After year 15-20, game stutters and lags tremendously

[Cedius]

On my second settlement and thought the first might have been a fluke or the map etc. However, it is apparent that it is able to be replicated, on my PC at least. Here goes: after gaining 150-200+ settlers around year 15 and higher, I get harsh lag and fps drops. I'm talking literal screen freezes for 4-5 seconds every 30 seconds. It could be my PC though, not sure. Running Alienware AMD Ryzen 7 3700x, 5700XT, and 32GB ram. Have dinked with all the video settings to no avail. Anyone else experience similar?

[Monarchco]

Have you considered restarting the game?
I've experienced some awful performance after a few hours playing, but it completely went away after restarting.
There's likely a memory leak somewhere in the game causing the degradation over long play sessions I would suspect.

[Zantai]

Can you describe when the freezes occur?

Do they start immediately after loading or do they build up over time as you play?

Do they persist if you restart the game?

[Revankaiser]

Originally posted by Monarchco:

Have you considered restarting the game?
I've experienced some awful performance after a few hours playing, but it completely went away after restarting.
There's likely a memory leak somewhere in the game causing the degradation over long play sessions I would suspect.

The problem here is probably the amount of villagers. When the city grows so does the number of villagers, which have a strong CPU usage. NPC IA cant be computed with gpu, so probably CPU is having more and more load.

For context, I have rn 250 villagers and it uses 20-30% of a Ryzen 5 3600 and 30-40% of an RTX 3070, with 16GB of ram, and running at 20-30 FPS x), plus the ocasional freezes.

[Cedius]

Originally posted by Revankaiser:

Originally posted by Monarchco:

Have you considered restarting the game?
I've experienced some awful performance after a few hours playing, but it completely went away after restarting.
There's likely a memory leak somewhere in the game causing the degradation over long play sessions I would suspect.

The problem here is probably the amount of villagers. When the city grows so does the number of villagers, which have a strong CPU usage. NPC IA cant be computed with gpu, so probably CPU is having more and more load.

For context, I have rn 250 villagers and it uses 20-30% of a Ryzen 5 3600 and 30-40% of an RTX 3070, with 16GB of ram, and running at 20-30 FPS x), plus the ocasional freezes.

The CPU has only about 10% load, while the GPU has around 60%. RAM usage is around 35%. I get freezes around every 1-3 minutes, sometimes screen freezes around 5 seconds before coming back.

[Cedius]

Originally posted by Zantai:

Can you describe when the freezes occur?

Do they start immediately after loading or do they build up over time as you play?

Do they persist if you restart the game?

The freeze I made the thread about happens regardless of time played in that session. i.e. they persist upon a restart. The freeze occurs steadily and often.

However, I can start a fresh settlement from year 1 and the freeze does not occur. Only occurs steadily and often around 200 or so settlers and year 15.

[Cedius]

Originally posted by Monarchco:

Have you considered restarting the game?
I've experienced some awful performance after a few hours playing, but it completely went away after restarting.
There's likely a memory leak somewhere in the game causing the degradation over long play sessions I would suspect.

Yes, restarting to a new fresh save settlement does fix the issue. But that is only temporary until late game again, which the freezes happen steadily and often. And this late game is when I really wanted to play in depth. Looks like I will have to play until year 7 or so and keep restarting fresh saves until the performance is looked at.

[Bedodel]

Same ♥♥♥♥, game become unplayable on 200+ citizens. Restart does not help.

[Thulen]

amd ? unity has an issue with ccx latency with 16+ cores , if you have one of those try adding this at launcher ( --affinity=0xFFFF <- only use the first 16 ) , im at year 60 with 250+ people and yet to lag or see hitching at 3440x1440 (intel cpu) . This is a unity game so theres always ways to optimize it more, not sure wich version this runs on .

[Cedius]

Originally posted by Thulen:

amd ? unity has an issue with ccx latency with 16+ cores , if you have one of those try adding this at launcher ( --affinity=0xFFFF <- only use the first 16 ) , im at year 60 with 250+ people and yet to lag or see hitching at 3440x1440 (intel cpu) . This is a unity game so theres always ways to optimize it more, not sure wich version this runs on .

3700X is 8 core, 16 thread. Is this what you're referring to? After playing several hours more, it's apparent that this will be a serious impact to longevity of playing, and replayability. Screen still freezes over 150-200+ population. Screen freezes last 5 seconds or more, and happen more frequently. I can't be the only one having this issue.

[Cedius]

Originally posted by Beloded:

Same ♥♥♥♥, game become unplayable on 200+ citizens. Restart does not help.

How often do your freezes last?

[Ghostlight]

Originally posted by Cedius:

Originally posted by Zantai:

Can you describe when the freezes occur?

Do they start immediately after loading or do they build up over time as you play?

Do they persist if you restart the game?

The freeze I made the thread about happens regardless of time played in that session. i.e. they persist upon a restart. The freeze occurs steadily and often.

However, I can start a fresh settlement from year 1 and the freeze does not occur. Only occurs steadily and often around 200 or so settlers and year 15.

Garbage collector kicking in?

I am curious by what is considered a big city in this game. Most city builders start to chug when they hit a certain number of citizens. Though usually it is in the thousands not a mere 250.

[J03K3R]

My game has also started to freeze at this point in the game and has stopped me from playing that save and will be starting all over again. I'm running decent hardware so I don't think I should be having a problem.

[Tyler_davis21]

I have about 350 people, it does hit some lag spikes, and my PCs fans kick in and it level out. From there is just has a few spikes. I saw in another thread Dev advised that around 1,000 pop is about the max where this should happen. Could be a memory leak, maybe?

[J03K3R]

I don't think so for me at least. I'm running Ryzen 5900X, 3080 TI, and 64gb of ram. it will run at 144 fps but once I move around the map especially towards a mountain range everything drops to 1 fps and freezes then will come back to normal. Also lags hard when going from wilderness to the beginning of the city and once in city center it is occasional. Sometimes its fine others its horrible and me stop playing.

[Ninjafroggie]

I doubt it's processor power related and more processor architecture, if indeed that's even the cause at all.

I'm running a ryzen 5 1600X 6-core 3600mhz, with 16gb ram and a RX560 4gb video card. Turned off foliage and shadows so my potato can actually run the game a reasonable framerate, but it can handle 250 pop just fine