Any performance enhancing tips for large/huge maps?

[adam]

I have a decent specced PC, but I'm now nearing the mid game stage on a huge map, with 4 other empires and 3 fallens and it's already starting to lag quite badly.
Are there any tips for improving performance or any ideas what I can upgrade my PC to, to improve it?

Currently I have:

Intel i7-5820k @ 3.30Ghz
16gb of Ram
Nvidia GTX 970
64bit Windows 7
Samsung 850 Pro 256gb dedicated SSD for steam games.

[EleventhStar]

i've heard not having a (large) fleet selected helps, apparently the UI is what hogs the most performance. next patch allegedly will reduce overall fleet sizes so that might help.

overclocking your cpu will also delay the bottleneck a bit, but i wouldn't spend money for it.

really there isn't much that will help in a meaningful way. i'm personally sticking to 400 star maps lately.

[Asuzu]

Originally posted by adam:

I have a decent specced PC, but I'm now nearing the mid game stage on a huge map, with 4 other empires and 3 fallens and it's already starting to lag quite badly.
Are there any tips for improving performance or any ideas what I can upgrade my PC to, to improve it?

Currently I have:

Intel i7-5820k @ 3.30Ghz
16gb of Ram
Nvidia GTX 970
64bit Windows 7
Samsung 850 Pro 256gb dedicated SSD for steam games.

Hmm I play on a gaming notebook (Asus Strix) with worse processor than your desktop, and it purrs like a kitten no matter how large scale wars are.

I think you might have a lot of stuff running in the background, hogging your performance.

In Windows, open up your task manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del, go to the "Startup" tab and check what's there. Unselect all crap like Adobe PDF update checkers, Office updaters and stuff, leave only system-critical drivers if there are any.

I also disable OneDrive as I'm not using it, and a bunch of other apps that my Windows provider took upon himself to install to make sure my PC runs slower :-)
Basically, barebone you should have only windows audio/network/steam/windows defender/nvidia app running.

You might also want to check your Windows processes and disable the useless ones through administrator tools - just be careful with that, if you are not familiar how to do it, might want to Google first to see how to do it.

Hope that helps, have fun

[Bapkat]

I have a similarly specced pc, maybe just a little better, and most of my games are on huge maps. Only time I lag is in battles where there are multiple large fleets, like 300k+ fighting in the one system. Other then that, no lag.

[adam]

Thanks all!
I do have quite a lot of mods installed, so that probably isn't helping heh

[Professor H. Farnsworth]

Mods reduce performance, although not as much as the standard UI does.

What you can do to improve performance without upgrading your PC:
- Get the No Ion Trail mod (this is a huge performance boost in battle). Looks less cool and prevents you from Ironman Achievements but heck.. Performance > fluff.
- Get the No Galaxy Dust Cloud (or whatever that mod is called - it removes the dust cloud from the galaxy)
- Reduce or turn off bloom in video settings.
- If you run with virtual cores (hyper threading) turn it off in the bios, this game does not function well with more than 4 cores and it is unlikely you will even get to utilize all 4 (it is multi-core enabled contrary to what people will tell you). In the mean time running with say 4 logical and 4 virtual means you cut each processors power in half and that's only something you want to do if you know that the game will never reach capacity (something this game does very easily).
- Disable the flashy alerts, some you can permanently disable (Resource overflow, Enemy Fleet spotted, inactive buildings etc). These eat up A LOT of performance, disabling them entirely will net you about 5 fps per one disabled (but you won't see your FPS jump up 35 fps unless all 6 were running).
- Any pop up that is animated and cannot be disabled - turn it off asap. ^ for that reason
- Late game stay at max zoom or at the zoom which removes fleet movement and similar from the map. Less graphics to update is more fps (that or stay in systems view.)
- Do. Not. Get. Sensor Array Megastructure. Ever. It's bad enough that Sensor tech increases planet sensor range.
- Federations, Active Sensor Link, Defensive Packs in war and Vassals/Tributaries all decreases performance as you can see their fleet movement.
- Shut down Chrome or other browsers you may have running, use your smartphone or if you have a laptop that to search wiki/google/watch tv.
- Turn off Windows Themes.
- Get CPU Core Parking Manager and unpark all your cores if not they will by default be parked if they aren't needed and that will create a throttle situation should the unparked cores reach peak processing. Having them unparked forces your OS to use all of them from the get go (this obviously takes a hit to their life expentancy and energy usage).
- I don't know the AMD equivalent, but in Nvidia Control Panel go into 3D manager and find Stellaris in Program Executables. All options that "improves" quality - turn them off. All options that improves performance - turn them on. Most software is perfectly capable of handling this themselves, there's no need to add extra from Nvidia or AMD.
- Set your SDD, HDD and CPU to maximum performance IF that does not include turning off power saving mode also turn off power saving mode (you're probably gonna have to google how, because I forgot what they called the window in English versions of Windows).

What you can do to upgrade your PC:
- Windows 7. No. No. No. No. Get Windows 10, seriously. It is stable now and it is very efficient. Hands down I did not think I would ever say that about Windows.
- Your i7 needs an upgrade. It's a very old one, but you can probably skip the 16 core Ryzer and similar.. The generation of CPU's before should do fine.
- Your GFX could do with a bump up to 1070/1080 or Titan if you want to be a big spender but it's not a must.. The 970 is exceptionally good at best you're only looking at a minor gain there. I would focus on a new CPU/Windows version If I were you (albeit 7 is decent, it's just not as good as 10 is now).

Until they fix the user interface and all the pointless animations it has which for some moronic reason take up the majority of fps losses in this game not related to doomstacks (because 1000+ ships, their actions and the animations will always take a toll on fps regardless of how well they optimize that shizzle..). That's about all you can do.

The speed animation alone decreases performance. The faster it animates the more fps it swallows... I do not get how something that should be no more than a few bytes in picture size has this much impact.

I run with a top of the line gaming rig and can tell you that I take performance hits too. I can get performance hits in any game, it's a simple matter of software has no limitations whereas hardware do.

[Fozzies]

Adam, i would be very appreciative of you posting back your results from all the advice, many thanks in advance

[Levihime]

Same, at end of game, i have 14 fps on X3 time speed. From start - 60fps =\ On normal X1 speed, 40-50fps. Battle - 10-15 fps.
FX6100
7950 3GB
8GB RAM