Another "help with my performance issues" thread

Please and thank you...

from Sins Forums

First off, my specs:

Dell Latitude D620

4gb crucial RAM (2gb x 2)

Dual core @ 1.83 Ghz (T2400)

* Nvidia Quadro 110m (using forceware driver 168.28, overclocked from 300 core/600 memory to (436/708)

7200 rpm harddrive

Win XP Professional SP 2 (32 bit - yes, I know I'm not able to utilize all of my RAM)

* - I know it only has 64 mb of onboard memory, but it's effectively 256, as it pulls the rest from the system.  How turbocache stacks up against dedicated graphics memory is a debate I lack the knowledge to have, but I've heard it's close.

My sins graphic settings:

Resolution 1024/768 (low as it will go)

EVERYTHING under "effects" set to low, exhaust trails down as far as they will go, and a few options turned off (forget which, but I mean the settings where you can turn asteroids and the like off).

My problem:

I play sins almost exclusively with my brother, and the main map we play is less than 40 planets. 

For the most part, the game runs fine, can't complain. 

However, whenever we're in a large battle, the lag becomes so bad that it has a serious impact on gameplay.  I can't scroll nearly as well, issue orders of any kind as well, etc. 

It's especially problematic from a gameplay perspective because he experiences no lag at all. 

I know a lot of people might zero in on my videocard and assume that it's the problem, but I'm pretty sure it's not. 

I say that for a few reasons:

One, overclocking it from 300/600 to 436/708 hasn't made a perceptible difference -

And two, to the best of my limited knowledge about video cards, they care about what they're rendering onscreen at the moment, and what they're about to, and not much else. 

If my videocard was the bottleneck here, I'd expect zooming all the way out of a big battle so that you're only seeing planets and waiting a few seconds to kill the lag.  But the lag persists. 

So I'm thinking that my cpu is the problem.  

Also, about the only thing of note I have running in the background when I play sins is comodo firewall - and I should note that it's JUST the firewall, with defense plus disabled.  I have very few other applications running (nvidia control panel, comodo firewall, I8kfangui, sandboxie) when I play, most non-essential Windows services disabled, and no malware. 

Considering that there isn't much more I can kill in terms of applications/services, and that I have basically all the pretty turned off in sins already...Is there anything, anything at all more I can do here? 

I should note that I've already tried setting the processor affinity for sins to a single core and giving it realtime priority. 

Also, overclocking my cpu isn't an option because my BIOS is locked down all to hell since it's a laptop, and it couldn't take the heat anyway.

So if anyone has any helpful ideas on how I could get it to perform better...I'm all ears.  Or eyes, rather. 

Thank you.

technical
3,448 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Try ingame reducing your Empire tree to the bare bones. Unpin everything and turn off the autopin features. This alone has helped me ingame more than anything.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Dual core @ 1.83 Ghz (T2400)
* - I know it only has 64 mb of onboard memory, but it's effectively 256, as it pulls the rest from the system.  How turbocache stacks up against dedicated graphics memory is a debate I lack the knowledge to have, but I've heard it's close.
End of quote

The 1.8 GHz is surely part of the problem as Sins is a single core game. I tried to run the game on a Phenom 9500 with 4*2.22 GHz and it was pretty much unplayable. With an Intel Core i7 975 it's what I consider minimum CPU power requirement for this game. Most cheap 920 processors can be overclocked to similar speed as that of a non-overclocked 975 processor. Currently, I would not chose an AMD processor for gaming.

I would also expect that the graphics card is part of your problem. Don't trust any of the promises that systems RAM would be nearly as good as fast on-board memory of the graphics card. It's by far not and also requires that both your CPU and GPU share the memory bandwith of your normal RAM. For example, an ATI X800XTPE with 256 megs onboard RAM is by far outperforming a X1550 with 1+ GiB of system RAM usage although that card is much newer and the system itself had RAM which was twice as fast as that of the machine with the X800XTPE. Personally, I do recommend nVidia cards if you also use OpenGL games, should you want to upgrade your graphics card. However, due to the CPU limitation, I doubt that it would satisfy you to upgrade the graphics card unless you also upgrade the CPU massively.

Screet

ObjectDock - Access shortcuts and frequently used applications from an animated dock.
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

I have a hard time figuring out how you can have performance problems running this game, I have a Athlon 64 x2 running at 2.2 with 2g of ram and a GeForce 9800GT 512mb and I dont have any performance issues and am running the game at 1280x1024 all effects enabled except dust clouds, bloom and skyboxes.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

@Ue_Carbon:

Thanks for the empire tree tip.  I'll try making what reductions to it I can and see if that helps.  I can't take everything off of it though, as it's too valuable a tool for being able to give commands quickly (for the way I play, and I'm far from an expert), but I'll reduce it as much as I can and see what happens. 

@Screet:

I'd love to upgrade both the gpu and cpu.  However, as it's a laptop, a gpu upgrade is a no-go.  And the best processer it can take is the T7600, which is disparagingly expensive from my perspective (200-250) and I don't know if upgrading to a lesser merom would be worthwhile performance-wise. 

Yeah, good point about the turbocache.  I've read it works pretty well, but I have no clue on the actual numbers vs. dedicated video ram. 

@JPHamel: Your system would crap all over mine, and drag it's butt over it when it was done.  So I totally understand why my system doesn't perform nearly as well as yours for sins. 

But I'll tell you what I completely, completely fail to understand:

Here are the MINIMUM system requirements straight from the sins box:

1.8 Ghz single-core processor (my t2400 is effectively 1.8 ghz x 2)

512 MB RAM 1 GB for Vista (I have 4gb good quality RAM)

128 MB 3D video card (my 110m quadro is up to 256 MB RAM though it borrows some from system, and with overclock beats some better but still very old videocards in benchmarks)

DirectX 9.0c (got it)

broadband connection for internet mulitplayer (FIOS here)

 

My computer is significantly better than the minimum requirements listed on the box - and when I read "minimum requirements" I interpret that as "the least you need to have a playable experience".

And yet, even though I have all my settings taken down as far as they can go without unchecking some boxes for planet elevators and the like, I cannot have a fully playable experience on a small/medium map with one other player, and no AI players (not even pirates).

That, I can't understand at all.

And there's nothing more I can do within the game that I'm aware of to improve performance without nerfing the game in more severe ways, like playing with a really small fleet capacity, which would just suck tremendously to have to do.

The only thing I can think to do is ask my brother to underclock his gear to the point that it lags as bad in mine in battles, which is also a terrible solution. 

I mean, usually when I read about people getting bad lag in battles, they're on a huge multiplayer map with 10 players in total. 

I can't stress enough that I'm experiencing this problem with ONE opponent on maps with less than 40 planets.

 

I love sins.   I've been playing games for over 20 years, and it's one of the best of it's genre I've ever seen.

However - if it wasn't so late in the product cycle, I would ask the developers to seriously consider printing more accurate minimum requirements on the box, as the ones in place currently seem extremely misleading.

...Or release a patch to crank down aspects of the game that tax the cpu heavily, or release an ultra-ultra low quality mod.  Something.

Thanks for your input guys.  I'll try the empire tree thing.  And if anyone has any other ideas for anything I can try, please let me know.  

Thanks.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

I just thought of a question I have for anyone knowledgable enough to answer it that I left out of my previous mega-post:

 

My knowledge of video card drivers and the differences between them is very limited. 

But my question is this:

Do video card drivers ever effect the amount of work that is done by the cpu, versus how much is handled by the gpu?

Or is that all determined by the application/game you're running?

 

Is it possible that using a different driver for my videocard could lessen the amount of work my cpu has to do, and thus improve my lag situation?

 

I should note that I've tried about 4 or 5 different drivers, including the stock dell quadro 110m driver, and the performance seemed the same across all of them...But who knows?

 

 

 

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

What does the "Pin" feature do? I don't see much happening either on or off.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

It keeps whatever you have pinned on the tree always showing. So if you have autopin on your caps ships then every cap ship will show up on the empire tree.

SB autopin...which is annoying IMHO. You can see what is 'pinned' by hovering over the pin button and it will show you what is pinned. To unpinned something select it on the tree then click on the pin button...this is how you pin things also.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

Hey JPHamel,

 

I have a AMD 62 x2 CPU at 2.2GHz, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 256MB 7900GTO Graphics and I get a massive amount of lag in single player mode after about 2 hours. How about your system? I tried changing my Graphics card to a 1GB Nvidia 8800GTS and still got a massive amount of lag after 2 hours...

 

Any suggustions? Thanks