CPU Usage Issue

[DreadShimmra]

Ok, long and the short of this whole issue is that with large ships, large stations, or areas with a lot of entities in close proximity, the CPU usage on most computers (client side mind you, not on a server or a computer running both a server and a client) goes to the maximum allowable for the computer, occasionally causing system instability, and even more severely, a thermal fault/ Blue Screen of Death (or equivalent for Mac). The potential causes (due to substantial anecdotal research) are thus:

1. Most of the issues happen on an Intel "i Series" processor such as an i3, i5, or i7.

2. Most of the issue seems to be stemming from a computer "sharing" some of the graphics card work with the processor, especially when rendering and displaying large/complex objects as mentioned above.

3. As far as graphics cards go, most of the issues seem to be happening on ATI Radeon, and Radeon HD cards (for example a Radeon HD 5850) both mobile and desktop graphics cards are affected equally. However this is not always the case as there are a minority of users who have this issue on recent generation Nvidia cards as well.

On to my theory as to the core of the problem. It seems that when anything large gets rendered in for the first time, no matter what texturepack/resolution, there seems to be a high CPU usage. My theory is that it is due to intel's "hyperthreading" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading which has been included into a number of their CPU's since the Pentium 4 line. My personal opinion is that it is due to the graphics card storing some of its "work" in system ram, and it is in some way, shape or form impacting cpu usage due to an architecture incompatibility with the rendering/shader engine. Again, without more knowledge of Java, or of how the starmade code works, at this point it is just speculation, with some anecdotal data attached.

On the other side of the issue, I personally (via what sample group I have had access to) have seen no issues with any AMD architecture processors, however as I only know of one of my users that has one, this is not a sufficient sample size to be noteworthy.



If anyone has any sort of input on this, it would be greatly appreciated, as this could potentially net a large performance and playability boost if fixed

In summation, my apologies for the wall of text.

 

[Admiralkio]

Graphics cards have a set of VRAM, or Video Random Access Memory, Starmade tends to use alot of this, and at times maxes it out, im using a Intel i3 @ 3.5Ghz with a AMD Raedon card with 4GB of VRAM and i haven\'t have a problem with it.

 

[DreadShimmra]

That is exactly it, when you run out of vram, it allocates to normal ram, i for example am running an i7, and a radeon hd5850 with 1gig of vram, once it runs out of vram, it goes to system available ram, and with the hyperthreading, it screws up and tries to process more than it can handle, thus leading to this rather annoying issue.

Thanks for the info we had yet to have someone with over 2gig of vram available to us

 

[lazarus78]

I have one of the few \"i\" series CPU they did not include hyperthreading on, for unknown reasons. It is an i5 2300.

A also have a GTX660Ti with 2GB of vram and Ive not encountered this issues.

Further, i will say that I have had an issue when playing Starmade where my ram usage will be damn near full. I have 16GB of ram and ive seen it at 14GB usage after playing starmade. This is a rare occurance, only seen it twice, but I thought I would mention it here just in case.

 

[banjo]

I have an old en-9600gt 1gb, and a amd phenom II CPU.

I haven\'t had any crashes or system errors. I also run on a low segment load though.

 

[DreadShimmra]

This is exactly the response I have been looking for gents, I appreciate you guys taking the time to post here, not going to lie, I really had needed a larger sample size for data. Furthermore, Lazarus, is this only while connected to a multiplayer server, or does that happen with single player as well?

 

[NEO_RBA]

When working on this starship made by skylordluke ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPLdbq0Lfxk&list=TLJdt9NSB3e-Bcri1owGQrpJ4d4Ndmhdck ) 1200 meters long by 395 meters wide 198 meters tall with currently over 2.2 million blocks in total, and over 220 turrets running along the ship, I\'ve had frame rate issues making it drop down to around 16 fps everytime I place 1000 blocks at once (one 10x10x10 cube) and then back up to 56/45 or 60 fps, the shield and power animations slow down my system a bit lowwering render distance has helped, but the game clearly doesn\'t make use of my twin AMD FX6300 processors even after I made sure the cores for each where unparked (total GHz is 8, with a max of 10Gz at full turbo with all cooling systems active.) the most the game uses is 33% per core and i\'m not even reaching my heat per core max system temps around 29/35 C core temps close to 48/51 C max temp is 65C before I reach my limits I also have 16gigs of ram and 50gigs of virtual ram on my SSD (max memory my mobo can support is 106 gigs) So its clealy not a memory issue or heat issue, however I have a cheap-o GFX card it only cost like $80 nivida 640 2gb.

only time i\'ve crashed the game was when I kept flicking the render distance back and forth between 4k and 20k, kinda not an actual issue I just wanted to see if it was the games programing that was failing or my PC, my PC would have crashed if it was something wrong with it.