Performance regression in latest patch?

[DrTall]

Hello,

I have attached a save game which was working A-OK in the previous patch, when I was playing on Sunday July 15. After patching today, the game is an unplayable crawl while viewing the system with all my ships (the home system). Loading the ships into a transport resolves the issue, but obviously this is not much of a work around. I also note that cpu usage is pegged on 2/8 cores while viewing that system.

Restarting AI War does not resolve the issue. It's possible this is unrelated to the patch, but it seems suspicious to me.

System specs:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Main Memory: 8GB
CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz (8 cores)
Graphics: 2x AMD Radeon HD 6900, CrossFire enabled (4GB total graphics memory)

As you might imagine, I've never had even the slightest performance problem with AI War before.

I'll be happy to provide any other information you want.

[DrTall]

Oh and before you ask, my graphics card drivers are up to date.

[DrTall]

It seems to be graphics related somehow. Letting a battle run while I'm viewing another system doesn't seem to slow the game down, and even being in the system viewing over in a corner doesn't slow it down either. That is, I have to actually be viewing the ships for the lag to happen. Not sure if this observation is useful?

[x4000]

Is anyone else having this problem?  Can anyone else load up this savegame and see if they have troubles?  The problem is, in the unity editor on my machine when I run this, I'm getting 50-74 FPS.

My system specs:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Main Memory: 8GB
CPU: Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge @3.6GHz (4 cores)
Graphics: NVidia 8800 GTS

I'm going to try a few other things and see if I can replicate this a different way...

[x4000]

Okay, on my mid-2010 Macbook Pro (Intel i5) I am able to duplicate a performance drop into the 20fps range.  However, that is running at the "High" performance profile that you had the game on.  Normally on my laptop I have to run it on Normal, and when I do I am getting 30fps on that machine.  If I zoom in to just the right area, I'm able to get it down to 12fps, though.

I'll take a bit of a further look and see if there's more that I can find out.

[DrTall]

Thanks for taking a look. I know this stuff is really hard to debug across platforms. etc. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.

[x4000]

My pleasure.  One thing I will note is that the ATI drivers have tended to be... well, rather horriffic lately.  There have been people who literally had all textures getting bent from the upper left and looking wrong in all their games on recent ATI drivers, and doing a rollback fixed that.  Etc.

So in a lot of respects, I wonder if this is a driver thing?  Have you updated your drivers lately?  It's also possible that since we improved the pipeline performance in general by switching to a new way of handling the pipeline, that the ATI drivers have revolted or something.  I don't have any way to be sure, though, as I haven't had an ATI card for a few years now.

[DrTall]

My drivers are up to date, but now that you mention it I have also been experiencing some strange behavior in League of Legends with textures. I will try rolling back the drivers, but I probably won't have a chance until tomorrow.

[x4000]

Okay, thanks for the note.

[tigersfan]

I have an A6 3600 2.1Gzh 4 core CPU with a Radeon 6530D GPU, running driver version 8.861.1.3000. (Yeah, the drivers are a bit old, but, right now, I like to resist change on my computer, so if my drivers aren't causing any issues, I tend to leave them alone. )

Running your save, I'm getting around 22 FPS and none of my 4 cores is maxed out (though one of them was chugging along at a good clip).

So, right now, I'm guessing your drivers are the culprit. Let us know how the roll-back goes.

[Kahuna]

For me it works fine but seems to be a bit laggier.

[doctorfrog]

Works ok here too (older ATI budget card with last week's drivers), but holding down alt and bringing up those destination lines drops the FPS noticeably.

[keith.lamothe]

Works ok here too (older ATI budget card with last week's drivers), but holding down alt and bringing up those destination lines drops the FPS noticeably.

That was true before, too.  It may be in greater degree now, I dunno.

[DrTall]

Hello,

I've spent the morning running tests and the TL;DR version is something performance related changed in AI War 5.042 that is still present in AI War 5.046. Of course, it is probably still some interaction of my system and the AI War update, but the performance problem is totally absent pre-5.042.

I tested all four combinations of:

AI War 5.000
AI War 5.046
AMD 12-3 drivers (released 3/28/12)
AMD 12-6 drivers (released 6/28/12)

I chose those versions of AI War because they're the only ones I know how to install (direct from Steam and direct from Steam plus beta updates). I chose those versions of AMD drivers rather randomly, but I wasn't playing AI War before March so using drivers older than that seemed unnecessary. I rebooted between every change of graphics drivers. I did not reboot between changes of AI War version.

In order to test, I could not use the save file I originally uploaded because it won't load in AI War 5.000. I used cheats to create about 2000 fleet ships in AI War 5.000 and used that save game (attached) in all tests.

The results were that AI War 5.000 worked splendidly in both AMD 12-3 and AMD 12-6. AI War 5.046 was unplayable in both AMD 12-3 and AMD 12-6. Here are some screenshots showing the performance:

https://picasaweb.google.com/111524973507026076668/AMD123AIWar5000?authkey=Gv1sRgCJWP8uGhwvba7AE
https://picasaweb.google.com/111524973507026076668/AMD123AIWar5046?authkey=Gv1sRgCJW21ObizOvpDg
https://picasaweb.google.com/111524973507026076668/AMD126AIWar5000?authkey=Gv1sRgCOnDx4C3qKS7uwE
https://picasaweb.google.com/111524973507026076668/AMD126AIWar5046?authkey=Gv1sRgCMDyq9KTuuPCZQ

It looks like the screenshots didn't capture the command lines shown when holding Alt down, but in both 5.000 versions, holding Alt to show queued move orders for the 2k units didn't drop fps at all.

Unfortunately I am not sure how to move forward here. The game is unplayable for me on AI Wars 5.042-5.046 and I doubt the issue will magically go away unless other people are affected too. Please let me know if I can do anything else to narrow this down.

Thanks,
Sean

[DrTall]

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNN!

Disabling CrossFireX resolves the problem.

I need CrossFireX enabled to play other games which are graphics intensive (AI War has never really been intensive on my system), but I can live with it disabled for AIWar. But does this help narrow the bug possibilities down?