strange "lag" with prolonged play

[RequiemsRose]

I've recently come back to the game after a few months (on here I only recently got it, was playing on my husbands library before) and I've noticed that after a while things just sort of stutter or break. It's almost like the lag you get when it autosaves where everything pauses and then suddenly just pops into position when the game realizes it was doing something. It starts minor enough, my first sign is that I can no longer use the wasd keys to move my camera across the map, instead needing to nudge my mouse towards the edges I want to move. Normally dropping a quick save file is enough to fix that at first. Next step tends to be that lag/stutter where things start freezing and then popping back into where they should be when the game catches up. When this happens, the camera movements I tried to make also catch up quickly when they finally stop stuttering, which normally means my camera shakes violently from me hitting A and D repeatedly to try and get it to respond. If I continue to play after that, the lag/stutter becomes more and more common and eventually esc no longer brings up my menu either, though I can still bring it up with the mouse from the HUD's bar. I haven't decided to keep playing after that, but when I exit the game fully and relaunch it, boom, everything is fine again...for a while.

I don't use mods, but I have been tinkering with the console a bit recently, mostly just god mode building to try different designs of base setups though. Maybe I built too much and now it's struggling to deal with it? I'm not sure honestly, it's happened for my massive colony that takes up the entire map cell the colony is in but inversely it has also done it in my game with 1 colonist who only has a 2 room colony, one is a bedroom that doesn't even have furniture, just a sleeping spot and a torch and the other is just an enclosed stockpile so my stuff doesn't deteriorate outside that I slapped a crafting spot in. It does seem directly tied to the length of time I play in a consecutive session. Even just exiting to desktop and immediately reloading fixes all of it instantly and it works just fine for the first 30 minutes to an hour, then it goes back to the stutter.

[ᖇIᑎ]

Check that your drivers are up to date and try verifying the game files. If that doesn't work, maybe try a full reinstall. Uninstall it from Steam and make sure there are no files left behind since Steam sometimes leaves some game files.

[UltimateTobi]

What's your PC/laptop specs?
RimWorld is very CPU-heavy.

I have a colony of 150 + at least over 200 animals and the game got pretty laggy with an average of 30 FPS. And I am sporting an Intel i7-9700K @5GHz water cooled.

But everything is still relatively responsive (except of course when I click while a stutter).

If you're not adverse to mods, try and have a look at the mod Rocketman, which allegedly increases performance a lot (can't verify, haven't tested).

[RequiemsRose]

I go through standard trouble shooting first thing. So far there's nothing wrong on my end. Drivers are up to date, no file issues when I verified, and I only recently installed it on my pc to begin with. I think steam thinks I have had this game for like a week max. I just don't get it, it's acting like there's a memory leak or something, but that doesn't make sense from everything I have checked so far. My only other theory is overheating issues since my pc is currently frankencomp without a case, but if it was heat then reloading without giving it a chance to cool off shouldn't be an instant fix plus Ark gave me heating issues before and my PC has some delightful yet annoying safeguards where it will just shut itself off when it reaches a certain temperature threshold whether I like it or not.

[Caz]

This is, unfortunately, pretty typical. I use Dub's Performance mod to keep an eye on TPS (ticks per second). When I start a new map, the TPS generally stays within 5-10 of the max (60 on 1x speed, 180 on 3x speed, 360 on 5x speed). But after about 10 hours of play time on a map, it's normal to see less than half of the max TPS. And this impacts FPS heavily, too.

I don't know what causes it, but I've yet to get past the 12 hour mark without seeing a massive drop in TPS.

[ᖇIᑎ]

I have a crappy work laptop: Intel i7-8550U @ 1.8GHz and I've never had stuttering with it. I do use Rocketman, though, so that prolly helps. The stuttering and lagging have been an issue for a lot of people since 1.3 dropped. I think people deal with it with a combination of performance mods like Rocketman and HD Pawn Rendering.

[RequiemsRose]

Originally posted by UltimateTobi:

What's your PC/laptop specs?
RimWorld is very CPU-heavy.

I have a colony of 150 + at least over 200 animals and the game got pretty laggy with an average of 30 FPS. And I am sporting an Intel i7-9700K @5GHz water cooled.

But everything is still relatively responsive (except of course when I click while a stutter).

If you're not adverse to mods, try and have a look at the mod Rocketman, which allegedly increases performance a lot (can't verify, haven't tested).

Oh boy, this'll be fun. My husband is the tech inclined one who put this pc together. I only know basics lol. If I did this right I have:
AMD A8-7600 Radeon R7, 10 core 4C+6G 3.10hz, I got 12 GB of ram, and lets see my graphics card shows separately so that's...a Geforce GT 1030

The husbands best guess was also a heat issue on my end until I reminded him about heat issues turned out when I was having them for Ark. My pcs temp threshold is apparently somewhat low, it shuts down before I've had noticable performance lag due to heat in the past.

[UltimateTobi]

That CPU is relatively old with an integrated GPU.
Degrading performance over time if nothing significant changes on the map does sound like memory leak. But if that was a common issue, more people would complain.

As Stariali mentioned, a couple peeps noticed worse performance after 1.3 (mainly due to the new rendering method for colonists (more layers due to tattoos, etc, which would be GPU related. Perhaps your PC uses the onboard GPU of your CPU instead of your dedicated GPU? But if that were the case, a game like Ark wouldn't properly run I guess).

But my save specifically has also been laggy in 1.2, but that's just down to the sheer amount of stuff in my save.

As mentioned before, maybe try out the mod Rocketman and see how it goes:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2479389928

[RequiemsRose]

I don't normally mod, but I suppose a QOL related performance mod wouldn't be too bad. Seems that is most likely my best solution. Ark had it's own performance issues, had to play with potato graphics on low memory mode to get that running decently (to be fair, the low memory mode wasn't due to a lack of memory, it was due to Ark tending to eat ram worse than chrome so I had to tell it to behave). It just surprised me, this game was running fine on my husband's pc which is slightly older and more outdated than mine. Worked fine on mine before I moved as well, but now that I've come back to it after my move and with a new, still old, graphics card it seems to perform worse. (For anyone curious, the new graphics card was a result of attempting to play Horizon Zero Dawn when that first got ported to pc...borked my drivers so bad I couldn't even factory reset the card, so...new-ish card)

[Zelithas]

Originally posted by RequiemsRose:

The husbands best guess was also a heat issue on my end until I reminded him about heat issues turned out when I was having them for Ark. My pcs temp threshold is apparently somewhat low, it shuts down before I've had noticable performance lag due to heat in the past.

It could be thermal throttling. If the CPU cooler is too small or the thermal compound is old or improperly applied, the CPU will overheat. The PC tries to compensate by reducing the core speed. Check the CPU temp when the lag is occurring. If it is high, then this could be the problem.

[RequiemsRose]

Originally posted by Zelithas:

Originally posted by RequiemsRose:

The husbands best guess was also a heat issue on my end until I reminded him about heat issues turned out when I was having them for Ark. My pcs temp threshold is apparently somewhat low, it shuts down before I've had noticable performance lag due to heat in the past.

It could be thermal throttling. If the CPU cooler is too small or the thermal compound is old or improperly applied, the CPU will overheat. The PC tries to compensate by reducing the core speed. Check the CPU temp when the lag is occurring. If it is high, then this could be the problem.

I do use speedfan, so I can check temps all the time. It always runs a bit hotter when I play any game, but that's kind of expected. Haven't seen anything that would worry me excessively though. I get hotter temps running games like The Forest and don't have issues there. That and I've had heat issues in the past (part of why I got speedfan actually) and from those issues it seems my computer will simply shut itself down before it throttles when it gets too hot. That whole heating issue was fixed when I figured out the pump to my liquid cooling had died and I replaced that only a year ago. Should be good for a bit still. Had to disassemble the pc for the move as well, so it got a full cleaning and new paste about 6 months ago. It is however, no longer in a case...haven't replaced that since the move yet. Although, it's overall temps have reduced without a case so, yay?

[Zelithas]

Originally posted by RequiemsRose:

I do use speedfan, so I can check temps all the time. It always runs a bit hotter when I play any game, but that's kind of expected. Haven't seen anything that would worry me excessively though. I get hotter temps running games like The Forest and don't have issues there. That and I've had heat issues in the past (part of why I got speedfan actually) and from those issues it seems my computer will simply shut itself down before it throttles when it gets too hot. That whole heating issue was fixed when I figured out the pump to my liquid cooling had died and I replaced that only a year ago. Should be good for a bit still. Had to disassemble the pc for the move as well, so it got a full cleaning and new paste about 6 months ago. It is however, no longer in a case...haven't replaced that since the move yet. Although, it's overall temps have reduced without a case so, yay?

From load, the game runs fine for a while correct?

Edit: A few other threads have shown up detailing the same issue. May be a bug in the game. Strange to see nothing on the official forum tho.

[RequiemsRose]

Originally posted by Zelithas:

From load, the game runs fine for a while correct?

Edit: A few other threads have shown up detailing the same issue. May be a bug in the game. Strange to see nothing on the official forum tho.

Yeah. Even if I immediately reload the exact same game I was just running. As long as I completely close out and relaunch the game it'll work for usually about an hour, sometimes less, before the stutter starts again. If I just go back to main menu and relaunch, it sometimes fixes it temporarily if it hadn't gotten too bad (usually before the part where my esc key no longer works) but it'll go back to stuttering after only like 5-10 minutes if I only exit to menu instead of exiting the entire game.