Very slow gamespeed right from the start (presumably Clausewitz Engine problem)

[ikarus7731]

Hi everyone,

I have the problem, that the game runs extremely slow right from the start. The ingame FPS display (console: "3dstats") shows constant FPS around 60 however the game speed itself seems to be severely limited, to the extend that on the fastest speed one ingame day takes around 3-4 seconds.

Specs

OS: Windows 10 64 bit
Platform: Steam
Grafics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (latest Update)

No mods installed

dxdiag attached
settings.txt attached
pdx_settings.txt attached
system.log attached
error.log is empty

When did the problem first occur?

I installed the Overlord DLC and somewhat similar had GeForce Game Ready Driver Update. Cannot say anymore what came first.

What did I try to fix the problem?

• Reinstall DirectX 9.0c
• Run game both in DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 mode
• Any combination of "Fullscreen", "Borderless Windowed" and different screen resolutions
• Turning off VSync and limiting refresh rate to 60
• Clean reinstall (incl. manually deleting Steam/SteamApps/common/Stellaris and Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris folders)
• Disabling all DLCs
• Reverting to older Game Version
• Reverting to older grafics card driver

Hypothesis

After I observed the problems with Stellaris I tried Hoi4 and experienced the exact same problem here. This led me to believe that there is an issue with the grafics card driver, i have however (as mentioned above) tried to revert to an older driver version without success. Furthermore, I have no problems whatsoever in any other game (incl. e.g. Surviving Mars which is not a Clausewitz Engine game).

So my final conclusion is, that there is some very specific problem with Clausewitz Engine games in conjunction with my grafics card (driver)?

Any help would be greatly appriciated.

 

[AndrewT]

If the engine was to blame, surely you would have seen this issue before Overlord came out?

If you run the Windows Update app, does it find anything to apply? If so do that and reboot.

And unload GeForce Experience before starting the game.

Then in the launcher Game Settings menu choose fullScreen, Vsync off and refresh rate 60. Does that help at all?

 

[ikarus7731]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions.

First of all: The system is up to date. Windows Update does not offer any updates.

The issue gets stranger by the minute. I did not quite know what you meant with "unloading the GeForce Experience" since it was not obvious to me that GeForce Experience was running in the background (I thought you only start it via the system tray symbol). After some digging and "trail and error" I found out that killing the process "NVIDIA Web Helper Service" indeed fixes the problem and lets the game run on normal speed again.

However here is where it gets weird. I continued my research and found an interesting article on howtogeek. There it reads "A quick glance at the scripts reveals the NVIDIA Web Helper is used for automatically downloading new drivers and installing them, as well as other tasks like signing into an NVIDIA account." Why on earth would a service that is (apparently) solely responsible for NVIDIA related tasks have an influence on games that are build on a certain game engine?

Furthermore the problem only seems to appear once. If you kill the process and then restart it (by opening GeForce Experience via system tray) the game still runs as fast as it should. All of that is super confusion to me and honestly also a bit annoying to kill the process once every time I restart my computer (wrote myself a little batch script to do that now - but it should not need to be done).

However, in conclusion: I can play and enjoy the game again so it's a win i guess?

Thanks for the help.

- edit -
Correction: The problem does NOT only appear once. However it takes some time after restarting the "NVIDIA Web Help" process before the game speed drops again.

 

[AndrewT]

I did not quite know what you meant with "unloading the GeForce Experience" since it was not obvious to me that GeForce Experience was running in the background (I thought you only start it via the system tray symbol). After some digging and "trail and error" I found out that killing the process "NVIDIA Web Helper Service" indeed fixes the problem and lets the game run on normal speed again.

I just meant to right click on it in your task bar and Exit. I have seen its attempts to optimise games, actually make them run worse.

If you leave it unloaded do you still get this happening after a while?

 

[ikarus7731]

I experimented a bit further around and I think I found a repeatable way to cause the slowdown. It is however very weird: So, apparently the "NVIDIA Web Help" process does not even need to be terminated. What removes the slowdown is simply having the Task Manager open (on my previous tests I guess I left it open some times after killing the NVIDIA tasks and sometimes not). I don't even need to restart the game for this to have effect.

Task Manager open => game runs smoothly as it should
Task Manager closed => extreme slowdown

How this can possibly be connected is beyond me ...

 

[imageses]

I experimented a bit further around and I think I found a repeatable way to cause the slowdown. It is however very weird: So, apparently the "NVIDIA Web Help" process does not even need to be terminated. What removes the slowdown is simply having the Task Manager open (on my previous tests I guess I left it open some times after killing the NVIDIA tasks and sometimes not). I don't even need to restart the game for this to have effect.

Task Manager open => game runs smoothly as it should
Task Manager closed => extreme slowdown

How this can possibly be connected is beyond me ...

that is a good sign of a virus i would run a scan with something like malwarebytes
i could be wrong though

 

[ikarus7731]

Thanks for the suggestion. Checked to computer several times with different scanners but it appears clean.

 

[AndrewT]

Task Manager open => game runs smoothly as it should
Task Manager closed => extreme slowdown

How this can possibly be connected is beyond me ...

Me either, in all honesty! Presumably Windows runs differently in some way when that utility is going, but more than that is outside my knowledge or experience I'm afraid.

 

[ikarus7731]

Some things are not meant to be understood
Thanks for your help and patience. I have a way to play, that doesn't hurt me too much so I'm happy ... I consider this thread closed