Thoughts on Lag

I got a new GPU recently and figured I'd monitor my temps while playing various games. It's a fairly straightforward process, game on one screen while temps and stats are shown on the other. My most GPU intensive game turned out to be Space Engineers in case anyone was wondering. Then I played KAG since I figured my days of playing with intense amounts of lag were over. Then I experience some of the worst lag I ever have on KAG while only utilizing 10% of my GPU. Investigating further I found that my CPU was pegged at around 25% when the lag was bad. Eventually I got the advice to reconnect, so I did. The CPU usage dropped to about 10% and the lag was gone. So now my thoughts. I'm guessing that KAG relies very heavily on the CPU for a lot of stuff. I'm also guessing that it only utilizes a single core, hence the 25% of my quad core CPU. Therefore lag could be mitigated in two ways. Either move processes to the GPU or utilize multiple cores. I'm sure this is much harder than it sounds because if it was easy it would already have happened. Or maybe I have a terrible CPU that bottlenecks my system.
Specs:
A8-6600k quad core @ 3.9 GHz
Asus R9 270
2 x 4gb 1866MHz
A motherboard
A case
A PSU
Some storage
Note: I will edit this for clarity in the morning my writing isn't the best at 1 AM

 

One of the reason I don't/can't play that much anymore. The fps drop is so terrible it breaks the game, and this issue is old. I think it's because of the blobs and all that stuff. Relogging seems to be the best solution, but it only gives you another 4 minute smooth gameplay. It is not your computer's fault, it's the game's.

 

Same here, stopped playing after a while, probably gonna build myself a fresh and new PC this summer (when I'll possibly have the money for it?) for now I'm stuck stalking the forums.

Not that I mind doing so.

 

If relogging fixes lag then that implies that there is some process that gums up the CPU over time that could either be removed or reset every once in a while. Even something that reconnects everyone to the server every 30 minutes would be preferable to playing at slide show speed.

 

I noticed that a lot of my friends who had AMD cpu's told me they had a lot of lag in late games, or even early ones. I used to have a pc with an AMD cpu in it and I experienced the same problems. Not long ago, I got a new pc that had an intel quad core cpu in it and the problem was totally fixed for me. Im not saying that you would have to get an intel cpu, but to all my friends and I it feels like the game "favors them". My friend who has an intel pentium also says that he never experiences lag either.

 

I sometimes wish there was a way I could be informed of the day this problem is finally fixed, because once it is I might properly return to this game and community and finally get to play full rounds again. (And there might be a larger player base, too, if that happens...)

 

I have an apu and I get around 250 fps
btw my computer is one of those stock store bought ones

 

Unfortunately, I doubt this is just a bug. If it were, it would likely have been found by now. There are a ton of ways to solve any given individual problem in programming, but some of them are more efficient than others. In fact, one solution could be orders of magnitude more or less efficient than another, even though they essentially do the same thing.

So, even though KAG is not a "big" looking game, there is likely some code in it that is written in one of these suboptimal ways, that either can't be found, or a better more efficient solution has not been devised.

I don't mean to impugn the developers here. It is not always obvious that a piece of code could be written in a more efficient way. I hope they can figure it out, but I doubt its easy, any maybe not even feasible at this late stage. What @Geti and his team are working with now is somewhat analogous to a mechanic trying to work on a car while it is driving.

 

i think lag is bad and we should remove it

 

Now I have now idea what I'm talking about but it seems to me that it would be possible to move a lot of the processes that don't effect the gameplay to another core. Things like particles and building collapses could be calculated by a second core without the need to communicate to the first core very much because they don't have a huge effect on gameplay. About the Intel vs AMD performance, I've always heard that Intel CPU's have much better single core performance compared to similar AMD CPU's this would further prove my theory that KAG only runs on one core and runs that core hard.

 

It isn't a theory, it's the truth. KAG (barely) uses a single core.
Intel CPUs are better for KAG overall.
So if you want to play kag intensively, look for a computer with a i3/i5/i7 (not a U version) and an nvidia/amd card, at least 4GB RAM would be enough.

 

Interesting, I've never heard of a program optimized for Intel vs AMD CPU's. So the question I still feel is unanswered is why does the CPU bog down over time but gets "refreshed" when you reconnnect?

 

Intel graphic chipsets are more terrible than you'd think :p
GMA ones are pretty horrible (I see people that can't even run Minecraft with it, or has 2-3 fps with a bad-normal CPU)
Any "dedicated" graphic card will do, even low-end AMDs - you're right.

By the way, an off-topic question - How do you compile to Linux and OS X using MSVC? Are you using different IDEs or have some script to compile that?

What's threaded, also? iirc, someone told me networking was - That isn't the most resource demanding stuff, am I right? So it won't make a really large difference. I think that if you have 4 cores and the 2 first heavily used, it would be better to move KAG to the Core 3 and 4 - Or does Windows manage it automaticly?

I also wasn't talking only about the game requirements - More about the overall usage. It's easy to get over 1GB RAM used after the computer started, to take 512Mb with custom programs, to get an browser opened (512Mb for firefox, maybe less), in that case, 2GB RAM is not really enough. Using the virtual memory will destroy the speed.

I'm again being slightly off-topic, but, couldn't you let modders create their own threads? I think that would break when you use some functions from the KAG lib (until you adapt them for this), but it would allow advanced modders to optimize some complicated (or not) calculations.

I think that's because something is being created but never destroyed until you leave the server you're currently on, and these would waste CPU every tick, and gets destroyed only on disconnect? I don't really know.

 

I don't have any fps drops :)