"I cannot play this game!" ‼️ X4 Performance Explained 

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Interface lag in the map is my only performance complaint … right click a station to trade with and it can take a bit to happen. Pausing helps a LOT, and it hasn’t stopped me from logging over 1200 hours, and in the last year the graphics have improved so much that I went from medium preset to ultra on the same aging PC

little correction here.. the game HAS TO calculate the position of any ship at any given time even outside of map, just a simple timer won't do. Those who delved into mods and map structure will most likely agree that the game actually does ship positioning with an extremely simplified model of the universe, which literally just puts the ship to certain coordinates within the entire universe (NOT WITHIN A SECTOR) all this while the "Map universe" is flattened to 2D so the calculations are basically made on a plane. Then maybe (I'm going off of gut here) adds a 3rd dimension to tell how far from the ecliptic plane the ship is located. In the end you only need 3 numbers to precisely position the ship ANYWHERE in the universe and only really start rendering the ship stuff when you, the player get within 70kms of it (In my experience the particles, weapon lasers and the like get rendered before you actually see the ship itself at 40kms). Let's be honest here, calculating 3 numbers isn't really a problem even for 10k ships in the entire universe, say, 5 times per second. that said, if you take the time to investigate the save files, you'll notice that there are actually also velocities being saved, so it is not unreasonable to assume that the game also calculates velocities when determining where the ships (all of them) will be on the next tick. Again, velocity is a vector, so 3 numbers, not that heavy of a calculation, even for thousands of ships. Another consideration (judging again by what one can read from save files) is that landed/docked ships do not need to have their position calculated at all. They just need to say they are docked at "that" ship, which will have its position calculated. Whenever the docked ship undocks, it gets its position copied from the larger vessel it undocked from and starts being calculated on its own. This appears to be the reason why, when you launch 21 ships from Raptor while sitting inside it, they will get all confused and launch in all sorts of weird angles, but when you launch then from OOS, they will launch pretty much instantly without any issue whatsoever. The fact that there are no collisions being calculated (and therefore also not trying to be avoided) while OOS also helps.

My only complaint is the lack of better multi-threading in such a perfect game for it. All else, yeah more people need to understand. Thanks Capn

For performance on the Map it's very important to use the filters, displaying information that is not necessary at the moment (eg orders) messes up performance and clarity.

I find if you pause the game when your either on the map or building a station, that can help a lot with you fps 😊

You are forgetting one thing maybe.. This game engine is a custom one dating back from the earlier X games wtih some upgrades.... It also uses some custom scripting elements that frankly is completely broken if you look at the amount of bugs in the game. You mentioned FSR is in the game.. As I remember it is FSR1 which is so utterly ugly and useless it might as well not be. And TAA isn't close to DLSS in performance and quality... Why do games built with engines like unity/unreal/godot able to handle stuff a lot better? Because they take advantage of current technology and hardware and are actually upgraded. They take advantage ot multi core and GPU processing, even for tasks that would be done only by the CPU in the old days (X4). That is a huge difference with this ancient engine. You can upgrade a vm beetle all you want but it will never be ford mustang. Game engines like mentioned before are created and updated by professionals. I don't think Egosoft has that kind of quality onboard (not even mentioning that half their staff is volunteer modders from what I heard in one fhte CEO interviews). I can understand your stance on this as you are obviously some sort of advacate for Egosoft. In all honesty not really objective. But excuses won't solve things. If you are charging full price for a game and basically deny that the game has serious issues, you are not worthy of my time anymore. And I do have 600 hours into it where I would asume 300 hours is afking because it literleraly takes a week IRL to build a bigger structure.

Dude, when the game is only using 1 CPU and 31 are idle... Its the games issue honestly.

Good explanation. As a software engineer I get that simulating this much in real time consistently is really not an easy task. It will be demanding no matter how far you go with optimization. Older X titles were a lot more simplistic in this regard. Its a bit like Crysis, where you can cry about "bad optimization", but in reallity it was just using more performance demanding effects by design (and they also had to do tons of optimization to make the it work on hardwares of that era).

Beta 7.0 is a game changer. The performance increase is gigantic. I don't experience the map and interface lags. Neither in game. Even with Shift + 4 speed up everything runs more smooth then before the beta. It is crazy❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Game Dev here (I work as a programmer for Bethesda), and I love X4. I have more than 500 hours in this game already. In my experience with X4, especially within the last few months, I have seen that the game tends to use 4 threads on my home CPU (10 cores/16 threads). When I watch my task manager during gameplay, I see that 4 threads are constantly utilized at or near 100%, while the other 12 threads are mostly idle. This is normal for most of today's PC games, even AAA titles, which tend to use between 4 and 8 threads on your CPU and leave the rest idle. Even our game Starfield, which can be very CPU-intensive in some areas, only uses a limited number of threads on my work CPU (32 cores/64 threads), with the majority of them at or near idle. This is why, in most cases, having a CPU with a high number of cores/threads isn't going to help gameplay performance all that much. What really boosts performance in CPU-intensive games is the single-thread performance rating. To illustrate this point, my home CPU (Intel i5-12600K, 10 cores/16 threads) runs X4 much more smoothly than my work CPU (AMD Threadripper Pro 3975WX 32 cores/64 threads). The single thread rating on my home CPU is 3954, while the single thread rating on the Threadripper is only 2660. (source: www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4603vs3851/Intel-i5-12600K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-PRO-3975WX )

TAA makes moving objects blurry, but it requires less resources than SSAA, and visually almost the same

That's one of the reason i built my empire with seperate stations. It requires more ships for logistic, but it's way more fluide than a méga complex. Thanks for this clear explanation.😊

For me, I only need decent FPS when in first person and flying or fighting in my ship. I don't even care (nor even notice) when I'm sat in my HQ Office playing Star-Manager for my empire. I know my PC is now showing me all the details of all the systems and all the ships and all the stations and calculating everything at every step... why would I also expect (or even NEED) 60FPS at that point? I'm looking at little ants crawling around interacting with each other half a universe away.

Defending a bad game design is a very dangerous trend. Developers feel they're not responsible and continue to lay shit under carpet and pretend everything is ok.

I subscribed to a mod removing all civ ships and it drastically increased my FPS

Every game needs a Captain Collins.

U know, i agree mostly. But there is only one but. If U will check GPU and CPU usage, most of the time it circles around 50%. Thats some optimisation problems.

akshually OOS is a term from the older X games, up to and including X3 AP/FL and possibly X Rebirth, although idk wether they still used that system there or not. The low attention simulation X4 uses is quite similar, although there are some differences, like for example it being applied in the same sector the player is, just outside of the players viewrange, while the old X titles used the IS simulation on everything that was in the same sector as the player, regardless of wether the player could see it or not. Tbf the sectors in the old X games also were a lot smaller.

Oh, so you played the old "it's simulating EVERYTHING" card. Does not mean the game is optimised. It's not. It would be optimised if it used multi-threading properly. Except - it hovers around 35% CPU usage on most modern hardware. Playing the game at 30 fps on high end PC rigs in 2024 is simply not an acceptable PC gaming standard. Period.

I don't understand the complaints about performance, because I have no performance issues myself. Granted, I play on a 1080p screen with graphics settings in the medium-high range (ultra does slow things down a tad), but I'm using laptop Nvidia 1660ti graphics, so that's to be expected. Yet my gameplay is smooth 99% of the time (there is an annoying pause when NPC voice comms first trigger). I'm not sure why I'm lucky and others aren't. I do run 32 GB of RAM with swap disabled, and my version of Windows 10 (1909) is highly optimized with very few processes running in the background and any performance "nerfs" like the Spector Patch disabled. That said, this unique setup does not benefit me with other poorly optimized games like Elite Dangerous Odyssey, so I really don't know what my secret is.

"Server fps" in single-player game. 🤔

I’m very glad the TAA works so effectively, I have kept most the new graphics settings such as better reflections and high quality glow just because of that. Definitely the occasional blurry spot but it’s not noticeable compared to gaining 40fps and a bunch of graphical fidelity.

I think you completely missunderstood what TAA means. TAA does nothing "only temporarily". The temporal means that it uses multiple frames for the anti aliasing and thus delivering a temporally stable edge smoothing. At the cost of blurring the image during movement, which is common to most fast anti aliasing solutions in differenct degrees.

Well, we live in a world where people consider significant dips below 60fps to be 'game breaking' and 'unplayable' It's a an expectation and perception issue, as well as technical consideration. I'm a bit older so recall a time when 30-45 fps was the norm. The game being playable is my overriding concern. This means my standards are lower but it spares me the imagined, from my pov, stress of playing a game that runs at less than 60fps.

9:10 "Too much stuff around you", that's exactly why I don't like mega-factories. Why many players build stations with dozens of wharves and hundreds of other modules and even brag about it but then complain about bad performance is beyond me.

My CPU have 24 Cores. This game only uses a very few of them 2 if I`m not mistaken. No excuses for that. We are not in 2006 anymore when dual/quad core was introduced worldwide. We are in 2024 and this game was released in 2018 far away from 2006. They did what they did because they wanted and this is the result an unoptimized game that struggle to give good FPS. I bougth an 360 FPS monitor to achieve a higher FPS not just because the beauty of this number but because this brings more fluety to the game images. I bought an latest processor and graphics card available in the market to reach certain quality and even so this game gives a sh*t for your hardware specs. This is just facts nothing else. I love this game but the way that was developed... well... results are results. By the way when we are talking about online server we have to count the network latency and their limitation. In single player games like this we don`t have latency to be worried and the number of "players" that will connect and request information to that server. Nowadays processor have a lot of cores to simulate only "one world" to only "one client/computer". So the scale and complexity is cut by half at least! Again, development decisions on engine or whatsoever was underseen...

A lot of people don't realise that you can massively improve fps on the map screen by pressing "3" to toggle the "Other" overview. The main thing about that is by default it will show all of the planned routes of all your ships. Disabling this makes frames shoot way up as your system isn't showing all of the calculated paths.

I run the game on a 6800k and a ref GTX1080. Pre V6 on old saves where I had stations and ships all over the place my FPS used to drop to

Would've been nice if game wouldn't simulate entire sectors every time a pilot video calls me

Hmm, I'm playing this game on my Laptop with an external 2k Monitor with high settings and I don't really have that many performance issues. When I load my 100+ hours Save it stutters a bit at the very beginning, but that stops rather quickly. Other than that I only have very few micro lags here and there, nothing that would ruin the game experience for me. And for those who want to know my specs: - RTX 3080 mobile (16.000 GDDR6) - Intel I7 11800H (8x 2.30 GHZ) - 32 GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) - 4 TB M.2 SSD

Ryzen 5700G CPU runs this game perfectly with all million fleets arround or whatsoever. Basicly I am saying You need little modern computer - that's it.

just drove through würselen seeing the egosoft building, what a shock :D

So, we have online - 40km radius offline - when we see icons in map offline offline - when map closed We know, that battle calculations are different for "online" and "offline". And i ask you: have we are differences between "offline" and "offline offline"?

taa gave me a HUGE performance boost. Could make multiple settings higher and still got better performance

I came here looking for a fix and walked away with a explanation that made me appreciate the game a bit more. I'm okay with a jumpy map as long as my combat is smooth and fluid.

I think it's because I attack with groups of like 80 Behemoths/Phoenixs, and 100+ varied M sized ships. Yeah. Thats probably it.

i had this described years ago that the old anti aliasing and the rest of the settings were made for up to 1080p, the dlss and amd equivalents are for 1440p upwards, there was a graphics settings indepth dive a few years back somewhere on youtube that explains it all properly indepth, but a lot of settings will try to use both and cause massive problems when one is meant to replace the other, or just doesnt actually work unless you are on the higher resolution screens. What you forgot to mention here is that the engine also changed in 6.0, where they went from an engine they have been used to and updating since 1999 to the blender based system they are now using, so all the updates took several steps backwards. There was always the in sector (IS) and out of sector (OoS) calculations where it swaps between physics based calculations to purely mathematical calculations, but now there is also in sector out of sight (ISOoS) calculations where positioning is needed to be a little more accurate and 3 dimensional while not needing all the physics, non of these calculations have reacted well to people thinking that they can run 3 to 6 screens all at 2k to 4k resolutions with maybe one set to 1080p for watching twitch and chatting ... the more screens you have at different resolutions also causes your OS to say "wait, we need to juggle this"

I have over a thousand hours in the game and never had problems playing the game

I honestly think Egosoft should make a smaller scale of the already existing game. There is just so much empty space in sectors that I don't think it's worth having just because of scale ,as well as reduce the sector count. It should exist like a new game smaller so it doesn't bother people who have the computing power for the bigger game. So the smaller one will have less populated areas with less space so it doesn't feel like a flying in the nothingness for hours. And since there will be less stuff simulated then the fps will be stable for a lot longer unless the players let the universe run for long periods of time. The other option in my opinion could be custom sliders where they can set a limit to what the ai can build and do so it doesn't go above a certain threshold.

I love the game so much, but sometimes in my late game I hit 10 FPS in my own System because I put like 10 station in a cluster and it's insane.

I only get about 24fps in large fights. I didn't realise it was my CPU that was the problem, not the game. Can you recommend an upgrade? I'm currently using a Ryzan 9 7950X 3D. Or maybe it is that the RTX 4090 just isn't good enough for low settings at 1440p?

There are ways to improve this further, but they have to change the way they do calculations / handle simulations in the backend. For example, the economy of the game is extremely heavy on cpu time because each ship searches multiple stations at the same time, for where to drop it's cargo / pickup cargo from. How about that gets simplified with universal buy / sell orders? For example (simplified version): - Stations advertise in ONE place for the faction they are part of, the resources they need and the resources they have for sale - NPC ships of the same faction have access to this list, so they either randomly fill those requests in, or via some algorithm, but the important thing is they scan only ONCE for the resource requirements. (this doesn't sound bad, until you realize the universe can have thousands of stations / thousands of ships) - Player may or may not be given access to this list (should be given to it, at least via the trading ships) "How would that improve performance?" - Currently, 1 ship has cargo to sell, it then looks at: 1. Stations it has access to, if they require the cargo 2. Repeat step 1 until all stations have been accounted for (if there's 1000 stations it has access to, it will search 1000 stations) 3. Select the best from the list it just pulled and act on it Now imagine having 5000 ships in the universe doing the same thing, with 1000 stations Result: 5000x1000 5,000,000 constant calculations (just for trading). - The "different" method would be: 1. 1000 stations advertise their buy / sell orders in one place 2. 5000 ships look at the 1 place where the stations put the prices in (1 ship takes 1 order from the list) 3. Each ship "marks" 1 buy order as unavailable for others (something like taken), and if the ship cancels / gets destroyed, order gets released Result: 1000stations + (1order x 5000ships) = 6000 constant calculations for trading (this frees up 4994000 calculations) Why not multiply? Because the station orders don't need to be recalculated every time a ship needs to scan, this is only done once by every ship (as if you have only 1 station with all the resources) This will also remove the ships "standing idle" outside in space doing nothing while they scan. And yes, different approaches can be done for everything else as well, and that will improve the performance even more.

Taking out factionsbig amount of ships helps massively with the tick rate. I several times ended up in terrible stutter in late game when owning a massive military-industrial complex. Once I understood the server tick issuem, I used that and simply launched a campaign or two to cut down or eliminate one or two factions and that solved it.

How do you feel about the minimum/recommended settings on Steam? Thankfully my PC exceeds the recommended settings, but sometimes it struggles. No idea what it would be like playing with the minimal hardware. Maybe people have different definitions of what is playable.

rtx 4090 and 12900k cpu 32GB ram and the game hardly uses them but lags to hell even on lowest gfx settings. and its on an m.2 drive. looking at my HQ brings fps to a crawl.

Good info but the real issue is that the old engine can only use at most two cores where the data is further distributed to the other cores. This produces the lag. Once these 2 cores are choked so goes the game performance as the GPU will just be waiting for data from the CPU. I noticed this even if I lower the graphical settings, the GPU usage goes as low as 30% while my CPU is about 20% ( 2 cores sweating it out while the 6 cores are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the data) and my fps is still tanking at 30fps. Try doing a battle scene - an 8 core cpu with HT would reflect low overall CPU usage, low GPU usage and fps is still crawling at 30fps. The game should be able to use all cores simultaneously but it is not. This is an engine limitation. It is what it is because of an old engine. So the strategy game could now become think most of the time, explore - to a limited extent, build - uh oh, fight - duhhh, trade - ooops...

My only big issue with X4 is how BAD capitalships are when compared to M2-class ships from X3TC . An M2 ship from X3TC would utterly annihilate a destroyer from X4, i'm willing to bet a single M2 could easily win a 1v10 , simply because of the fact that in X3TC, players were given a much greater option of costumization on ships, that included weaponry , and most players put Capitalship weapons all around, and FLAK top and bottom . Meanwhile , destroyers in X4 barely has any weaponry imo, the only capitalship weapons are the 2 infront, with very limited energy, and all destroyers from ALL FACTIONS uses *THE SAME* capitalship weapons, while M2-class ships from X3TC could be fitted with any type of varrying weapons , PPC , Gauss, Ion, etc etc.. My opinion is that Egosoft went backwards on X4, in terms of gameplay. And i don't know why.

Great explanation, well done Capt. Thanks a million for this, I hope this helps some players understand how the game works in the background.

Hi ; With TAA, i gained between 25/35 fps with apparent same quality. It's huge and welcomed.

Pause the game while on map or just put offline trade and mining if you dont need it. Most of ressources while on map are taken by the trade and mining filter which, lets be honnest, takes a lot of ressources

My issue is more surrounding core optimisation. Right now it is too heavily dependant on a single core. I'm hoping they can eventually change this. I proposed a while ago that in future iterations they could split the game into slices/quadrants where they each get their own core, then have a single game core that only focuses on exchanging data between those cores/slices. Could even further refine it with another core dedicated to just the sector you are in. Essentially though, the idea is that the game breaks itself up into smaller 'servers' and then meshes them with a single core for handover. Would allow scalability where performance then becomes strictly dependent on how many cores you have.

Another thing is X4 never utilises more than 5 threads. Currently I have i7-12700f and when I played X4 5.0 with my old stock cooler my cpu temperature was at ~70-90 C. I looked up why that's the case and discovered aforementioned problem. Now I have big tower cooler so I need not worry about my cpu overheating and manually assigning threads to X4 via task manager, but still I would like for X4 to use full capability of my CPU. P.S. It was at the time of 5.0, so maybe Egosoft have solved it, but I stopped looking into it for the reasons above =/

only 5 mins in, recently got into this game, so take my words with a grain of salt if you like, but i also have had years in the industry, so i would note, satellite coverage, is stopping it from being a fully simulated travel to being seen/known by the player, this had the greatest impact on performance in my honest opinion, i had to destroy around 30 percent of my map coverage, because my game was just down to a 1980 cpu. and it tore my FPS no matter what sector i was in, from being a solid 120, to under 50. this is where they need to do the most optimization, my cpu and gpu are not really going past 40-60 percent usage, and gpu isnt going past 30 percent, the only time it does, is why i am near a mega factory, which i have learned, so i place them, far out of the way. the game DOES have SEVERE issues on optimization, its not just random that 30 percent of the comments on steam releases are this game is slowing down, buggy etc, they DO need to do work, while it is nice, that your standing up for them, they need to be realistic about what DOES need fixing. ive put 440 hours over past 2-3 weeks, yeah i know, i no life things, but i live on the pc. i work on the pc, it just is what it is, but again, they need to do some optimization, and yes, that does take man power, and yes, it will take away from them doing other things, in a temporary sense, but they do need to fix it, x4 games, strat games, are usually some of the easiest to run, BECAUSE the are 80 percent or 98 percent in some cases simulation, as long as the cpu can handle it, your good to play, as big of a gam as you want, if i put more then 200-300 or god forbid 500 ships, in a sector, moving, this game CRAWLS!!!!! this can be better, but on a differnt note, i love your videos, they have given me so much help over the past 2 or 3 weeks leaning this game. and understanding lots of the nitty gritty, one thing, they also need to work on, is this, modified game doesnt get support crap, because of their own arbitrary rules, only currently 8.9 percent of their player base, is able to forward gamereports for optimization, they by their own hand, are hurting them selfs, just because a game is modded, or "modified" certainly does NOT mean, all of their data, is useless to put into fixing the game, THAT IS THEIR BIGGEST MISTAKE IVE SEEN YET, absolutely deplorable choice. and in turn, they have under ten percent of an "official" player base, the rest are all called modified players. and all that data, is THROWN OUT.... this is terrible. i can only imagine, the number of things, that could be fixed, if that had use atleast some of that data. sure, a mod, will throw some red in the mix, but players who use, modified starts... or players who use trainers, for what ever their own reason is.... that DATA is 100 percent good. maybe 99. again, love your stuff, love this game too, its tons of fun!!!! but, they are making some terrible choices, so im just saying, dont defend them blindly, this company isnt THAT transparent, or amazing. they could be, but they choose NOT TO BE.

One further thing that I've noticed that you didn't seem to cover in this video; In sector collisions seem to take up a lot of CPU power, particularly in asteroid heavy sectors. If you choose not to drive your own ship (IE hire a pilot and let them fly you around while you do empire management) these collisions aren't calculated in the same way and my FPS goes up a ton.

Now I better understand what is happening when I'm flying around my 30,000 module mega station. 😂🤣😂 ...I do like to build.

It could be far more multi-threaded though, I appreciate that is not an easy thing to do but I guess from the player and consumer’s perspective that’s not their problem they buy the hardware and they expect it to be used i.e. if I have 8 cores I want to see the load split across 8 cores as much as is possible. Tbh though X4 runs pretty well now Egosoft have improved things over time and it would be unfair not to acknowledge their progress ❤

I like to teleport to a ship parked in the middle of nowhere when I'm using the map for management. Not that my FPS has ever been really bad. It's just peaceful. and there are some pretty views in X4, I'll just orbit Earth. Which is why I wish there was more ship intiriors like with the Astrid. It's the ship I use most often because you can actually walk around it. Hang out at the desk and manage the fleet from the map, or just stand there by the bed watching Earth rotate, Or tyring to find that little valley colony on mars, & wondering what that white pimple on the planet is.

Mods can heavily impact the game too, if your running mods that increase even just the economy you will lose FPS They build more ships, more activity... guessing you can see why mods can lag, pick and choose carefully... start stacking the wrong mods even though they might seem usefull and you will end up losing up to 40 fps I love modded experiences, most games I can install up to 400+ mods without performance issues but you can't with X4 If your FPS isn't the best with vanilla definelty don't add anything to do with "economy boost" and "heavy war starts" just do gameplay and balance changes

As someone who has played Egosoft games since X2: The Threat, I can say that they have gotten better and better at optimizing performance. I still remember the battle for Omicron Lyrae in the main story of X2 when the framerate on my Pentium 4-powered PC dropped to a crawl... Wow, I just realized that's 20 years ago! I think these games are brilliant. Sure, they can be janky and not perfectly optimized. Sure there may be some bugs and weirdness, but I've always just liked the mood in them. Maybe except X: Rebirth. I never got into that game properly. But X2, X3 and X4 are probably the games I've played the most of all my games ever.

My processor isn't very good, but I can play reasonably well if I take a few precautions. On the maps I deactivate all icons, I try to keep my view close to the sectors, thus avoiding taking the image of all sectors, which slows down the map, I also avoid showing the menu that shows commercial ships, mining ships, etc.. already that on my PC this seems to require too much. As for the game itself, I have always liked factories that are focused on just one type of production and are more compact, never build a factory that produces several things because I know that this would affect my fps, small factories, even though they are close together, almost do not affect my fps .

Can they just implement FSR 2.0 or 3.0 ? that will be the biggest performance upgrade for anyone, Nvidia and AMD. For anyone that wonders what's the best upgrade: I swap my old 4 cores i5 3570K to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the FPS from 20 in the map with full empire and economy jumped to 50FPS in the map, SO SAY WE ALL!

If the trader is just a timer when calculated in the background how can then they tell that it gets attacked? Wouldn't they need to still track at least its position and movement even before we open the map? AI has to make decisions on whether to attack it or not, whats closest or how big of a target it is? Secondly, just because the calculations are done at a lower frequency than the render rate doesn't mean the UI should be sluggish too... the map could maybe be rendered at 60fps so we can move it around and click around pleasantly even if the data is actually updated every 10 or 5 or even 1 fps? They could also have better LOD for the map so it only starts calculating stuff that you are currently zoomed into instead of everything, or we could have filters to hide all ships and only render stations for example. Some other games also use a slowdown effect so the calculations can catch up (riftbreaker or eve online) in these cases. Like I get why it's difficult but it doesn't make my frustrations go away, especially when you spend most of the time just interacting with the map that feels bad to use. Good video and I'm glad for some dev insights though!

Absolutly right. For the X Games you need high end CPU for calculating the whole universe. The Ryzen 7800X3D is very very good for X4. And nobody really needs high FpS on a map.

bro it doesnt work to tell gamers, hey the games running a lot so just accept it...i have a high end rig and performance sucks, cpu gets almost 80 degrees and gpu is non existent....EGOsoft has to get modern with multithread support/Vulkan and DLSS...*just my thoughts, great vid though man

You are correct. You must really control things and keep the number of ships down in quantity to keep refresh FPS at a good level. It kills my game at some point once I explore to much or build to much. graphic card is already set low. But still it fails over time

I don't have much of an issue with performance, well a bit but its not the deal breaker for me. Its the AI that break it for me. I understand that everything need to be simulated, and there is out of of sector calculation and in sector etc. But I feel like there should be less entities in the game in general but better performing or should I say smarter AI instead.

Might need to pickup on this game again. Only thing I care about is the fleet AI. How’s the AI doing now? Does jump delay, turn rate still make a very disorganized fleet?

A few days ago my entire 15h gameplay went to nothing, both auto and manual saves are deleted, and I quit the game. X4 is a great game, with tons of issues, it's a glorious shitshow. When you play expect everything.

I've got an R7 5800X, and an RTX 3080 and it runs well for me. 45+FPS even by my bigger stations. I've got ultra settings, except fog. I think I turned on FAA. 1440p. It ran decently on the 1060 and i5 I had before finally getting my hands on the 3080. Medium-high gfx and 30ish fps by stations. Still looked quite pretty. 1080p I'm an old gamer so anything above 24fps is fine by me, great game.

Uh, I always figured that the reason why the ships more distant to you where not appearing to move smoothly was just because you where receiving the position with some lag (as in a in universe reasoning for this) and not because the game was "badly optimized" or something... As for the "lag" on the map (as in the time to react to your input), I never noticed any but then again I tend to give up the game after a while and start anew so I never have a massive super space empire going on...

so I will ask if your calculations work on 8 cores of my processor or only on one, if you tell it so nicely but without the basic facts "on how many cores are these calculations performed?" and why should I improve my PC, if it is powerful enough to handle cp77 ba ultra 2k and here I have 60 fps, then there is probably something wrong with the game

All moving parts in a game is more or less controlled by the cpu. so if your cpu is not good enough , the game will run slow, doesn´t matter if your gpu is high end. it is.. that simple. im running a 16 core processor, amd , rtx 4700, running 1440p and it is smooth as butter. I do not overclock. Also i strongly recommend turning off Vsync. I wont go in to tech detail here, you can google what it does. TAA stands for Temporal Anti Aliasing. Temporal.. its using alot of resource because it is using previous rendered frames to perform the aliasing. Kind of the same tech as V-sync, that is using it to to avoid tearing in the image. Any way you put it, any kind of anti aliasing is taking on the gpu. If you are using dlss then it shouldn´t be necessary to use any anti aliasing as dlss already uses its own taa. in respond to taa and blurry picture... taa makes the picture more sharp than its other counterparts in anti aliasing..

I don't really care about having super smooth graphics, I care more about the content of the game and how smooth it runs. So I have always turned off any anti-aliasing in every game and have never had issues with performance, unless my pc was really underspecced. Turning on TAA and such new AA features has some weird effects on fast moving stuff. In Satisfactory, they have implemented the same stuff by going to Unreal engine 5 but all your items on conveyor belts have weird graphical artifacts because of this. Turning off TAA and such fixed that for me and even gave a performance boost at the same time. So the term "better or smoother graphics" also has a downside when moving things become too blurry and makes it less good-looking.

I've played since the beginning of X2 and can say that X universe games are the most amazing sims I've ever experienced. Every thing they do is F'ing Magic (FM). I can do some impressive software design. I can't even begin to explain how they manage the simulation of an entire universe.

Your Server Explaining is good. But i run a Ryzen 5800X3D and have no FPS Drops on the Map. When I still had a Ryzen 5700G, I was also at 20 FPS. I solved that with the new CPU.

12900k, 4090, 32 GB RAM , 10 Hours in the Game , watch a little fight in my ship. CPU bound to hell, 50 FPS. LOL ! not even opened the map. This Tec ist decade old

If Egosoft uses FSR, DLSS would be a downgrade from that. It's a lower tech version of the same thing.

I thought this but then I played the game with zero mods. It performs great even in large battles even if I spam a sector full of stations and ships. You can't get 144 fps when it's under that level of load but it's not running at 30 fps like it is when it's heavily modded.

What I have noticed is once you have A LOT of ships, the game really struggles and became more or less unplayable in map view. When I say a lot of ships, I'm talking about 5000+ ships. So one tip here is to start replacing smaller ships with larger ones, for example L miners and L traders instead of only M miners and traders (not to mention S ships...). Use carriers for your S and M fighters. And for stations, you don't need connectors everywhere so that can save up on FPS with megaplexes, especially in-sector. So far, this current game is running fine for me with most settings on max (although I did recently upgrade my PC... Helps).

Never faced any performance issues with my Intel i9-10850 k running at 1080p at reasonable settings. Only when I'm near my one mega complex factory only then my FPS drop and again it is very playable.

I started playing X4 on an i5-2500 processor and I didn't have much issues. But perhaps I'm a bit...generous in my expectations since I also played X3 Litcube's Universe on the same computer. Playing X3 Star Wars LU however...well, my system simply told me "No can do!"

No excuses for poor optimization. Game engine uses only up to 1-2 cores of 20 available on my machine.

The only game that punishes you for buying more DLC going on at once.

I havent got a state of the art PC: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor 4.20 GHz with 64,0 GB ram, Nvidea Gforce RTX 4060 Ti. No issues at all tbh🤔

i spend more time on the map managing my fleet than i spend in cockpit flying myself thats where the problem is

Maybe we should pressure egosoft to migrate this game to the unreal engine?

My computer is mid at best now. It runs an unmodded game absolutely fine, unless I leave the game running on SETA for like 12 hours and it struggles. Even then, if I save it and restart my PC and take a break for like 20 mins it runs fine again. I never really have fleets bigger than 10 destoyers a carrier and maybe 100 fighters, which is already massive overkill for anything you'll face and can kill stations in non-glacial pace. If you mod the game with say Star Wars Interworlds (which is amazing) my game will lag at times but hardly the games fault.

friend of mine asked me why i have framedrops at high traffic stations, my answer was: dude im like... the server and did you see the 500 XL-Traders here? not to mention all the dude flying from and to this point? i think i never ever again will build the "Hub"

Very nice Explanation video. I must say that since the latest 'Pre-Timelines' build game runs a lot better ... at least on my Rig

Are you sure people are having these problems or are they just saying they are having these problems. I have not had one problem even when I was using an old R580 8gb in 2k on an old 3600xt amd cpu and still have not seen any issues on my new 7900tx 20gb on the same 3600xt cpu in 4k. Turn Chromatic Aberration OFF folks. you can run this thing without any anit-aliasing or any upscaling and it looks great. I only use FXAA High anti-aliasing, no upscaling. The Chromatic Aberration if on makes the game look like shit. Turning upscaling on makes the game look like shit... I only have FXAA on because it gets more depth to the station lighting, blur and haze effects of lighting and adds a touch more color to the game [imo]. Turning it off or on a barely notice the difference. Chromatic Aberration makes things too blurry and out of focus. It's what threw me about the whole graphic settings and was making the game look like crap. I even capped my fps to 60, so it wouldn't be doing 160-375 and over using and heating up the card for no reason because I play for hours upon hours at a time.

X4 has performance issues... 😲, the solution is to save the gameplay by delete all the factions with giga ultra Chad fleet 😅

ok bro, you are way off base here. And to your qualifications, I have been playing this game since the original for over 20 + years and I have about 10k hours across all the games in the series compared to your 1500. I have also been around long enough to see modders and other game devs pick this engine apart. I also have a BS computer science degree and 25 years of experience in the field working with tech and software. And you are wrong on quite a lot here. First, You can actually use upscaling, NOT FSR, actual NVIDIA upscaling by simply turning it on in your nvidia app for the computer. Now, the game is ALWAYS calculating the movements of the objects in game, and your MAP is NOT a "SERVER". And Servers DO NOT RUN AT 5 FPS as a general rule. FPS for servers is Tickrate. Tickrates need to be ATLEAST 20+ in order to have a smooth MP server in ANY game. But should strive for 30+. (Your use of SC here to objectively say 5 fps is normal is outright hilariously ignorant.) Now that we have that out of the way, this has been discussed over and over for years. The problem is the engine itself and comes down to how the game was coded, and how it offsets the calculations to threads ( or rather how it basically only uses 1 thread for simulation.) as stated here: forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4692161. The reason it runs slow on someone's computer comes down flatly to CPU bottlenecking. You need ATLEAST 4 cores and as fast a CPU as you can get. It has nothing to do with graphics or TSA, or FSR, or some made up SERVER FPS bs. The reason the game runs well when you first start it up is because there are less objects in the games DB. After a few hours the game creates more assets and the game has to start tracking more and more and more. The slow FPS performance of the in game menu comes down simply to the Menu UI tech itself and how it translates the background calculations to the users UI. IT has nothing to do with changing how often things are calculated.

I have noticed in my first play through which is at like 500 hrs I have map lag. It doesn’t bother because it’s the map but I was worried my out of map view would be laggy. But even with a few hundred ships on screen it runs well in first person

I get your point but I have to disagree.When you trying to justify the fact map is not as important but gameplay is. I don't think any game should be acceptable on latest hardware to run 10FPS in late game on map sometimes even dropping to 5FPS. That is not acceptable no matter what kind of simulation is going on. And I am talking about 6GHZ CPU's power which average user wouldn't even have access to. They need to handle better way of optimising map as it is the CORE interface of the game. The real issue here is that game is single threaded and not utilisng all THE CPU CORES. THIS IS FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM. Which falls down to engine they using and coding techniques they applying. Take a look at ECS systems that run 10000s of entities at same time.

To be fair in 2024 games not having multi threading, especially a game like this needs to be checked. I have 16 cores, bloody use them! not just 2!

whenever Distant Worlds 2 chokes my system out only the ship icons start to move choppy while the camera scrolling remains smooth. A potential solution for the X-series?

Capt. Iam currently running Ryzen 3 with 16 gb ram RTX 1060 video card absolutely 👍 no issues at all 🎉

I love to build massive shipyards and manufacturing Starbases, and the game lets me know it does not appreciate that, haha! That is my fault, and I cannot expect different results, unless I forked out the cash for a super computer. If you build like a reasonable person, and don't try to field massive fleets around enormous space fortresses, the game tends to run pretty well. I would love it if the game could support that, but with limitations of hard and software, that isn't going to happen with the game looking as good as it does.

I've got over 1500 hrs in this game. I've never had any serious problems with this game. I've only ever once built a mega complex and it was in Faulty Logic. It was about 500km from the gate. I put it out that far so I didn't have to worry about the highway or anything else causing my game any problems. I'm also playing on a laptop that's 5 years old that came out a year or two earlier. It should be common sense that if you put a bunch of stuff somewhere in ANY game it's going to cause problems. How many sandwiches did someone spawn in Stanfield to make the game crash? Same thing.