Disabling hyperthreading increases FPS

[jeruntje]

Just FYI I disabled hyperthreading on my i9 9900k and this increases my framerate quite substantially. I my 2.5k guest zoo, 150 animals and 34 species I went from on average 35 fps to 39 fps. This doesn't seem much but it's a 10% increase!
It might help you with your zoos to go from barely playable to playable..

 

[Chris Simon]

Just FYI I disabled hyperthreading on my i9 9900k and this increases my framerate quite substantially. I my 2.5k guest zoo, 150 animals and 34 species I went from on average 35 fps to 39 fps. This doesn't seem much but it's a 10% increase!
It might help you with your zoos to go from barely playable to playable..

Interesting. Now here's the question, though. (I guess for the devs, rather than you or anybody else here)
Is the Cobra engine optimized for some particular number of threads?

As an experiment, I disabled the SMT on my R5 3600 (which means going from 12 threads to 6) and it did nothing. So the game doesn't care for whether it is 6 or 12. But maybe 16 is "too much" and windows scheduler or the engine itself becomes inefficient in using them?

Or there may be another possibility. Clocks. My Ryzen doesn't care about multithreading when comes to clocks - it runs at 4.2GHz on all cores, SMT or not.
But to my knowledge, Intels are different. So maybe your improvement in FPS was caused simply by the fact that the i9 with HT disabled was able to keep higher turbo? (or what's it called, nowadays) and the higher FPS is simply a result of that?

 

[jeruntje]

Or there may be another possibility. Clocks. My Ryzen doesn't care about multithreading when comes to clocks - it runs at 4.2GHz on all cores, SMT or not.
But to my knowledge, Intels are different. So maybe your improvement in FPS was caused simply by the fact that the i9 with HT disabled was able to keep higher turbo? (or what's it called, nowadays) and the higher FPS is simply a result of that?

I ran some test to check this out. And with and without HT enabled the cores run at 4.7GHz. I also was testing your other theory about the numer of threads being too much.. so I ran a test for 8, 6 and 4 cores... with HT enabled and one test on 8 cores with HT disabled. I was going to run 6 and 4 cores with HT disabled only my game won't start anymore.. I think there's some kind of DRM going on that if you change the number of cores, the game thinks it is installed on a different PC each time.

So one advise.. don't change your cpu settings too much!

But I found an interesting result none the least:
I noted the max. fps during each test.
8 cores + HT: 37 fps (4.7GHz)
8 cores: 40 fps (4.7GHz)
6 cores + HT: 37 fps (4.7GHz)
4 cores + HT: 38 fps (4.8GHz)

I found that there was barely a difference in frame rate with 8, 6 or 4 cores enabled! I think this means that planet zoo heavenly relies on 1 core.. I was going to test with 2 and 1 core enabled.. but I couldn't anymore .... Waiting untill Frontier will respond on my ticket.

 

[Chris Simon]

I ran some test to check this out. And with and without HT enabled the cores run at 4.7GHz. I also was testing your other theory about the numer of threads being too much.. so I ran a test for 8, 6 and 4 cores... with HT enabled and one test on 8 cores with HT disabled. I was going to run 6 and 4 cores with HT disabled only my game won't start anymore.. I think there's some kind of DRM going on that if you change the number of cores, the game thinks it is installed on a different PC each time.

So one advise.. don't change your cpu settings too much!

But I found an interesting result none the least:
I noted the max. fps during each test.
8 cores + HT: 37 fps (4.7GHz)
8 cores: 40 fps (4.7GHz)
6 cores + HT: 37 fps (4.7GHz)
4 cores + HT: 38 fps (4.8GHz)

I found that there was barely a difference in frame rate with 8, 6 or 4 cores enabled! I think this means that planet zoo heavenly relies on 1 core.. I was going to test with 2 and 1 core enabled.. but I couldn't anymore .... Waiting untill Frontier will respond on my ticket.

Wait, you mean the game locked up?
shakes fist at Denuvo

Good luck with your ticket. That is quite ridiculous, in all honesty.

If that wasn't the problem, I'd ask you to try it with 6 cores with AND without the HT to kind of simulate my situation.
In any case, this is really interesting.

And also, I originally wanted to ask but forgot - what GPU do you have. I'd assume that with an 9900K you have something like GTX 1080Ti or RTX 2080, but your FPS are really, really low, even for such a large zoo. I would expect stutters, possibly a bit of FPS reduction but not this much. Are you running it in 8K or something?

 

[jeruntje]

Wait, you mean the game locked up?
shakes fist at Denuvo

Good luck with your ticket. That is quite ridiculous, in all honesty.

If that wasn't the problem, I'd ask you to try it with 6 cores with AND without the HT to kind of simulate my situation.
In any case, this is really interesting.

And also, I originally wanted to ask but forgot - what GPU do you have. I'd assume that with an 9900K you have something like GTX 1080Ti or RTX 2080, but your FPS are really, really low, even for such a large zoo. I would expect stutters, possibly a bit of FPS reduction but not this much. Are you running it in 8K or something?

Yes the game locked up .
Yep I was going to do that with 6 cores and without HT and with 4 cores without HT.
I have a rtx 2070. I run at 1440p, and sad but tru... my gpu isn't maxed out at all. It doesn't matter if I put the graphic settings on the lowest or on ultra, the frame rate stays the same.. I set the guest limit on 5k for this test. And these frame rates I noted are the max. frame rates I was getting. When playing normally the frame rate usually hovers around 31- 35 FPS.
If I didn't limit at all, my zoo would attract up to 8.5k guests and the frame rate would fall to low 20's whilst playing...

 

[Chris Simon]

Yes the game locked up .
Yep I was going to do that with 6 cores and without HT and with 4 cores without HT.
I have a rtx 2070. I run at 1440p, and sad but tru... my gpu isn't maxed out at all. It doesn't matter if I put the graphic settings on the lowest or on ultra, the frame rate stays the same.. I set the guest limit on 5k for this test. And these frame rates I noted are the max. frame rates I was getting. When playing normally the frame rate usually hovers around 31- 35 FPS.
If I didn't limit at all, my zoo would attract up to 8.5k guests and the frame rate would fall to low 20's whilst playing...

I didn't know it is THIS bad, to be honest. I play smaller zoos and I keep them small because I'm crap and I can't manage large zoos. I've heard people are having problems with framerates in larger zoos, but I kind of imagined they mean something like dropping below 60 and getting tearing and stutters. I didn't know it's a console level of BAD.
I've got the RX5700XT (which is kind of close to RTX2070 in performance) so I guess I now have one extra incentive to keep my zoos in check.

I do hope they do something about it.
And also that you get your Denuvo problems resolved ASAP. Being unable to install your game on multiple computers or having a limited number of installations is so 90s. It's embarrassing.