Game only used 30% of CPU and 60% of GPU with terrible FPS

Question

Contrary to some other people's problems. I have a Core i7 3930k and the game is for some reason, only using at most 2 of the 6 cores available to it. The CPU usage maxes out at 30% during gameplay. This creates a bottleneck for the GPU which is a ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1080 which appears only to be using 60% of its total performance capability.

Can we open up more cores? Is there a setting in config that can help? Or does the team need to focus on optimizing the pipeline and building additional multi-core code? Not sure what can be done, but pretty poor when I can't get more than 30 FPS in some areas. Almost unplayable (yes I know its early access, this is just feedback).

Comments

Something seems to have an impact on the utilization of the GPU and CPU later in the game.
And at a first glance it does not seem to be the CPU that restricts the GPU for me.

Newly started game: https://i.imgur.com/ogBXOnB.jpg
- GPU utilization at around 95-98%
- CPU utilization at around 35-40% (way higher than in the game that I played a lot of hours, see below)
- FPS at around 140 to 160

Around 145h play time game: https://i.imgur.com/WGv16PS.jpg
- GPU utilization usually does not go higher than 60%
- CPU utilization usually does not go higher than 30%
- FPS does not go higher than 63-64

System
CPU: i7-8700K
GPU: RTX 2080 Ti
RAM: 32GB
HDD: NVMe

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When you say CPU at 30% can I confirm if that is one core operating at 30% or the CPU? What you might find is that you have 1 core working 100% and the remaining cores doing a little bit but not much? I have this problem from the very start of a new game, but I do notice it the frames get far worse as the number of machines grows.

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1-2 cores might be a bit higher than the others but usually these two don't go over 60% each.

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I have run a test.
 
My original build got to about 90MB on the save file with the frame rates in the 30's, at best.
The auto save was taking a couple of seconds with a very big lag spike.
One of my six cores was using right around the mid 40% range with another, probably the pre-processing for the GPU, running in the 30% range. The GPU was in the 40% range with less than half of it's memory being used.

Then I started a new game.
GPU utilization in the 100 to 99 percent range, with the same amount of memory used. FPS well above 100. The auto save was not noticeable.
Built as much of my base as I could without the use of foundations. FPS remained very high in the 80's to above 100.
Then I started building on foundations in the air, no walls. As the save file got bigger the FPS continued to gradually drop,  it was still above 60 FPS.
Behold! Right around 20MB of save file size the FPS dropped to below 60 into the 40's while looking at running machines/belts. It was a very noticeable change....
At this time the GPU core usage dropped into the high 80% range, no change in it's memory usage.

MY Rig is not the problem.
GPU: EVGA 1080Ti SC black edition, Factory Overclocked
CPU: Intel i7-5930 socket 2100-v3 overclocked to 4.2 GHz (stable at stock power settings)
Memory: CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2666 MHz stable)
Storage: 2 X Samsung 850 EVO 500GB (not in raid)
Monitor: Samsung u28e590d 4K monitor (I use nVidia Fast Sync.)

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FPS drop due to belts has got worse since update #2, I used to get 15 fps looking at 40 stacked belts, now it's 2-3 FPS and generally away from the belts FPS is only just playable. I have a 1060 and have lowered all the graphics settings to medium where it's only showing 25% usage and no change to frame rate. CPU is i5 4 series overclocked to 4.2Ghz with 16Gb RAM. CPU optimisation doesn't seem to be a thing in this game yet, get to end game and it's unplayable.

Answer 1

Me and @lordmaca is having such problem, we have tested several things like, I thought at first it was the huge amount of belts and factories, too much entities running on the base, but when we started to construct the second floor (of a very huge factory) the fps drop even more, so, looks like platforms are impacting the performance even more than belts and assemblers, if so, it should be something simple to optimize since it shouldn't impact on cpu, it has no processing to do at all, probably a bug, we hope they fix it before or at latest on the next update, if not, we will not enjoy playing a game running at 20fps (and decreasing) :'(

Comments

I’ve done some research last night, overclocked to 4.3GHz with a proportionate  increase in frames. I’m monitoring cpu usage and it’s using 1+1/2 cores to run the game. But that 1 core is absolutely flat out 100% of the time. Seems like computation of the logistics network is choking the game, I’d suggest that the devs need to work entirely on optimising the logistics and material flow calcs they are doing before secondly moving on to the render pipeline, it’s not surprising if the size of the factory increases the cost of computing what-goes-where is also increasing, but that said, even on factorio I have massive production and network to compute and this is done far more efficiently.

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I don't think platforms impact the performance that much. Most likely the belt are, or more exactly the items on the belts. The belts are not rendered when there are not visible but the items on them are still computed when you look at them.
I've done some tests.
When the factory is idle I have the highest frame-rate.
When the factory is working the frame-rate drops to about 30 for me.
But if I look at the factory while is working my frame-rate drops below 15, even if the factory is enclosed by walls.
If we assume that the calculation of how items on belts move causes the performance hit than this would mean that the position of items on belts are not "culled" by occlusion and are "culled" by the viewport.

Answer 2

me and my friend have a pretty big base, huge production, main-bus and more... the FPS is at 30 maximum, another thing, when we move away from the base it doesn't get better and when we come back stuff are already spawned, I think this really need optimization, we are at a point if an update come's up, we will not be able to enjoy playing it.

Spec: i7 4th - Asus ROG Strix GTX 1080 - SSD.

Comments

The fact that frame rates don’t improve much when moving away from a base suggests to me that the calls to render the scene are on the same loop as the simulation of the logistics network. It might be better to move the simulation of belts and machines off to a separate asynchronous thread with shared memory?

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What Geo said!
I am also a programmer and his comment/suggestion was right on.....
Open up another thread.
My game save file is in the high 80MB's and the FPS is falling off to where I do not want to play it.
Recently started another new game just to enjoy the mega FPS boost.

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You can't separate the simulation from the rendering of the scene, because the rendering of the scene is based on the simulation. Also you can't simulate some parts of the factory at different speeds than other parts because they depend on each other to work properly.
What you can do is simulate at different "resolution" based on that's important and what's not important. But this is no easy task to implement. You can actually see this in the game right now, just look at a truck. If the truck is far it teleport, if it's close it move more smoothly.

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This is for now a moot point with me. It seems the last upgrade changed a bunch of stuff, especially the power consumption. Went off line with energy usage at around 4.4GWh (out of 6.02 GWh) came back in and everything was down. Frame rates were very good, just turn everything off. I shutdown all my aluminum / silica processing to no avail, system would not restart.
So I uninstalled the game, will wait for the FINAL RELEASE when they implement all available cores, fine tune the graphics and get the bugs out.

Answer 3

Same here with the experimental. My i7-3820 is used round about 35% (looks like 3 cores: 100 / 8 *3 = 37,5) and the GPU is at ~40%, but the FPS is only at 14-19 in the base (10.000 items per minute, ~2.000 belts) and far away, looking in another direction at ~25 FPS.

Set the shadow quality to low brings 3-5 FPS more. The other options does not change anything.

Comments

I did a test with the most recent Experimental Build (Tier 7 test) 0.1.14 build 100692 that is not promising for me.  

I started a build for Aluminium Sheets (360/min, 24 Manufacturers) and before I started I made a few tests.  

This is what I will enable when I put on the power:
7 Miners Mk.3
22 Smelters for Copper ingots.
18 Manufacturers for Silica
12 Foundry's for Aluminium Ingots
24 Manufacturers for Alclad Aluminium Sheets

Before I enable power to the above I get 40 FPS looking at the machines at the top floor of the factory.  
Here is me on top of the factory that has all the machines for Aluminium sheets.
Image of my FPS and my Build as well as commentary. https://i.imgur.com/grExSlU.png

When I enable power for 14 of the 24 manufacturers everything starts and I get 12 FPS !!
https://i.imgur.com/vpGH2yO.png
This is very bad because this is only 1 small new factory, everything else is standing still.
It isn't even 5% of all my available machines working.

I enabled the last 10 manufacturers (24 total now for 360/min) and now the FPS is about 8 FPS when looking at the machines working. (I only see the top 24 aluminium sheet manufacturers).
https://i.imgur.com/6djRSy5.png

This is not good for expanding my build (200h) into Tier 7 and 8 and some kind of performance boost must be done.  Overall I think the new network optimization is doing "something good" but it is not enough for me.  
It is also a shock how much the FPS goes down whenever any machines are working (and as others have said it does not help to "run away" or not look at it, the FPS hit is wherever you are it seems).

My computer:
Intel 5960X boosting to 3.9GHz on 1 core
64GB memory
1TB nvme drive
250Mb/s Internet
Nvidia 2080 RDX graphics with latest driver.

I love this game but it is getting harder to be able to play it at sub 15fps

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Same situation for me, 50%GPU, 30%CPU but less than 30fps, whaterever graphic options (full low options or full ultra)

CPU: i7-4790K
GPU: GGTX 1080
RAM: 32GB
HDD: SSD

Answer 4

Multithreading isn't something you just turn on, the game has to be programmed in a way that different systems can function in parallel and if done poorly will actually decrease your performance as threads lock each other attempting to access data. few games use more than 2-3 core as most logic in games is linear not parallel. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AfWTdWPRkk

Comments

Doesn’t resolve the problem and I’m fully aware it might require additional programming as I’m a software developer. The question posed even goes so far as to suggest that they need to optimize or multithreaded or both. Actually a lot of calcs in this game can be performed in parallel.

But I digress, the game needs some attention to frame rates in whatever form that takes.

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yeap several people have already mentioned it (me included) the game has come to a point where i am not enjoying it as much as i was due to the fps drops, but i guess we can only wait.

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You guys all have trains running on timetables? I found that my fps went back to normal after deleting all timetables for my trains. So currently ignoring trains on auto til it is fixed.

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I don’t even have trains in that game yet.