Feature/Mod Request: Reduce CPU usage when minimized

[Mecho343]

For those of us who have kids, families, pets, work, etc, it would be great to have a feature that reduces cpu (and possibly gpu) usage when the game is minimized or out of focus. This is a turn based game and being able to play it all day, sporadically throughout the day without it nuking our CPU when minimized would be wonderful. This would also be a huge help to any of us who have a neurodivergent brain and are more productive when we can switch between tasks and games every few minutes.

[gamz]

If you're an Nvidia user, you can use minimized fps lock in Nvidia Control Panel.

[Viper]

Even when minimized the game is still running. It has to do all the same processes as if its being displayed on screen.

[Rhogog]

I noticed it too but ignored it and not even sure if it's CPU or GPU that gets overstressed.

Originally posted by Viper:

Even when minimized the game is still running. It has to do all the same processes as if its being displayed on screen.

It has nothing to do with that. You may be in the middle of your turn, doing absolutely nothing and giving the game zero reasons to "to do processes", and your fan runs silently but as soon as you alt-tab, cooling fans starts spinning like crazy.

[Mecho343]

I'll try the Nvidia thing as that sounds like it might work. If it doesn't, I'm working on writing a windows service to monitor for the game and set the Priority level appropriately based on active or not. I'm thinking that should cycle down the CPU when out of focus. If it is successful I'll link a gist.

[Mecho343]

I coded a service to set the process priority when in the background, but this only affected the CPU about 5%. I tried the Nvidia FPS lock suggestion and that worked wonderfully. Under NVIDIA Control Panel -> Manage 3D Settings -> Background Application Max Frame Rate. I turned it all the way down to the minimum of 20 FPS and that dropped my CPU usage from ~75% to ~20% when the game was in the background.

I was reading about some 3rd party apps that might do this better so I'm curious if one of those apps can drop it down to 2 or 3 FPS when in the background.

Thanks for the suggestion gamz!

[Mecho343]

Thank you Devs!

Hotfix #2 implemented a feature where the CPU and GPU rates are limited when the game is out of focus. Judging by the CPU usage it looks like the game limits itself to <= 10 fps which is perfect and much better than the nvidia solution.

You can turn this feature on under Settings -> Graphics -> Limit Background Performance

Well done! Thank you!