My single player game is starting to lag pretty badly and I’m trying to figure out what is causing it.
Prior to the pet update(s) I never had any performance problems at all, even though I was running a lot of mods and had a fair amount of placeables in my huge base. After the update(s) I started a new game with a few additional mods (beefy ones though) and have been experiencing intermittent lag, mostly around my base, and it’s worsening.
What I don’t understand, is that my FPS is still pretty good, usually fluctuating between 45-60 and only very occasionally dipping below 30 even at my base (except of course for the lag).
I have an i7-7700K (4.2GHz), GeForce GTX 1080, & 16GB ram. Game and OS is on an SSD.
Given my specs, I have been running with everything maxed (ultra), which has been perfectly fine until the update/new game and still more than playable afterwards, except it has now deteriorated to the point of becoming very annoying. Given that it’s worsening, I guess it could be due to the amount of placeables in my base. Although, I was experiencing some minor lag in this post-update new game prior to building my base, so I suppose it’s not the root cause.
Strangely, when I tried reducing my settings to high, this gave me a modest FPS boost, however the lag remained, so as to be pointless.
The other thing I could do, is to test my game without the addtional mods (one by one) and observe any difference in performance. However before I go to this trouble, I thought I’d ask if any more computer savvy people than I (I’m not very) could offer any advice.
I’m guessing, based on what you have reported here, is that the cause you suspect is indeed the culprit. The amount of placeables and other objects is slowly adding more and more resource demands. The performance update that Funcom is working (to help improve how assets are loaded in) could help with performance issues you are experiencing right now.
I’m in the process of building my new system (I finally get to play with it next Wednesday!!!), but I’ve always had performance issues myself (i7-5820k 4.0 GHZ overclocked, 980 GTX, 32 GBs of 2100 RAM, Samsung SSD). And those performance issues was with and without buildings, didn’t really matter on that front.
The only minor relief I found was some maintenance work on my virus protection (Bit defender, I made sure all permissions were granted, and updating from 2018 to 2019 helped), and video drivers (the latest 400 + driver versions seems to have a minor impact). It wasn’t a perfect fix though, I only saw a modest improvement to my issues.
Everything was perfect performance-wise for me in my previous game prior to the pet update. Smooth as silk.
Since I did notice some lag early on in my new game prior to building much, I’m assuming the cause is likely a combination of something in the update (perhaps the event log) and increasing amounts of placeables as my game progresses. Especially considering my previous game was also pretty full of placeables and didn’t have any problems.
I did notice the lag starting to become really pronounced after putting down a bunch of modded decorations. It still wasn’t too bad, but by now (weeks later) it’s getting seriously frequent and annoying around my base.
Since reducing my settings doesn’t fix the lag, all I can think to do is reduce my modlist/tear down all my beautiful decorations.
Before I do anything so drastic, I’ll continue to monitor things for awhile. I was going to start building another bigger, better base somewhere else soon. Paying attention to performance throughout that process might give me a better idea of what the limits are I can work with within a given loaded chunk of the game.
I don’t know when the performance update will hit (it’s currently under development according to the Trello board), but hopefully it’s soon and helps with your issues.
Yes, I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully, it will improve things for everyone. I’m only now starting to experience a taste of what others in multiplayer have been putting up with for ages.