Major FA Slowdown on High-End PCs

[iiNNeX]

Me and my friend have been playing FA for a long time now, on multiple computers over the last 2 years.

Both of us have this issue, weather we play online or singleplayer, weather it is against AI or 1v1 (I have seen this issue addressed before regarding AI but we get it in no matter what game type we are playing be it online or offline).

It has happened on our old computers and and even on our latest high end machines.

Example: I would be doing a free for all for 4 players, me and 3 AI, and set sim speed to +5 or +10 for the time being just to let them grow in number/advance quicker, and after about 15 minutes to 20 minutes in game time, the sim speed now says +3, then +1 then sort of -4 at about 25 min. Which I find ridiculous for the hardware I have, and I know the game doesn't use multicores properly, but I have spoken to a few members on FAF chat and they have told me they get nothing of the sort, and play for hours with no simspeed slowdown, and they have computers worth 1/5th of mine...

Here are my specs, and my friends' are pretty similar:

Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition
CPU: Intel 4820K overclocked at 4.7ghz
RAM: Corsair Vengeance RED 16GB DDR3 2133MHz
GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB Dual Clasified (which is overclocked too, don't have exact figures atm)
Storage: 2x latest Samsung Evo SSD's

Running it on 1920x1080 @144hz with all settings maxed, Vsync ON

I never get any lag what so ever, just simspeed goes down to un-playable, no matter the scenario, be it with mods or without mods, or whatever.

Any help with this will be highly appreciated, we love the game and want to keep supporting it and playing as much as we can, but sadly this issue keeps us away.

Thanks, iiNNeX

[SimonISSO]

Hi, I'm iiNNeX's mate who is also having this issue.

To add to his post,

I found that one time i played a game by my self with AI enabled. It was an 8 free for all, i was one of the 8. I was able to play for at least an hour. get past the point where i would normally have given up because the game was so slow. The only reason the game stopped was because one of the AI floated a Aeon mother ship into my base and i was not prepared. I wasn't expecting it, because the game had never got that far before. I'd managed to build my base to double it's normal size, without getting bored of waiting.

Something happened that day that made me able to play the game without the problems experienced above. I have no idea what it was, but i wish i knew, cos it was a great game. Sadly i can't tell what it was because at the time, i hadn't really identified there was much of an issue.

If you want any more info from either of us, we'll be happy to provide it. We want to solve this cos SC is an awesome game.

[Deering]

Hi, Have you checked out this thread?

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3046

I would suggest running the replay and posting the times you get for comparison.

Were the other people you were talking to playing against ai or people? Ai end up slowing down the sim much more.If I remember correctly its something about destroyed units not being removed from something rather. so uses up more and more cpu. The size of the map makes a difference too.

[E8400-CV]

Running with AI always slows it down exponentially with unit count.

[The Mak]

From what I remember when this issue was found in the GPGNet days, it seems the AI keeps track of dead units. As you kill more AI controlled units the AI tries to continue to issue orders to them or something similar. As a result, it just consumes more computer resources, similar to a memory leak. Since this is in the game engine side of things, it will be very difficult to fix.

This is only with AI controlled units. If you play any of the Survival maps this issue does not come up.

[iiNNeX]

I completely understand the AI issue the game seems to have and it makes sense, however I get the slowdown with people too. I will try to play some matches this weekend and post the replays here so you can see what I mean. Thank you for the help so far.

[Ze_PilOt]

From what I remember when this issue was found in the GPGNet days, it seems the AI keeps track of dead units. .

That's more an urban legend than a fact.

[E8400-CV]

Big "micro'd" airfights slow things down a lot too. Just giving them a patrol order into each other doesn't slow it down.

That's why you don't want a micro whore on setons.