard drive and installed Windows 8.1 for the first time), a lot of weird errors being thrown and such, and I kind of had to trick the driver into installing.

This time I managed to uninstall, completely clean the drivers, and reinstall, without any errors or issues. I also used the beta 15.4 drivers this time, which people recommend for GTA 5.

The result is that GTA 5 now runs absolutely perfect, an amazing contrast which I really didn't expect just from a driver reinstall. Now I know that 15.4 specifically caters to GTA 5 so something like this is to be expected, but at the same time the contrast is so huge that I wonder if that performance improvement might actually also be partly down to a correct driver install this time, which could help Space Engineers too. It's hard to believe that just updating drivers alone could have such a monumental effect on a game.

 

Ohhhh man... don't get me started on AMD drivers lol. One of my buddies plays League of Legends and he kept getting a second and a half of black screen every 10 minutes or so, along with intermittent crashes to the desktop. We did a driver update and it solved the problem completely. He's running an 8350 as well, paired with crossfired 280x's. I am running with a 290x and I can honestly say I see a huge performance difference between my computer and others who have that card and are running an i7 or something like that. I'm planning on upgrading to 5830k because of that. If I could offer you some advice, I would recommend a processor upgrade when you have the opportunity. Don't get me wrong, 8350 is a good processor for most things, but you just can't beat Intel when it comes to processor intense games and stuff like SE. Kinda sucks for guys like us if we wanna go to intel, cause that means a new mobo as well, but as far as I'm concerned it's worth it. Just my two cents though, I know a lot of people have good results with AMD gear, I'm just not one of then hahah.

 

Yes, the Hyper 212 is good. I'm using the plus, not the EVO, but it brought my Bulldozer down from a 30C idle and 55C load temp at stock speeds (this is a quad core, mind you!) Down to 30C under load with an overclock to 4.2GHz. Before that I was actually undervolting it to help keep it cool! Back then the saying was 55C max, at some point they decided 60C... now it's 62? Whatever, I still stop at 55C. The cooler you can keep it, the better.

Now I'm using the Hyper 212 on my i5 and it's doing well.

I've only ever had one driver related issue a while back, excluding the recent beta drivers for GTAV. It was only in one game and it was fixed within a week, just some minor artifacting, no crashes or anything. However, before I updated to the new beta drivers, GTAV would crash... but that's why BOTH AMD and Nvidia had to release new drivers the day before GTAV released.