Performance Megathread

[Dëzaël]

@Axe99 If you launched the game only once, try launching it again, otherwise opt in for any other version than 2.6.*, then opt in again to the latest. Sometimes launching or updates bork themselves and need reiterating. Perf is not that great, but is not supposed to be that level of bad, and what you report is typically what I get when launching or install screw up.

I know that when it happens to me my windows theme screw up as well and some colors go white, so I'm not putting the blame on PDox for that one as it should be quite a rare thing but it might happen in other cases as well. Try it!

 

[Axe99]

@Axe99 If you launched the game only once, try launching it again, otherwise opt in for any other version than 2.6.*, then opt in again to the latest. Sometimes launching or updates bork themselves and need reiterating. Perf is not that great, but is not supposed to be that level of bad, and what you report is typically what I get when launching or install screw up.

I know that when it happens to me my windows theme screw up as well and some colors go white, so I'm not putting the blame on PDox for that one as it should be quite a rare thing but it might happen in other cases as well. Try it!

Thank you sooooooo much Performance is still a bit slower than I'd hope at game start (10 seconds a month on fastest, 12 seconds on fast - I'd have expected a bigger difference between fast and fastest), but it's perfectly playable now. Really, really appreciate your assistance - I'd been looking forward to giving Federations a crack, and when it went all snail-paced on me, it was a bit disheartening. Now I'm a happy Plantoid .

 

[Dëzaël]

@Axe99 I'm glad I could help. Thank you as well as I'm aware of this issue since a long time ago now, but never found anyone having witnessed it. Now I know it's not only me.
When you're used to it, you can tell it's borked just by the way the camera stutters when coming to the galaxy right after loading ends. Loading times are also longer than usual when it happens.

This problem is strictly similar to the late game usual poor perf, but 10X worse. Maybe exploring this thing could give some hints about the larger problem if they're connected. For now our only common point is that we both use a GTX10XX series graphics card. Could you tell me if you're using a theme for your desktop, and if you're on Windows 10, if it's a specific version like Pro or else?

 

[Thinghunter]

Hey guys, I want to share my experience regarding the game performance with you:
I recently upgraded my pc in November mainly because of the Stellaris endgame lag (1000 planets, 30 civilizations, ~200 years in, standard number of habitable planets, ~5 mods for more traditions/new jobs/new traits, new buildings), which was unbearable. Especially difficult was to deal with the fact, that pausing the game resulted in a huge frame drop and my input got sometimes eaten, so i had to pause/accidentally unpause/pause again the game quite often. Previously to the upgrade, I had the following specs:
- i7-4970 CPU
- gtx 980 GPU
- 16 gb 1866 mhz RAM
- 3 tb harddrive where the game is installed
Additional to the lag, I noticed that CPU, GPU and RAM sometimes had up to 100% usage, but not at the same time!

My new PC has:
- 9900k CPU
- rtx 2080ti GPU
- 64 gb 3200mhz RAM
- 1 tb Samsung 970 EVO installation drive

After the pc upgrade, I noticed a ~30% to ~40% increase in performance which mainly correlates to the higher single-thread performance of my new CPU. My CPU and my GPU have usually a usage of 20% - 30% (but may spike when loading a new game) and I stay at ~14gb RAM usage while playing & browsing the web (watching twitch livestreams, youtube videos...). The CPU usage highly indicates, that Stellaris uses a maximum of 4 cores and no hyperthreading exept for loading a game. My VRAM usage is below 4gb, too (I play on 4k, highest settings). All my benchmarks have been recorded with MSI Afterburner.

The release og 2.6.* increased my performance by approximately the factor 5, but again with the same CPU/GPU/Ram usage (On the same settings with the same mods). This results in almost no lag while on the highest speed (roughly 2-3 days persecond). The loading times for endgame have greatly improved due to switching to a SSD (from ~1 minute to ~20 seconds). But whenever i pause the game, my input gets still sometimes eaten- despite it is much, much better- which is still unnerving.I have the experience that the game stops for several seconds at some times, too, usually at the end of a year (but suprisingly not every year).

To sumn it all up, I can enjoy playing Stellaris again. But if you do not have the money to buy the best pc hardware available, it is quite impossible to play on the highest settings. I do not know if changing from 800 systems to 1000 systems increases the required system specs linarly or exponentially, but i think it is mandatory to choose your galaxy size in Stellaris accordingly to your hardware when you want a good experience. I think the Devs did a great job when they released 2.6 and I hope we will see another jump in performance soon.

Greetings,
Thinghunter

 

[KingAlamar]

To sumn it all up, I can enjoy playing Stellaris again. But if you do not have the money to buy the best pc hardware available, it is quite impossible to play on the highest settings. I do not know if changing from 800 systems to 1000 systems increases the required system specs linarly or exponentially, but i think it is mandatory to choose your galaxy size in Stellaris accordingly to your hardware when you want a good experience. I think the Devs did a great job when they released 2.6 and I hope we will see another jump in performance soon.

My guess is going from 800 to 1000 systems will cause more of a "linear" hit to performance than an "exponential" hit to performance. While I could be wrong I suspect the number of POPs & JOBs is still where are issue lie as opposed to the number of systems, number of AIs, etc. I expect POP & JOB processing to be mostly a linear function as I wouldn't see the need for anything worse than that ...

 

[Axe99]

Could you tell me if you're using a theme for your desktop, and if you're on Windows 10, if it's a specific version like Pro or else?

Win 10 and I've got a theme (just some windows "nice screenshots" theme they gave away for free at the start of the year). It's normal Win 10, nothing snazzy. Thanks for looking into/thinking about

i think it is mandatory to choose your galaxy size in Stellaris accordingly to your hardware when you want a good experience

Oh aye - I've played a medium game once, early on, but never again - small is the only sized galaxy that provides anywhere near decent performance on my machine, and even then I've stopped playing late-game because it gets too slow to be fun, rather than because the crisis has been completed or there's a natural gameplay break-point. I might start cutting down my inhabitable planets as well with that in mind.

I'm actually thinking about picking it up on PS4 to see how it runs there (as there might be benefits it being optimised just for one set of hardware). Would be a funny old world if I ended up playing a Paradox game on console for performance reasons, but if that's what it takes.

Edit: Console version is content-wise ages behind PC, so I'll chug along with PC then, don't want to have to go in both directions through the learning curve .

 

[4xForEver]

What's the big deal with performance?

AFAIK programmers love doing micro optimizations to make their code run faster LOL.
well the problem is that working on performance takes a lot of time and skills and the end result is something you can't pack into a DLC and sell.

I wish to be rich and donate few millions for performance and game progress.

 

[Ari Rahikkala]

Is anyone running into an unusually big lag spike around the first of the year?? I'm running an iron man game and started noticing massive slowdowns around the first of the year [when game is saved]. This slowdown is much longer than the normal time to save game & move on.

For reference my current game is on a small [400 star] map, 0.25x habitables, no guaranteed planets, no mods, around 2500 with Crisis defeated.

Would you by any chance happen to be assimilating large numbers of pops, particularly on planets with already large populations? I did a bit of logging and it turns out that assimilation can be very slow, depending on the population of the planet and the number of pops that actually get assimilated - easily over 10 seconds on my 9900KS when the planet has over 100 pops and the event assimilates 12 pops on it. The way the assimilation event works is that it goes through every planet with assimilable pops at the start of every year, and tries to convert 3, 6 or 12 of them on each planet, so it can add up to an awful lot of lag.

My guess about why this is a problem now and wasn't before 2.6 is that job checks are done upon job-affecting effects now instead of being done on a regular schedule, and that each separate assimilated pop triggers a new job recalculation for its planet. That would explain why the performance scales as it does: On each planet, for each pop that gets assimilated, the game has to calculate all job weights for all pops (at least once; the way that synthetic assimilation actually works is that it kills the old pop and spawns in a new robot pop, and I'm not sure that those effects don't both cause their own job checks).

 

[KingAlamar]

Would you by any chance happen to be assimilating large numbers of pops, particularly on planets with already large populations? I did a bit of logging and it turns out that assimilation can be very slow, depending on the population of the planet and the number of pops that actually get assimilated - easily over 10 seconds on my 9900KS when the planet has over 100 pops and the event assimilates 12 pops on it. The way the assimilation event works is that it goes through every planet with assimilable pops at the start of every year, and tries to convert 3, 6 or 12 of them on each planet, so it can add up to an awful lot of lag.

My guess about why this is a problem now and wasn't before 2.6 is that job checks are done upon job-affecting effects now instead of being done on a regular schedule, and that each separate assimilated pop triggers a new job recalculation for its planet. That would explain why the performance scales as it does: On each planet, for each pop that gets assimilated, the game has to calculate all job weights for all pops (at least once; the way that synthetic assimilation actually works is that it kills the old pop and spawns in a new robot pop, and I'm not sure that those effects don't both cause their own job checks).

I went ascension fairly early in the game so I had already gotten past the initial glut. On the other hand I was receiving a fair amount of refugees and also wound up with several protectorates and even a planet that rebelled against the prior owner so it's possible that I wasn't paying attention to things while I was dealing with the Crisis???

 

[Tavior]

Did anyone manage to solve their micro-stuttering in early-game issue with 2.6.3 patch? Just curious.

 

[1602 AD]

Does anyone know what major calculations/updates are done on the January 1st tick besides purge/assimilations? Right around the ~200 year mark in my giga structural engineering game, the Jan 1 tick started taking incredibly long. Like almost 10 minutes. Always 5+.

And if it's interesting to anyone, gene/robo modding projects appear to get processed on the 2nd of each month.

Edit: I'm now convinced the issue is in fact synthetic ascension assimilating, which is a shame because I specifically picked it in this play through thinking a mono-pop galaxy would be less laggy. My empire is, admittedly, massive in this game. The AI seem to love the 'make planets habitable' wonders even more than habitats so I'm well over 150 worlds at this point. Almost forgot, this is all 2.6.3.

Positive Performance Notes:
-The UI lag while paused is basically gone. This is HUGE imo and I am elated.
-FPS mid-month is also significantly better.
-The fact that the game does not crash, despite chugging for over 10 minutes on a single tick, is frankly amazing. So credit where credit is due because stability is also an element of performance.

Negatives:
-Day 1 of each month still hangs but the auto save months are noticeably worse. My game is installed on a SATA SSD so that could be a factor. I wonder if they would consider lowering the iron man autosave interval for this reason though, or at least honoring the setting we select in options for non-iron man games.
-The hang when re-settling pops is understandable, but I think it would/should be possible to do it in batches through the UI? Like ctrl + click moves that whole grouping of pops, or a button to just move all unemployed pops.

 

[KyuuET]

So, I finished my first long set of playtests on 2.6.x, on the beta branch so mostly on 2.6.3.

Yes, performance is better. I'd call it borderline playable in late game. Not enjoyable, but playable. It was not playable before. True work has been put into it and while I can't say the end result is yet perfect, the change is galactic, mind the pun. I think the best and most wonderful change is that huge late game battles, with a good 1500K of fleets at it, can be played. I do appreciate the work, but I must add that I feel the work has just started. This change proves that the work can be finished, and I'll take it as a good sign.

I have been wondering abut other things that aren't directly hardware performance optimization, but come close. Things that are parts of the game's tech that ultimately affect performance. I believe there are a few things to look at. I think performance and other mechanics need to talk together.

Species. Just opening up the colony ship building menu or species list require coffee breaks, because the game just forks new species at an astonishing rate. Yes, you could probably optimize the code for opening these lists, or maybe just look at the species handling mechanics.

Colony issues. Play late and wide, the game becomes unplayable with so many constant popups from worlds that have no jobs, no housing or massive crime, and this becomes a performance issue. Not because the code for these is bad (except when you get the same popup from the same colony 100+ times) but because the AI builds worlds with five times the amount of pops it supports, and when you conquer them, you also conquer their horrendous management effects.

Rebels. Lists of contacts and any place where you need to see all the players become slow. Not because the code there is bad, but because the game forks out so many new empires later on, most of them without an empire name. So while it's nice to see the ___ make a deal with ___ constantly and then breaking the same deals right after, they fill the screen, toss popups and again, make playing performance bad.

Useless travels. I'm guessing they don't have an issue with burning fossil fuels in the cosmos, as the AI's unoptimized constant travels back and forth with their construction ships, on their way from doing nothing to the other side of the galaxy to do nothing, while building 50 more that also do nothing, tends to fill the screen with nonsense. Not because the code displaying a construction ship is bad, but because the code managing their work is a bit more artistic than technical.

There are more, but I hope I've hidden a point here somewhere. Performance is not just about being able to process stuff quickly. You've really, really improved that and I am grateful. The next steps need a bit of looking at the big picture as well. Here's hoping good luck for future endeavors in that area. I know you can do it.

edit: since it's recommended to post, system in short: Ryzen 9 3950x / 64 GB / 3x Samsung 970 Evo 1TB / RTX2080Ti / Win10. AMD may still be the loser option in performance for Stellaris.

 

[Officiant]

System: i7-6700K @ 4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM 3200@14, on a GTX 1080 w/ 1TB NVMe SSD. Aka, I should have zero issues with this game.

I've been playing 2.6.3 (+beta) as well. I think performance has increased in MP and there are fewer CTD. Clearly, optimizations are having an effect in this realm. That said, in SP, I've definitely noticed endgame lag and freezing (while it calculates) in the endgame now that it did not do in 2.5.x. I like the dev diary that specified how you were reducing/optimizing the calculations that occurred monthly - this effort needs to continue.

I'd like to encourage parallelizing these calculations. I ran Stellaris w/ HWmonitor on w/ as few background apps as possible. For most of the year, 7/8 cores was <5%, one was ~55%. On Jan 1, a SINGLE core was 100% for the entire time, until 1/2. This indicates that nearly all of the turn-of-year calculations are calculated on a single core when I have 8. Literally every computer has at least two cores nowadays (and most have 4+) so there's no reason to keep all of these processes on a single core.

For instance, when calculating assimilation, it could be done per planet, with each core assigned an eighth of the total planets. Or maybe you can split up some of the monthly checks, some cores get these checks or again, run all checks for a planet on a single core, but splitting planets across cores.

Thanks!!

 

[Aepdneds]

I have a weird performance issue in the late game on a 600 star galaxy. The year is 2420 and the total population of the galaxy around 10k. The game itself is running fine but if I pause the game all planetary menus are extremely laggy, nearly impossible to use. If I hover a building it takes 5 seconds to show me the name, it is not possible to scroll the building list, if I click on an open slot it takes ages to open the building menu etc. As soon as I unpause the game it is useable again, no matter if I play on slowest or fastest.

I opened the task manager and it showed me 31% CPU usage while paused in the planetary menu, 27% on fastest in the planetary menu and jumping between 22% and 27% on fastest in the galaxy view. Why is there a higher CPU load while paused? While writing this without Stellaris open the CPU load is between 3% and 5%.

No mods installed.

Specs:
MSI GETRVR 6RF Apache Pro
i7-6700hq @ 2600Ghz
GTX 1060 6GB
16GB Ram
Windows 10

 

[Riince2]

Literally every computer has at least two cores nowadays (and most have 4+) so there's no reason to keep all of these processes on a single core.

This is nonsense. You can't just "use maor cores" when the outcome of each subsequent calculation is dependent on the previous one. That's called serial code, and you'd slow things down to a crawl if you did it across multiple threads since the cores need to communicate between for every calculation to make sure they're on the same page, and most cycles would be spent on this rather than the actual game's instructions.

Amdahl's law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

parallelization is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to fixing the performance of the game. PDX is trying to do that where possible, and cut down on calculations where it's not possible. The latter is what made 2.6 such a dramatic increase in performance, daily pop checks were insanity, and late game start of month lag is the next demon to tackle.

 

[permeakra]

So I'm playing lategame on a large map (big mistake), and yeah, I'm experiencing late-game lag. My rig is fairly low-spec by modern standards, but still.

Most of the time I just experience slow ticks, but occasionally there are hard freezes when gui goes unresponsive for, I think, about 15 seconds at least. They typically occur on xxxx.01.01 Doesn't appear to be saves though, those happen fast.
My empire is the largest on map and has about 4k pops, so i guess total pop count is low tens of thousands.

What does the game do on xxxx.01.01 besides autosave?

 

[KingAlamar]

@Riince2 : I mostly agree with your position. Specifically writing code that can take full advantage of modern machines [or even 7 year old rigs] is freakin' hard in general and almost impossible if you don't hire ELITE people / specialists in that kind of thing. If you rely on the run-of-the-mill "staff" programmer you will wind up getting pretty bad results.

Even if you do have specialists coming in during version 1.0 of the game to wring every last ounce of performance out of your base engine you have to be VERY careful how new features are tacked onto the engine otherwise you could ruin a lot of the performance you had.

NOTE: When I heard some DEVs explain how their code was [is??] set up to calculate buffs / effects / etc. it struck me as being a very serialized process -- something that wouldn't lend itself well to taking advantage of even 7 year old systems ... let alone modern-day systems.

 

[Polinerd]

Cool, it is good to know this has been an issue for 2 years and still has not been fixed, AND it is such a well-known issue that they had to create an entire thread to put all comments on it. This game is virtually unplayable late game and it pisses me off, never mind other bugs that keep creeping up in. I am so angry at this and Paradox should be ashamed of themselves that this is still a major issue.

 

[grommile]

On Ensign difficulty, 600 stars, 1x hab planets, 1x hyperlanes, 9 young empires, 2 FEs, it's fine.

Of course, in that configuration there are no threats, so...

 

[KingAlamar]

On Ensign difficulty, 600 stars, 1x hab planets, 1x hyperlanes, 9 young empires, 2 FEs, it's fine.

Of course, in that configuration there are no threats, so...

I may not recall correctly but I think those are [more or less] the default game settings for Stellaris possibly other than difficulty. If you have a system that more or less matches the 'recommended pc' and the default game runs acceptably then that's at least a good sign.

Granted the difficulty may be a gotcha is the AI doesn't produce POPs, JOBs, etc. as it otherwise should but compared to where we where it's a step in the right direction.