CPU and GPU usage never goes over 25%, pls help

[SenDeku]

I've been having an issue where whenever I play on any kind of pop, when I load in the game gives me around 120 fps if there are no zombies around, but as soon as I get near any zombies my FPS tanks but the game never takes more than 20% of my resources. If I play on a high pop my fps tanks down to 20. I've tried everything, giving the game more RAM, removing game bar and other overlays. I really love the game but I just cant get it working well. please help me, I'm honestly out of ideas of what it could be.

[SenDeku]

Also I'm not using mods, here's my console.txt https://pastebin.com/vE2Rb70U

[JAspie]

"LOG : General , 1651357172431> Memory free: 200.0 MB"

This looks like the problem. The fps drop is due to the constant garbage disposal to accomodate the moving Zs on-screen, creating the low fps due to the CPU/GPU being throttled because they're feeding too much data to process in realtime.

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by Zynergi:

"LOG : General , 1651357172431> Memory free: 200.0 MB"

This looks like the problem. The fps drop is due to the constant garbage disposal to accomodate the moving Zs on-screen, creating the low fps due to the CPU/GPU being throttled because they're feeding too much data to process in realtime.

I turned the free memory up using the -xms line and it didn't help. I'm a little confused.
Are you saying that because of the amount of info coming in at real time it's causing an issue there? if so I assume that means it's just not something I can fix

[Beard]

Try going to your graphics card control panel and set the power to "Maximum Performance"

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by Beard:

Try going to your graphics card control panel and set the power to "Maximum Performance"

Already set, in nvidia and windows. I dont have any issues with other games either. it's just Zomboid. The game just doesn't use my stuff, I get like 20% CPU & GPU at best, it never goes higher on my CPU than 20%.

[Beard]

What kind of card do you have by the way?

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by Beard:

What kind of card do you have by the way?

Nvidia RTX 3050

[Beard]

Hm, could you check the core usage of your CPU when having the lag? It is possible the bottleneck would be there

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by Beard:

Hm, could you check the core usage of your CPU when having the lag? It is possible the bottleneck would be there

overall CPU is %20, never goes over that except when loading the game initially. it seems to use the first two cores of my 8 core CPU and leave the rest, I've tried changing afinity in task manager but that didn't help.

Also worth noting the GPU and CPU at least from what I can see are not bottlenecking, as I said, it's not even touching the GPU's usage at all, both cpu and gpu are at 20%. The game isn't using my resources.

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Single core performance matters quite a bit for PZ, even though it is multithreaded. If one or both of those cores are maxed out, then it likely can't send as much data to the GPU.

https://i.imgur.com/p0zghru.png my first 4 threads
https://i.imgur.com/TYTbsed.png the rest are doing this

If I'm understand what you're saying, it means right now the game is using my resources correctly if it mainly computes using the first few cores. so I should for now stick to normal/low pop? Fair enough. A price to pay for a good game I guess. Thank you everyone for all your help through this, I appreciate you all.

[GR4V3 MIST4K3]

I'm having a very similar issue on a new laptop the msi gf75 thin intel i5-10500h rtx3060. At HD with default settings the cpu and gpu loads are low to medium, while the game struggles to maintain 30 fps zoomed out to 175-200%. Sharp drops in framerate on default view when panning or running. I figured the CPU would be enough to run PZ comfortably at 50-60 fps or locked 30 fps. I'm stumped.

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by GR4V3 M15T4K3:

I'm having a very similar issue on a new laptop the msi gf75 thin intel i5-10500h rtx3060. At HD with default settings the cpu and gpu loads are low to medium, while the game struggles to maintain 30 fps zoomed out to 175-200%. Sharp drops in framerate on default view when panning or running. I figured the CPU would be enough to run PZ comfortably at 50-60 fps or locked 30 fps. I'm stumped.

As stated above the game doesn't use all your cores.
There is no fix. unless the devs somehow recode the game to use more threads of your CPU.
I was also very upset about this issue, really love the game but am left unable to play the way I enjoy. so I gave up on it and moved on to other games that do use my cores.

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Originally posted by SenDeku:

As stated above the game doesn't use all your cores.
There is no fix. unless the devs somehow recode the game to use more threads of your CPU.
I was also very upset about this issue, really love the game but am left unable to play the way I enjoy. so I gave up on it and moved on to other games that do use my cores.

Yeah. Though note that the game does use 26 threads. There's no great way to multi-thread what's left on the main thread + the rendering thread for now.

Specific to your system, Sendeku: If you're not playing in 4K, I'd consider the FPS pretty low for the cpu / gpu combo. If this is 4K, then that's expected for now (we're looking at improvements for build 42 that, instead of rendering and sorting each individual tile, creates large contiguous chunks of them) which should make quite a difference, should we be able to pull it off.

in the 3D section of nVIida settings, make sure that OpenGL rendering is set to the GPU and that Power Management is set to high performance. You can also try turning Thread Optimisation on, though people have had mixed results (I find it gets me extra frames on my 3080, some others have reported the opposite). There is also low latency mode.

These are also thirsty components so you might see drastic differences when plugged in vs. mobile. High Performance mode might help in Windows' Power Options, but you'll have to watch your temps.

Not playing 4k, playing in 1080p, tried everything including what's mentioned above. currently playing on ARK with maxed out settings and 3x dino pop on the biggest map available, no problem. As someone who just buys games to plays them, why is this okay? Most games these days are pushing for 8 cores, and you're telling me I need a better system. lol

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

No, I'm not telling you you need a better system.

I am saying that that doesn't make very much sense for 1080p. You should be getting better performance on that hardware and if it's not a setting issue, then I"m not sure why you'd be getting worse performance than say my old 15 9570/1050 max q laptop. I would think that means there's something up with the configuration of the system or settings in PZ vs. the game proper. For example, if you unlocked 225% and 250% in options, zooming out will perform much worse (that's why we cap it to 200% by default).

ARK has more teams than we have people working on PZ. We can't compete at all. They use Unreal, we use our custom engine.

Thank you for being respectful and explaining yourself, I get what you're saying. but I was playing the game vanilla with no mods. this wasn't just my experience but the experience me, and my 3 friends had playing this game. We all have AMD CPU's.

It's very frustrating because I wanna play the game, i really do, it's a great idea what the game has in mind. I've been following this thing when it was only on the indie store. I understand you're a small team but what are you guys going to do with these kind of limits when NPC's come out? Why can I even use insane level of zombies on multiplayer if there's a 500 zombie limit. I spent 200 hours of my life into a multiplayer session just for me and my friends to watch in horror as like 100 zombies just vanished in-front of us. like they all just magically despawned. Even half life 2 had multicore rendering, and that was from 2004. And yes, I understand, big company, but how can you not compare yourselfs to your games direct competition.

As a person I can respect what you're saying, but as a gamer that just bought this game to fight a ton of zombies, I'm extremely let down. I've spent 90% of my time on these forums trying to fix the thing so I can play it, just to find out what me and my friend wanted which was insane zombies just isn't posible

[SenDeku]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

We're not remotely competing against ARK. NPCs won't have any great impact on performance. You can't multi-thread OpenGL. No idea what Valve does, but I assume it's the same as the game does, which is splitting any task that can reasonably be placed on another thread on another thread, not that they're literally splitting rendering between threads. Anyway, we're not a multibillion dollar company, as I said.

Did you edit the bats or jsons to give the game 12000m of RAM? Because realistically that's probably just going to lead to larger pauses when the GC kicks in.

I also see you're running Windows 10. If you're not on Windows version 1803 or later (the Fall 2019 update), the newer ZGC will not be used and you will likely get rather frequent, short pauses.

It took you this long in the thread to read my initial config issue, and give me that? Jeez. Okay, I'm sorry. I get it. Your game is perfect, you have no competition on the of whole steam store. I am sorry.