Beta 1 performance issues

from GalCiv3 Forums

So I started playing the beta today and noticed that there's performance hit as I uncover more and more of the galaxy - so basically, panning around is I would say a bit worse than in Civ V under similar circumstances.

There's quite a bit of disk churning as well (by which I mean that the hard disk light on my case is furiously flashing away, it's a very quiet drive) and transitioning to and from the planet and shipyard screens is slow.

After playing for a while, exiting to the desktop can make my computer slow to respond, I guess because there's more to unload from memory.

Okay that's it for now.  Keep working on it, guys, it looks great!

 

14,062 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

from what ive noticed and which has been confirmed from their last stream; Video Memory is a bottle neck atm. also when using a large map im consuming about 3.5GB video ram

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Um, wow.  I had no idea video cards came loaded with that much memory these days.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Okay here's a thought.  Maybe the reason for the memory usage is that a lot of the map is animated.  I mean sure, there's map animation in Civ V too, but I don't think it's quite as much as GC3.

I sort of hope that there are plans to freeze animations which aren't in the field of view, if that hasn't been din e already

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

yeah that would be nice.  the last stream did mention that they will be continually optimizing performance during the development cycle. 

 

 

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I have to say that I have performance issues as well. My video card is not the latest (Radeon 6xxx series) but I think the performance got slightly worse with the beta. 

The major slowdowns I get is when I first enter the game, I assume because everything is loading, when I enter new screens for the first time (ship designer etc) and when I quit the game, where my computer is a bit unresponsive until everything unloads.

Hopefully there will be a lot of optimisation sooner rather than later, because it's making me stop testing the game. :(

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Well here's a couple of things that seem to have really helped.

  • Turn off the Gel UI.  Yeah, I know it's pretty.  But I'm trying to test the game, not pick up my jaw at the sight of pretties.
  • Dial back the frequency of Autosave.  I think one of the problems is that you don't get a notification about an auto-save, it just does it, and that itself might explain some of the start-of-turn slowness.
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Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The Gel UI worked pretty well. I never realised that it would have such a big performance impact...

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting joe_da_cro, reply 7

something that might help also is dialing back the AA in options.

That too.  I was going to mention it but, honestly I always turn it off.  Too much hit on performance for very little improvement at typical display resolutions these days.

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I had that one turned off already for the same reason. :)

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

On the chance this might somehow be hardware combination related: I am not seeing these problems with an Intel i7-4770 (without an integrated GPU) with 16G RAM and a GeForce GT 640 GPU with 12G RAM.

StarDock has already stated that they are working with Intel about performance issues with Intel chipsets that include an integrated GPU when paired with another manufacturer's Display driver card.