Game slowing down before reaching the midgame

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i7 7700k
RTX 3070
32 gb ram
on a 500 gb SSD

I have done multiple observer runs and with the following settings:

medium galaxy
18 ai
2 fe
2 marauders
.25 hab
.5 hyperlanes
xeno compat off
0 wormholes
0 gateways

I start to notice slowdown around 2216 where the "fastest" speed becomes about as fast as the "fast" speed. I did this with modded / vanilla runs of observer
(modded was AI game performance fix, more events, NO L gates, ISB Graphics 3.4.3)

Either would produce the same result. At 2215-2220 the game would slow down noticably, and by 2260-80 become only as fast as "normal" despite being on the fastest speed. It would just keep getting slower and slower.

I posted this on Reddit which has some more information.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/v306xx

And here's another person having the same issue (he's a little angry about it, sorry) but the important part is he says the game is slowing down pretty early and noticable just like mine is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/v35638

Now I can find some more people having the same issue, but I can find a lot more people having literally no issue while playing with huge modsets so I thought it would be worth a shot asking for help here.

The only thing I could find that has some correlation is the amount of AI empires. I played on

small galaxy
10 ai
2 fe
1 marauder
.25 hab
.5 hyperlanes
xeno compat off
0 wormholes
0 gateways

This prevented the massive slowdown up until about 2290 where the game became as fast as "fast" speed, and by 2340 it was as fast as "normal". A few AI empires splintered off from the original ones which I thought might be causing the issue.

Some guy on steam told me that the issue is a new bug with the amount of ai empires causing slowdown, so that's why I tried with less but eventually just got the same issues, just postponed a little later. Is this the case or is there anything I can do? Let me know what to try.

 

[AndrewT]

We can't help with modded games here, so please confine your testing to pure unmodded galaxies, thanks.

I start to notice slowdown around 2216 where the "fastest" speed becomes about as fast as the "fast" speed.

The fastest speed setting, 5, is the game being run as fast as the hardware allows

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/low-fps-on-good-pc.1400522/#post-26681142

You should also unload GeForce Experience, as we've seen that cause speed problems to our games.

And is it ally better if you run stellaris.exe directly instead of via Steam?


DXDIAG is a program you run from the Windows search box on the task bar. After running it will open a window and start collecting info with a progress bar in the lower-left corner. When it completes click the 'save all information' button and save it to a file then attach that file here.

Please attach here your Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/settings.txt and pdx_settings.txt .
From your Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/logs/ folder, attach here system.log , error.log .


Please report the temperatures of your CPU and video (GPU)
1/ before starting the game up and
2/ after say 10 minutes' play.
If your PC's vendor has given you no way of reading temperatures, install
SPEEDFAN http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php

 

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I uninstalled GeForce experience, reinstalled Stellaris, did not open steam, and launched only stellaris.exe — speeds stayed the same on the save I am playing.
Do I need to start a new save to see if it works?

Using Core Temp before and after all CPU cores stay between 50-60 Celsius and doesn't breach 70. My processor is safe up until 90 Celsius so I know it's not being overworked or strained. Task manager shows CPU utilization at about 30-40%.

GPU temps start at around 50C and get up to 60C during play. Task man shows about 10% utilization.

 

[AndrewT]

Do I need to start a new save to see if it works?

That would be a better test I feel.

Those temps are okay, problems like this start happening at around 80c. It never gets up there?

And put the game in fullScreen mode, Vsync off, refresh rate 60. Is that any better?

 

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Fullscreen with 60 fps cap actually gave me a big boost in game speed in the current save, will start a new save with the other suggestions and see how it goes. That might have just fixed it in all honesty!