When does your game start to lag massive?

[TheChakrus]

I played X4 years ago with my old Acer Aspire 7 (i7, GTX 770, 8GB Ram) and I enjoyed it. But every time I'd built 1 large station and had 1 massive fleet the game was not playable anymore.

Now I want to get a new PC above the recommended requirements and I want to ask you: What are your specs and at what point (how many stations, big stations, ships?) is it impossible for you to play?

[Belteguesian]

The lag is due to CPU, not GPU. I have a GTX1060Ti 6GB and goes smoothly as hell. Make sure your new PC has an SSI hard drive and at least 16GB RAM with a "modern" processor and as big a motherboard BUS as you can get or afford...

[zpc]

On release of X4 I had an old I7 (3820) and it was indeed lagging at some point, and fps were really low & going up'n down even in normal space. Switched to a i7 9700K and using it ever since with all DLCs up to now and it gave me a pretty decent experience. (20-40fps on map with 6.0, 40-60fps in space with dips below 60 only in big battles)

So... judging by the GTX770 your i7 is pretty old as well. I'd say playing the base game without DLCs might be okay-ish (although I'd recommend a smaller universe using e.g. X4 Universe Generator[forum.egosoft.com] ).

If not lagging from the start, the default universe should give you degraded performance once you go the "X player empire builder mode". As long as you don't add a lot of ships and stations with running commands you should at least be able to play the plots with a small player asset count. Having e.g. one HQ and a personal fleet should be possible. Having an own economy rivaling all factions and / or having all combat zones under control with own fleets certainly will give you a lot of lags. Conquering all sectors and populating them will fry your laptop I guess

[conrado.lacerda]

I would recommend a desktop pc to run this game because of the massive difference in performance between laptop- and desktop-type CPUs.

[TheChakrus]

Originally posted by zpc:

On release of X4 I had an old I7 (3820) and it was indeed lagging at some point, and fps were really low & going up'n down even in normal space. Switched to a i7 9700K and using it ever since with all DLCs up to now and it gave me a pretty decent experience. (20-40fps on map with 6.0, 40-60fps in space with dips below 60 only in big battles)

So... judging by the GTX770 your i7 is pretty old as well. I'd say playing the base game without DLCs might be okay-ish (although I'd recommend a smaller universe using e.g. X4 Universe Generator[forum.egosoft.com] ).

If not lagging from the start, the default universe should give you degraded performance once you go the "X player empire builder mode". As long as you don't add a lot of ships and stations with running commands you should at least be able to play the plots with a small player asset count. Having e.g. one HQ and a personal fleet should be possible. Having an own economy rivaling all factions and / or having all combat zones under control with own fleets certainly will give you a lot of lags. Conquering all sectors and populating them will fry your laptop I guess

Thank you. It only started lagging and got worse when I added to many modules on a station and/or had to many ships. I removed my old Acer 1y ago and instead I had my Surface Pro for university. Even with all DLCs my Acer ran surprisingly smooth.
But now I want to have a desktop PC next to my Surface, so I can play my games again properly.

i9, RTX, 32GB - Desktop PCs for 1300-2000€ start to get common, so I will have my peace again the next 7-9 years.

[mikemonger]

I don't start noticing lag until I hit 2 billion credits worth of ships. By the time I hit 2.5 billion its bad enough to make me stop playing.

Core i7 9770k with RTX 2070 super GPU and 64gb ram (ram was really cheap when I built it so I splurged).

The issue is the game simply does not take advantage of having a multi-core CPU. And the database is XML based. I hate xml. Bloat is built right in.

[EternalBoredomKillmenow]

Originally posted by TheChakrus:

I played X4 years ago with my old Acer Aspire 7 (i7, GTX 770, 8GB Ram) and I enjoyed it. But every time I'd built 1 large station and had 1 massive fleet the game was not playable anymore.

Now I want to get a new PC above the recommended requirements and I want to ask you: What are your specs and at what point (how many stations, big stations, ships?) is it impossible for you to play?

Another option to try if your internet is good is Ge force now cloud services im using the ultimate package and it works great on all games ive tried it with.

[Bozz 💀]

the biggest game changer is the CPU, I changed CPU 4 times in 4 years and I saw big improvements in the game performance every time I changed my CPU.

Went from I7 4970K to I7 9700K to i7 12700K to i9 13900K

I don't recommend the last one specially, but the 12th gen did wonders in x4
I bought the last one just because it's the last one I will be able to buy on my motherboard lol

but you also need a well balanced computer overall.

[DEATHLORD]

I disable the c power state for my cpu in bios. Running an I9 9900kf chip with turbo. It used to spin up from 3.6 to 4.8 ghz. Now after changing the power state it runs at 4.8 ghz. With the three full self contained ship yards and all the mining stations and resource depots along with the vast number of ships. I get 90 fps in space and only 30 fps on the map screen. By disabling the c power state to 100% on it gave me and extra 40 fps. Evan around all my ships and mining stations the last check was 90 fps.

Found this suggestion in somebodies thread. And it worked

[Denmer]

Eventually it's not gonna matter what your CPU is anyway. Running on a 5600X with a 6800XT and 32GB of RAM.

I may have gone a bit overboard on my empire, I think I have 12 stations, two of them trading hubs, the others miners producers, probably 500 ships mining/trading between them, then about 14 fleets guarding some jump gates.

Sitting in the HQ I finally got around to unlocking with SETA running and the game goes, but UI/changing menus is laggin, ship movement on the map is laggin.

Fleets are somehow breaking, see a lot of Errors on Attack commands (could not reach target). Decided to use my massive stock of ship parts and made a fleet out of 5 Asgards 6 Osaka 2 Tokyos with 60 Takobas between them and a Honshu or whatever. It's time to destroy the Xenon! Oh nope, okay, after the first few fights, the commander no longer knows how to fly, keeps traveling around the attack target, the ships in formation that for whatever reason aren't following attack commands but are at least near the target drift into the stations attack range and get destroyed.

Well crap. I guess I let the game go on too long in SETA or built too damn big.

[Humble]

Desktop gaming PC is much better in power and cheaper than Laptop (I don't know how good steam desk is even it's said playable but would be lag once you had mega station and huge fleet in steam desk? I do not know, I was thinking getting those but Idk.

But of course I do understand why people need laptop but unable to get desktop due life circumstances/situation.

[Valhalla Awaits]

Originally posted by Geist:

Originally posted by mikemonger:

The issue is the game simply does not take advantage of having a multi-core CPU. .

Thats is not true anymore. It does use multiple cores since the engine update.

Originally posted by TheChakrus:

What are your specs and at what point (how many stations, big stations, ships?) is it impossible for you to play?

Never got to a point where it is impossible to play. FPS may get worse in some areas with big stations and many ships, but thats up to you how much you build, You can only build as much as your CPU can handle.

To your first quote, your "partially" correct. The recent engine update does indeed make use of upto 8 cores, however... That is ONLY the updated PHYSICS part of the engine that does this. The rest of the game still uses only 4 cores for 90% of the workload. So technically this does take a little bit of the load off the primary four cores, but not by any significant margin since 85% of the CPU load in this game is from the economy/combat/AI simulation, not the physics. Having 8+ cores does still help the game run better though, as OS and background tasks can use the less utilized cores that the game isn't using, just don't expect miracles in FPS gains.

Onto your second quote. I'm sorry to say this likely means you've never played long enough to reach late-game. X4 "WILL" become unplayable framerate-wise eventually. It does not matter how powerful of a PC you have, the game is a ticking timebomb on performance. And it is a matter of "WHEN" and not "IF" the game becomes unplayable. The better the PC you have, especially the CPU, the longer you can avoid unplayable framerates and the further into the game you can get. NPCs and the player will slowly scale up the number of ships and stations, conflicts will increase, clutter will grow, and your framerates will plummet into the single digits... eventually.

Funny thing is, despite how much faster modern PCs are compared to when X4 launched, you'd think we could run it effortlessly now. But the DLCs keep growing the size of the game, this making the PC requirements keep up with tech. If you play X4 without any DLCs or mods, you likely can finish the game with decent framerates the whole way on a top of the line PC (4090 with 13900k/7800x3d). But it depends on what you consider "finishing" the game since it's a sandbox.

[conrado.lacerda]

Maybe there's room for a "lite" version of X4 without many of the least traveled or used sectors, but probably this will never happen...

[Vladolf Putler]

Originally posted by TheChakrus:

I played X4 years ago with my old Acer Aspire 7 (i7, GTX 770, 8GB Ram) and I enjoyed it. But every time I'd built 1 large station and had 1 massive fleet the game was not playable anymore.

Now I want to get a new PC above the recommended requirements and I want to ask you: What are your specs and at what point (how many stations, big stations, ships?) is it impossible for you to play?

I just upgraded because of X4 after many years, I picked new generation low/mid, rtx 4070, I5, I wanted fastest memory possible, but this is a catch, mobo advertised up to 7600mhz ddr5, so I bought only one matching sticks g-skill, but if you go in bios to set them to this speed, the system itself is unusable, had to go to like 6800 and no problems any more, so here I could save some money, the performance is great, I cannot say anything bad, no lags at all, even in my HQ I have over 100fps, the lowest fps is on map 60-80 and that is great, you really dont need more in map. And of course m2 ssd is a must, even the save time and load times are now like whaaat, its so fast compared to my previous system - i5 3570k, gtx 970, I definitely recommend upgrading to at least what I have but the memory could be lower frequency

[[RM] Thunderhunt]

I found going into task manager/detail and setting cpu priority to high 3x'd my frames.

[Valhalla Awaits]

Originally posted by Geist:

Originally posted by Valhalla Awaits:

To your first quote, your "partially" correct. The recent engine update does indeed make use of upto 8 cores, however... That is ONLY the updated PHYSICS part of the engine that does this. The rest of the game still uses only 4 cores for 90% of the workload. So technically this does take a little bit of the load off the primary four cores, but not by any significant margin since 85% of the CPU load in this game is from the economy/combat/AI simulation, not the physics. Having 8+ cores does still help the game run better though, as OS and background tasks can use the less utilized cores that the game isn't using, just don't expect miracles in FPS gains.

Onto your second quote. I'm sorry to say this likely means you've never played long enough to reach late-game. X4 "WILL" become unplayable framerate-wise eventually. It does not matter how powerful of a PC you have, the game is a ticking timebomb on performance. And it is a matter of "WHEN" and not "IF" the game becomes unplayable. The better the PC you have, especially the CPU, the longer you can avoid unplayable framerates and the further into the game you can get. NPCs and the player will slowly scale up the number of ships and stations, conflicts will increase, clutter will grow, and your framerates will plummet into the single digits... eventually.

Funny thing is, despite how much faster modern PCs are compared to when X4 launched, you'd think we could run it effortlessly now. But the DLCs keep growing the size of the game, this making the PC requirements keep up with tech. If you play X4 without any DLCs or mods, you likely can finish the game with decent framerates the whole way on a top of the line PC (4090 with 13900k/7800x3d). But it depends on what you consider "finishing" the game since it's a sandbox.

" I'm sorry to say this likely means you've never played long enough to reach late-game. X4 "



To quote myself since you probaply have missed it:

"FPS may get worse in some areas with big stations and many ships, but thats up to you how much you build, You can only build as much as your CPU can handle."

My CPU can handle much because it is a i9 13900. (and the performance cores run fine on 5.5Ghz, I love that thing.)

If your game runs slow. build less. Factual no one needs those megastations and no one needs thousands of traders. Its up to you to find a blalance of empire size and playability that your machine can handle.

Your just agreeing with me there. My point was that the scale of the game eventually spirals to levels that render it unplayable. You as the PLAYER have a huge impact on that, and true if you never build anything the game can go on with better FPS for much longer. But the NPC factions "DO" expand, just very slowly in vanilla so as to keep the player competitive. But they will make the game unplayable eventually all by themselves. Or at least thats been true as recently as v5.0. Don't think 6.0 put any hard caps on them.