Bug/Issue Game performance (Lags)

I'm saddened by the fact that I can't play Starbound for more than 1 ~ 1.5 hours before it crashes or I have to restart because of it eating all of the memory available. I will also say that this started most recently after the newest stable patch.

If there is anyway to either mitigate this or solve this entirely, I would love it. If not, well, I'll just have to leave Starbound alone until a patch comes by that can fix this GAME BREAKING problem.

 

having lag issues when i load my save and for at least 3 minutes im getting almost constant framedrops on the beta patch

 

Hello,

I'm also encountering problems with stuttering while running the game in 4k.

My specs:

OS: Windows 10 Home 64-bit
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 3.6GHZ (with only 1 utilized to about 95% +- 5%)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (with 15% utilization)
RAM: Single-Channel, HyperX 16GB DDR4 2400MHz CL15 (game uses about 500MB)
SS Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB (utilization 0-1%)
Resolution: 2560x1440 configured, but actually 3840x2160
Zoom levek: 2x
Borderless: Yes
Fullscreen: No

So the highest resolution that is supported by the game is 2560x1440.
However if you enable borderless, the actual resolution will be the current resolution of the dispaly, which is 3840x2160.

Now, I do realize, that 4k is not listed in supported resolutions, so the question is simple. Are there any plans to support it?
The Game UI already scales as expected, the only problem is the fps drop.

While playing the game with zoom 2x I'm getting 40 - 20 FPS
While playing the game with zoom 3x I'm getting 60 FPS

What I find interesting is that no matter the resolution or zoom level, CPU and RAM utilization would remain the same.
I've read here, that CPU bottleneck could be the issue, but since utilization is the same, I think this is not the case.
GPU and storage can't be obviously an issue.

To me it appears as this is some kind of in game buffer that struggles when that large chunk of the wolrd is drawn/simulated

So, is there something I can do to run the game in 4k with zoom 2x? Some kind of configuration file, or something.
The benefit of seeing large portion fo the world is amazing, however the lower-ish FPS kinda kills that option.

I'm willing to provide more details about the system, if needed.

Are you guys planning on supporting 4k oficially? And since the last update is 10 months old, is the development/patching of the game dead?

Thanks in advance.

 

When you say 95% utilization, you means one core is running at ~95% usage?

As for 4k support. There has been no word about support for it. Its possible given their development for the XBox, and presumably the XBox One S, but we don't know.

 

Hello Lazarus, first and foremost thanks for answer.

now,

It gets little more complicated. I did several tests today and the utilization depends:

1. on whether you are in menu or in the game
2. on whether you alt tabbed while playing the game
3. on how many times you have alt tabbed while playing the game

All of this is done in borderless window in 4k resolution
To ilustrate, I have taken screenshots with performance graphs.

1. In menu: https://imgur.com/UitGcAr
2. In the game, before first al tab out of the game: https://imgur.com/cguYkfG
3. in the game, after the first alt tab out of the game: https://imgur.com/wG48Wl8

(I had to post links to the images themselves, since inserting the image somewhat didn't work. To see the details of the image, you will have to download it, imgur doesnt like large images)
So as we can see, utilization of the thread(s) depends significantly on whether I alt tabbed out of the game. To me it appears as problem with multithreading.

In games this is common problem, especially in those trying to simulate somewhat dynamic world, as this simulation is linear and doesn't cope well multithreading.

This is confirmed by the fact, that with multiple cores utilized, the performance goes down. On the other hand, with one core fully utilized, the performance is about 30FPS.

If I change the zoom level from 2x to 3x, FPS rises to about 60FPS, however the behavior remains, the more time is spent out of focus(ale tabbed out of the game) the lower FPS I get in the game when I return. Save&quit to menu, then reloading the save fixes the issue. (fixes in sense that I have 60fps again, alt tabbing however starts to break the game again)

So the question stands, is there something I can do on my end, regarding the configuration, that would improve the performance of the game?

 

Hello.
I also have FPS problems with Starbound.

Specs:
OS: Windows 10 Home Single Language 64-bit
CPU: Intel Celeron CPU N2840 (2 CPUs) - 2.2 GHz
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 2GB (64MB VRAM)
RAM: 4GB
HD 500GB
Resolution: 1366X768 (I play game on 1280x720)
Zoom level: 3x
Borderless: No
Fullscreen: Yes

In normal game, I get 30-36 FPS,but in Navigation Console I barely see 4 FPS. How can I boost that?

 

First off, you can just direct link to images. IE https://i.imgur.com/UitGcAr.jpg so no need to download them to view them full size.


The most I see the CPU being used is ~12%. A single thread having high usage is normal, since it is being used to process the task. I thought you meant like a whole core was being held up at ~95%, which would not be normal at all.

The only thing I can surmise is it may be related to a potential AMD CPU issue. I can not confirm this, however.

Get a better computer. Your CPU is crap. Your issue is purely weak hardware.

 

I would tend to disagree on that, altough Ryzen was somewhat buggy on release, a lot of bugfixing was done. I can play Terraria or space engineers with no problems..
It really wouldn't suprise me if botched multithreading would be the issue. Not that I can blame them, since 4k is not officialy supported, so this is not really a bug I can report.
I'm just wondering, I've seen multiple posts on Steam asking the same thing as. It would be nice to see someone from Chucklefish to give us official statement on that.

I guess we will see in time.

 

The potential AMD issue being with the game, not the CPU itself. Over the past few years I've noticed a trend of people having unexplained performance issues more often having AMD systems. I also recall one of the past patches included some AMD specific "performance improvements", so Chucklefish must have known about something at the time, and perhaps their changes didn't fix everything, or potentially botched some things.

 

I see, my bad, I misunderstood your message. The only way to be sure would be to try this on Intel Platform, but I don't have access to such machine. We can just hope that they pay attention to these forums. Or that the PC release is still support worthy from their point of view.

 

Its all anecdotal, but we have tested on Intel systems many many times.

All my systems have been Intel based, and I have not had this issue. (And I'm talking a good 7+ systems) And you can surmise that it appears most of these related complaints are AMD based, so you can argue that those not saying anything are most likely working just fine, so they aren't really important here. So the question is, is there an actual trend of AMD based systems having problems, or is it just coincidence? Without getting my hands on a knowingly "problem" system, I can't really say anything for sure. All I can really say is what I have seen and "Well, it works fine for me!", which is unfortunate because I would love to figure it out.

 

I have seen some that were not AMD, but weren't Intel either. not blaming any1 or anything like that but sometimes it feels like they only test this game on Intel systems (which is not a bad thing, but not really a good thing either)

 

Yeah, but even then, its not all AMD systems, so even if they tested on AMD, they might not experience the same problems. Issues like these really can't be fixed unless they can replicate the problem.

 

What I gathered so far, and to keep it short, what you need is a modern day PC to play this pixelated mess and now pretty much becoming ancient game and even with the new PC it's questionable how will it work and for how long. In my case I started playing this game on a dualcore and moved it up to a i7 and every time I introduced it on a new PC it worked for a half a year or less then crapped itself with tons of game breaking problems in between, didn't got any official support or anything and even when I got something it was useless and wasted time something I hate and shouldn't be dealing with in the first place. This is not how you run a company and treat your consumers. You make a solid product and only then release it on a shelf, if you can't make these basics then don't bother to own a company and make things at all instead do something else with your life.

 

Starbound has always run poorly. It doesn't deal with rendering or trashing things from memory well. Your specs hardly matter, at least after a while. The longer your play session the more the game will drag. The more tiles (especially water) you move, the more lag you will notice. The more worlds you fly to, the slower the chunks load. The longer you keep a single world file, the more bloated it becomes. I still see problems that were present in the alpha. A lot of "indie" companies can't do performance well. I've played so many sandbox games that I can't ballpark a number, and most of them ran like hot garbage. At least after a while. It's not reasonable to expect the handful of people at Chucklefish to fix the performance issues in Starbound, especially since they're sort of ... well, done with the game. They stated when the game hit 1.0, they'd have a smaller team work on content updates. That sort of mentality shows that they have no intention to introduce any *effective* performance updates. We have what we have and that's all there is to it. It wouldn't even be cost effective to go back to the game after all this time and enhance the way the engine renders and stores/releases information. It would have been more likely if the game either was still in beta or came out last month.



I recorded this in 2014...

The things I mentioned here can easily be recreated. Load a game, visit a world and enter a vehicle then fly around for about 20 seconds at full speed. Beam to ship, visit another world and repeat. Continue doing this and about the third or fourth world you do it on, you'll notice chunks loading incredibly slowly. Now extrapolate that with 5+ people on a server all loading chunks and worlds, moving tiles and creating projectile spam as well as dropping items and mobs having to render. It's a shame, too. In my opinion, there are three things holding Starbound back from perfection. One is no town/colonization mechanics where you claim territory and have to pay upkeep, as well as inviting residents (both player and NPC). Second is the lack of proper server tools. Third is the performance.

Probably the absolute worst performance offender is when you're playing with a friend and you two move apart from each other then back toward each other again and there's a 2 second freeze as the server tries to render you to each other. I have no idea how this has not been fixed in all this time.

 

Its almost like different actions have different system demands, some are more demanding than others, and trying to do them repeatedly and quickly causes performance drop... Who would have thought!

This is typical behavior for virtually all games like this. The worlds are generated on the fly, and it is demanding on basically any system.

The only way to fix these types of problems is to allow the game a few hours to generate all the worlds you are likely to go to have to keep them in memory, or allow some loading time to load up a whole world completely, which would baloon the memory requirements for the game.

 

Please tell me that you do not work for Chucklefish. I've been reading your responses and they are ludicrous at best. That video and what us players are experiencing is not even slightly typical behavior.

I have a wonderful gaming rig, I game all the time in my private life and I'm professional software developer (I say this only to say that I know how to troubleshoot problems and test my system). Starbound is the only game that my machine lags in where I haven't found a setting that will fix it (outside of network latency), and I play all games at max settings including games that use procedural generation during game play.

Based on all the responses to this thread and others based on this issue, which are primarily yours, I will probably never again buy another Chucklefish game. There is a problem. Chucklefish can choose to ignore it and every day it will continue to impact gamer's impressions of their company.

 

I played the game in two different PC. A desktop and a laptop. With Steam and without Steam, and with mods and without any mod.
The game lags the same way on both machines, with Steam (Overlay disabled) and without it. And it lags without mods or with mods.

Desktop:
Intel Core2Qaud Q6600
8 GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 650 OC 2GB

Laptop:
Intel Corei5 6200U
4 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 520

My conclusion is that the game's code is....

 

The Q6600 is perfectly normal. I used to play on a similar machine. That CPU is just shit by todays standards.

The i5 6200U is a laptop CPU, meaning it is underpowered off the bat. Was your laptop plugged in to the wall at the time you tested? That can have a big impact on its performance since laptops will throttle to conserve battery. They will also throttle when they start to get moderately hot. Also judging by the other specs, that is a basic home user laptop, not really good for most gaming as it is.

You are basing your assessment of 2 weak systems.

 

In comparison with ANY other 2D side-scrolling survival-crafting-digging game, ONLY Starbound that runs so incredibly slow.
I know those machines aren't great, but how about that I play Fallout New Vegas on this laptop, with a bunch of mods and it runs perfectly. I think FalloutNV is more demanding on both CPU and GPU. Or it should be compared to a sides-crolling 2D game.
So, there must be something wrong with how Starbound draws things on the screen or maybe something else that makes the game perform incredibly bad even in modern machines. If you take your time and look around on the internet, you will find that many people complaining about why Starboud is so slow. Even in much-much better PCs than mine.
Oh, and you said that Q6600 is a shit CPU, but the Q6600 faster than lot of i5 CPU that many people using for gaming!
Something really wrong around this game's performance...