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Performance is bad! I can't play this game anymore.

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Pie'O'My

Pie'O'My

Private
Jan 26, 2022
14
3
AMD Ryzen 5 3500U
Radeon Mobile GFX
8gb RAM

So I have been playing this game with no issues for over a year on this laptop. I used to play multiplayer with a friend and have no issues at x4 speed.

Now I can't play single player because the lag is too much.

I have uninstalled, deleted all folders and re-installed then verified files, started without mods and its atrocious.

What to do?
 
When did it last run okay? The 1.30 patches perhaps?

Does this happen right from the start of a new unmodded campaign in 1444? Or only in mid or late game, or only after playing for a while?

Is the slowness in game load time? Time passing? Jerkiness in zooming or scrolling? All of these?



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/EU4/settings.txt and pdx_settings.txt .
From your Documents/Paradox Interactive/EU4/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
 
It would be very hard to say what version worked okay as I had been rolling back to different versions trying to get a few mods working together.

This issue is on all bookmarks, on all resolutions, with or without mods.

The game loads up fine, the menus are normal. The game setup is normal. Everything feels great until the game actually starts. The UI menus are unresponsive, moving units from a province is very unresponsive and days pass by extremely slowly on x1 speed and sometimes hang for 5 seconds or more. It feels like the CPU is struggling. I have turned the display settings down to 1360x768 and it makes no difference, turning all gfx options to off in game settings makes no difference.

I play other games fine. CK II, VIC 2, Attila Total War, Empire Total War, Mount and Blade, Silent Hunter III

Note I do have to turn down the resolution on Total war games from 1920x1080 to 1360x1080

I have tried Speedfan and it only seems to register my SSD. I can tell you by knowledge of my own system, its perfectly fine, it starts up in seconds and CPU and GPU is flat lining within 16 seconds. The laptop does get hot – but that’s always been the case.

I can't even reply with the files your requesting as I get a message saying its spam-like and to contact an administrator.
 
here are readings from resource , idle = just steam open, main menu= main menu of game and scroll = game start as ottomans trying to scroll map at x1 (which is awful.

Interesting that no notable CPU usage during the map scrolling image!
 

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We expect EU4 to be slower than CK2 to some extent; apart from anything else the devs have admitted to adding too many new provinces in the 1.31.x patches which affected performance quite badly. Some of that was improved under 1.32.x. It really should not be nearly as bad as you report though!


Lots of worrying errors in that log (perhaps from going back and forth in game versions), so let's start with a full **clean** re-install:

- move any valued save games elsewhere
- "uninstall" in Steam-EU4
- manually delete both the Steam/SteamApps/common/EU4 AND Documents/Paradox Interactive/EU4 folders
In particular make sure there are no files or folders left under either the Steam EU4 or Documents EU4 locations, before installing again.

- re-install game in Steam, run a Steam Verify when done.
- add EU4.exe to the exceptions list of your antivirus app; ESPECIALLY if you have Windows Defender, add it to the Ransomware "Apps Allowed Through" list.
- start the game with no mods active and test with a new campaign, NOT with any existing one.

Pie'O'My said:
I have tried Speedfan and it only seems to register my SSD. I can tell you by knowledge of my own system, its perfectly fine, it starts up in seconds and CPU and GPU is flat lining within 16 seconds. The laptop does get hot – but that’s always been the case.
Click to expand...
That's an odd report about Speedfan, I've been using it for years and never heard of that issue. Perhaps try another utility like Speccy instead?


What I can see from that dxdiag is this machine only has an integrated Vega 8 video system, rather than a dedicated GPU. And you may be a little short of free memory:
Memory: 8192MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 6020MB RAM
Click to expand...
So do make sure you exit every other app you can before starting this game. The 2gb missing there is being used by the Vega 8 video:
Card name: AMD Radeon(TM) Vega 8 Graphics
Display Memory: 5043 MB
Dedicated Memory: 2033 MB
Shared Memory: 3010 MB
Click to expand...
AND it can take up to another 3gb away, leaving only 3gb for Windows and game!

I recommend you contact Lenovo support and see if there is some bios/firmware setting to recover that lost 2gb, that's quite a bit!

You might also check for an update to that 2020 video driver:


Let me know if any of that helps to any extent.
 
I will go through these points.

Firstly I have re-installed again and checked the log, the errors in that file above are related to the French Revolution bookmark.

Here is the error log after full fresh install. 1444 start.
 

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I ran a program (Intelligent Standby List Cleaner) that refreshed memory. I believe its much better now but my readings are showing nearly 2GB of RAM space freely available (consistently) while running game. Can you comment on the ridiculously low CPU reading as shown in this image? The ticker takes 5 seconds to progress beyond the 1st of the month, then is slow for a week or two then speeds up then slows to a crawl the next day again. All this while my CPU is doing nothing and 2GB RAM spare?

I will try the other resource monitoring program and report back but in the meantime I wanted to notify you of this. I don't believe my machine is the problem here. I have no trouble before and even had you tube playing in the background while playing eu4 - no problems. I once tried it with several chrome tabs open doing different things and it was fine. The machine will start using that missing/shared 2GB when needed.

I will also check out driver updates but while I do can you go into this low CPU usage ?

thanks#
 

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I had the same problem has you it had to do with AMD drivers .

One day my EU4 was unplayable for some reason

I was getting 10-20 fps at speed 3 in 1444 with a ryzen 2600 and rx 580

I uninstalled the amd drivers then installed old one and fixed the issue for me .
 
Jangar12 said:
I had the same problem has you it had to do with AMD drivers .

One day my EU4 was unplayable for some reason

I was getting 10-20 fps at speed 3 in 1444 with a ryzen 2600 and rx 580

I uninstalled the amd drivers then installed old one and fixed the issue for me .
Click to expand...
Thing is, I am very adverse to start messing with drivers as it also messes my sound driver up due to Lenovo and Microsoft not getting their sh*t together. I spent so much time re-configuring after my last driver update I really don't want to go through that and from reading what you say my driver isn't the latest one. Its from 2021 I believe. Would you recommend rolling back to a previous driver? That would mean my driver would be out of date by 2-3 years! I think I may have to update the driver but I'd rather exhaust all other potentials first!
 
So I just ran a virus definition update and scan, it found a few suspicious items, quarantined them and realised UAC was turned off, so enabled it and now I can't launch the game through the launcher. Disabled UAC, still can't launch the game.
 
If the game is not using much CPU power it's because it doesn't need it at that point. It's not a bug.
Pie'O'My said:
The machine will start using that missing/shared 2GB when needed.
Click to expand...
I'm afraid not - that missing 2gb I pointed out is unavailable to Windows at all. I believe this is a misconfiguration in the bios, but that's getting somewhat out of my sphere of experience, I have to admit.

Pie'O'My said:
I am very adverse to start messing with drivers as it also messes my sound driver up due to Lenovo and Microsoft not getting their sh*t together. I spent so much time re-configuring after my last driver update I really don't want to go through that and from reading what you say my driver isn't the latest one. Its from 2021 I believe.
Click to expand...
Your AMD Vega 8 video driver is from August 2020. I believe this is the current one from Feb 2022 for your setup:

I don't understand how updating it could affect your sound driver, since that's an entirely unrelated one from Realtek ?
 
You're correct - I was getting confused with the Windows Update that messed up my sound drivers. Anyway I have updated Radeon and the issue remains. I am ruling out my RAM as an issue too. The game is broken. I have just about had enough of this from Paradox. I have paid all that money for a game that won't even start right now and when it does it runs like crap. I have never been able to finish a game of EU4 because some DLC or patch is released that borks the save file or mods. I have put up with it because you're introducing new features and such but when your new features are not thought out and the AI can't even make use of them, or it introduces performance issues then you have a big problem. Why would someone subscribe to that for a fee? I want an isolated version of the game that you can't destroy like this. One that I can play!!! I'm done with this. Game has been uninstalled - never thought I'd say that about this game.
 
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And you wonder why you lose players...

AndrewT said:
If the game is not using much CPU power it's because it doesn't need it at that point. It's not a bug.

I'm afraid not - that missing 2gb I pointed out is unavailable to Windows at all. I believe this is a misconfiguration in the bios, but that's getting somewhat out of my sphere of experience, I have to admit.


Your AMD Vega 8 video driver is from August 2020. I believe this is the current one from Feb 2022 for your setup:

I don't understand how updating it could affect your sound driver, since that's an entirely unrelated one from Realtek ?
Click to expand...

The game is running on 10fps while idling my cpu and gpu. I would call that a bug. The fact that you are not considering it, means that it meets your expectations. Well, sorry, that is not normal. This is a broken game, and engine needs an update.
 
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I think the company itself does not care at all which is really sad. It's like saying "Either get a $2k PC or you will have to experience the worst lag possible". The problem is the we all love these games and have paid large amount of money. I think it is better to fix the engine than releasing DLC's every single month. Hope it will reach the top of the company.
 
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