Graphic Flash

[reculvermary]

Running with a Geforce GTX 960, inside station all good, so as I take off i get a cross in the screen with graphics flashing all colours, yet in station perfect, any answeres please?

[Steve]

Your graphics card is under the minimum requirements.

[Essedus]

Might just be a bug with the game but to be on the safe side I'd try playing anot her graphically intensive game and see if the same thing looks like it's happening. Weird flashy colors can mean failing video card.

[Stollie]

Im using a GTX970 and a GTX960 is fine, have you updated your drivers?

[timon37]

We've heard reports of graphical glitches if the game runs out of gpu memory with nvidia.
So if your gpu has less than < 4gb please lower the settings, especially texture quality antialiasing (fxaa is fine though) and shadows.

[Skully]

Looks like nothing is swapped out from dedicated Vram to shared Vram (or discarded), so it just continues building up until dedicated is full at which point stuff starts disappearing.
The more dedicated Vram available, the later this problem hits.

[ZombieHunter]

The same exact colored flashes happen to me in GTA V with my 970. Only game that causes this so I've seen it before. X4 does not do this to my GTA 970. But you aren't crazy and your card isn't dying. Both my previous 970 card and my new replacement 970 from EVGA (previous card died)
have had this issue before.

[timon37]

@Skully
If you can externally see the memory consumption reaching your limit lower your settings, especially disable MSAA/SSAA, disable shadows, lower texture quality, disable glow and ssr, disable ssao. Roughly in that order but adjust to your preference.

In vulkan we have to do internal memory management, so you can't externally measure how much memory is really used/free, just the peak usage and how much the game currently reserves for itself. Which depending on what you do for the first 5-30min will definitely grow, After that it should settle, though there could be some situations where fragmentation worsens over time.

[Skully]

@timon37
I have already set everything to the lowest value. When I startup X4 is allocates roughly 1.5 GB of Vram, with Windows using about 0.3 GB it comes close to the maximum of 2GB I have on this system straight away.

I think the flashing is a different issue though, can someone check the Vram usage when it is flashing?

I know nothing of the Vulkan game engine, looking at https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.1/html/chap11.html#resources-association it seems to be capable of swapping resources. But again this is a layman interpretation.

As for the memory usage, I have given some speculation at:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/392160/discussions/0/1743353164083644219/?tscn=1543734363#c1743353164089442613

[timon37]

Hmm what resolution do you play at?
Also currently the presets are bad (sorry it's a miss on our side), so the Low preset isn't low enough.
You have to select custom and set texture quality to lowest (others to off or low).

I guess the last thing would be disabling window compositing and other fancy effects in windows.
That should limit that 0.3gb used by windows.

We're looking into making the game more playable with 2gb gpus but I'm afraid there won't be any very quick fixes:(

[Skully]

Before v1.10 I played on 2560x1440, with v1.10 the game issued the warning message and I lowered it to 1920x1080.

I already had everything customized to the lowest setting, including textures.

It delays hitting the memory limit issue a bit more, so I was able to play around a bit.
I think I hit the issue rapidly fiddling with the map. I'll do some more testing.

I know 2GB Vram doesn't qualify for minimum requirements. I figured it was worth a shot.
However, if the game assumes it can load everything it needs into available dedicated Vram, plus the nature of X being a virtual unlimited universe with mods and extensions, then I reckon at some point higher limits will not suffice either.

Another temporary (quick?) fix might be shipping ultra-low textures as I noted in the other topic.

At least I know now I need to put a bigger GFX card on my Christmas list.

For the flashing colors problem I think that is a different issue. So the discussion so far is likely not helping out those folks.

[Skully]

First, I have been fiddling with 1.20 and showing relative good results. With LOD at 0 I can put my resolution back to 2560x1440. The game will load up and use about 1.5GB dedicated Vram and starts building up shared Vram. It does take an initial framerate hit (which is expected with shared Vram usage), but I end up back at 60 fps in space.

Now for the weird part. After some time playing it seems to hit a snag.
@reculvermary, does your screen go something like https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1582373019 ?

If so, then it seems something triggers a mesh or texture corruption. It is not really the memory limit that seems to cause this as I can easily reproduce it using the ship configurator (which doesn't show very many meshes). You can load up many textures (or models) and see shared Vram go up with dedicated Vram being steady.
Until you trip the bug. At which point it doesn't matter how much you have on screen, it'll be corrupted. It can even start flashing as is the case for some with text and probably others with partial scenes.

Granted this is all speculation on my end, but maybe it'll help out.