Surviving Mars - Heavy Disk use leads to game play issues [Windows 10 x 64 bit]

[MindWerks]

Description
Heavy Disk use leads to game play issues [Windows 10 x 64 bit]


Windows


Steam

What is your game version?
2622059

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
I have started having a problem with playing Surviving Mars. After loading the game the radio would start cutting out. At first I thought maybe my GPU was choking on the game but when I turned on the FPS it was pegged at 144 (which matches my display rate) and never dipped. I checked my CPU while the problem was occurring and it was running at about 40% so no real problem there. Then I noticed the hard drive the game was installed on was pegged at 100%. The disk in question is just a normal HDD but paired with another in a mirror RAID. It took me a little while to pin down what was going on but I think I have a clue.

The UI seems to be doing something that is causing a build up on disk activity. As you click around in the game this activity kind of builds up until the music starts to cut out and it takes a really long time for the UI to respond. Now besides the music cutting out and the UI being slow the rest of the game seems to work just find and shows no adverse performance problems. I attached two images, one is a capture I did after loading the game, the second is one I captured after clicking around the UI for a bit and the problems started to surface.

I don't really know how to fix this, and this is the only game I have that really has this problem so I think it might be a glitch. Unfortunately it keeps me from playing the game for any real length of time right now.

Can you replicate the issue?
Yes. It will replicate on it's own to a minor degree. However if you quickly click on different buildings it will become really obvious.

Attachments

 

[barrygreybeard]

Have you checked in resource monitor exactly which process is accessing your F drive?

 

[MindWerks]

Yes but there is no real smoking gun, the only files that are active on F: are all various Texture files or music files and UI.exe but they changing pretty frequently. Here is the best one I could capture.

 

[nccvoyager]

Yeah, the files being accessed will constantly be changing.
If I was informed correctly, then Surviving Mars locally streams (basically) everything while it runs.
This means textures and audio especially are constantly being read from the HDD while the game runs, instead of being preloaded at startup or when loading/starting a game.

In practice, this means there is very little in the way of load times for the game, and also leads to a much lower RAM footprint.
Unfortunately, it also tends to lead to some texture pop-in, and can lead to some resources (like music) cutting out if the amount of data that needs to be read from the HDD exceeds the read speed of that HDD.

I would guess that the streaming system is interacting weirdly with the RAID setup.
As an experiment, I would suggest lowering the texture and shadow quality to the lowest settings and then checking if the issue persists.
If it doesn't continue, then I would propose that the RAID setup has lowered the read speed of the HDD(s) in some way.
If it does continue, then I would surmise that the system is indeed interacting weirdly with the RAID setup.

 

[MindWerks]

I tried setting the settings on the lowest setting but still got the same music cutting in and out and the UI was still slow to respond. The music cutting in and out is more annoying then anything. I really like the music and I make a little face when it starts doing it. If I turn the radio off the only thing I have to deal with is the slow UI response, but that seems to come and go (it doesn't always occur). I dunno, hopefully a something in the future will fix it. When I bought the game it didn't do this. Seems like something over the last few days changed, which I why I'm hopeful it my be address in the future.... maybe... I hope.

 

[nccvoyager]

That is another option, of course.
I have seen reports of people having issues with the streaming system doing weird things after the patch was released.
Most of those issues revolve around the streaming system not streaming high-quality textures at all.

One other thing I would suggest is making sure that Surviving Mars is added to the white list (or equivalent) of any active antivirus scanner, if you haven't already.
My apologies I can't be of further help.

 

[Bad_Wolf]

Hi,
I have exactly the same problem.
Was ok before the recent update.
Gerry

 

[MindWerks]

Ok, In my case I believe that this is a hardware problem. I did a closer look at the condition of the disks physical health and noticed that one of the disks in the RAID had flagged a S.M.A.R.T. error. So my drive was telling me that it was having problems and disabled read/write ahead caching. The behavior that resulted was that when copying files you would see halting/hesitant or burst like transfer rates that would swing wildly from horrible to moderate.

I'm currently in the process of replacing the drive, but if you have this exact problem like I did then you may want to look at the health of your hardware (you can use crystal disk info, it's what I used). I think the way the game streams its files just made the problem more noticeable... so I guess thanks for that.

Good luck.