Freezing / Lagging / FPS Drops / Shutdown Theory

[JBProfessor]

I have a theory.

I want to see if I delete all or most of my toolkit items if the freezing stops. I know there are people who said they were unaffected. I wonder if they downloaded over 100 toolkit items like myself or not.

I also wonder if my Nvidia Geforce GTX graphics card is the reason. Someone mentioned Nvidia issues.

My overall theory is that when 1.9 came out with the Thememakers toolkit, Everything slowed and took longer to load and I believe it is due to the UGC. I hate to do this since I created some blueprints with the toolkit but I might delete all my items until Frontier sees our posts and makes a fix.

The issues: Loading times 10-20 minutes of loading just to get to King Coaster kicking the planet
Waiting 2-5 minutes for the game to load the building, scenery, or blueprint tabs.
Random freezes in the game and shut down requests.
Crash reports posting after 15 minutes of inactivity.

 

[Guitar_Sly]

The long loading times and the performance issues/crashes seem to be two different problems. They might be correlated in the code of the game, but are definitely changing "independend". As a example, if you unsubscribe to the TMTK Items, load times (cobra screen) are much faster than with TMTK Items subscribed. But it does not affect Game Performance in Parks, so this seems to be a different problem.

I've analysed my system activity while loading and running the game here: https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...framerates-in-large-parks?p=249382#post249382

Spoiler

OK, done some testing the last few hours and it seems we've got 2 seperate problems. One is the load times issue on the cobra screen, the other is ingame performance.

Loading Time:

I am subscribed to nearely every TMTK-Item on the Workshop and I also experiencing high loading times. I've monitored various system data while loading.

Time to load up the Game: around 15 Minutes from start to Main Menu

While loading, theres nearly no CPU or GPU activity. RAM goes from 6.5GB up to 8.4GB usage just a few moments before loading is done.
What makes me curious is disk activity. Theres nearly no disk activity either active time, read or write.

Just for fun, I've changed the install directory of PlanCo from the SSHD to the Samsung Evo NVME Drive. With this, I increased Bandwith and lowered latency dramatically, without any effect on PlanCo. Load up of the Toolkit Item Tab takes ages, just testet it on an empty sandbox. Again, nealy no drive activity on the disk.

Loading of Parks and Game Performance:

1.- Port Aventura Recreation by alfatm: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1322672912

Load Time: ~8 Minutes

FPS Unpaused, Zero Guests: 9-12

FPS Paused, Zero Guests: 18-20

CPU Load: between 30 and 70% all 16 Threads, no Thread at 100%

GPU Load: Theoretical 50 to 85%, but the GPU is less used and clocks down to 1300 to 1400 MHz. At 100% Load it boosts up to 1680 MHz.

GPU Memory Load: 8GB @ 4K & 7.5GB at 1920x1080. Resolution Change does not affect performance in any park tested.

RAM Load: ~11GB


2.- Pinewood Hills by Geekism: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1227670863

Load Time: ~4:30 Minutes

FPS Unpaused, 2000 Guests: 15-21

FPS Paused, 2000 Guests: 23-28

FPS Unpaused, Zero Guests: 17-22

FPS Paused, Zero Guests: 25-40

CPU Load: between 30 and 55% all 16 Threads, no Thread at 100%

GPU Load: Theoretical 50 to 85%, but the GPU is less used and clocks down to 1300 to 1400 MHz. At 100% Load it boosts up to 1680 MHz.

GPU Memory Load: 8GB @ 4K & 7.5GB at 1920x1080. Resolution Change does not affect performance in any park tested.

RAM Load: ~11GB


3.- American Celebration Resort by RobCo: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1305014445

Load Time: ~8 Minutes

FPS Unpaused, Zero Guests: 5-10

FPS Paused, Zero Guests: 10-14

CPU Load: between 30 and 55% all 16 Threads, no Thread at 100%

GPU Load: Theoretical 15 to 70%, but the GPU is nearly unused and clocks down to even below 600MHz. At 100% Load it boosts up to 1680 MHz.

GPU Memory Load: 8GB @ 4K Resolution Change does not affect performance in any park tested.

RAM Load: ~15.4GB out of 16GB. Im near at a RAM Limit with this Park.


For my System, at least the First Park seems to run as ever. But with 2 and 3 I suspect I'm also somewhat affected. But from System usage I am able to monitor, nothing, except the RAM in Test 3 is very much stressed. Even for loading up a Park there is no really noticable load on Hard Drives/SSD's. It also does not make any difference for me, if I load up from HDD or NVME SSD. This irons out that it could be related to latency or available bandwith of the drive.

The Only somewhat limiting thing here is my Graphics Memory, wich allocates near or completely all available Memory with 8GB Physical on the Card, but this does not mean that the Game "needs" that much. The Resolution change to FullHD proves this, with just slightly lower VRAM allocation but no performance uplift at all.


EDIT: While I was typing this Post, I left PlanCo running on the main Screen and opened the Forums on the second. While Park 3 was running unpaused. Over Time, RAM usage has gone down to just ~8GB. Even with the Game back in foreground, it hasn't gone up to the initial 15.5GB. But after few seconds scrolling and zooming around, PlanCo freezed and crashed!

Greetz,

Danny

 

[FutureFear]

I'm no expert in this but to me it seems obvious if you download 100+ Toolkit items that the game might take some time to load... For obvious reasons.

- Toolkit items get handled in a different way by the game compared to all other (ingame) items.

Things like compression, file size, file location, file extension,...etc. all play part in loading time.
Even though Frontier did an outstanding job on their end to limit user-made-mistakes. Since all items are user made and not all users have an extensive understanding of 3D modelling, game programming and or keep loading times in their mind; but instead opt for more quality in the details... it tends to create larger files. ---> larger files tend to take a longer time to load.

I also guess, Frontier chose to load the Toolkit items during game start-up, to limit the loading time of parks.

Also keep in mind that the game will always have it's limits due to DX11 (mentioned 1000000 times on the forum by now)
Such limits can only be extended with better hardware, but no matter what your setup is, sooner or later it will reach it's limit.
( high-end hardware performance differences are so small these days that you even won't notice the difference).

About your crashes and freezes, they don't seem related to the Toolkit in a direct way. Perhaps keep your GPU drivers updated, if that doesn't work open a support ticket.

Hope this helps