High CPU Usage With .99 > Very Slow Gameplay

[Sponge]

Is anyone else experiencing a significant downgrade in performance with .99? I'm sitting at 50-80% CPU usage constantly, and gameplay is quite choppy. Animations, such as jumping to a new system, take several times longer to run than they should. Turning is laggy, and even firing weapons jumps around a bit.

Thinking it was just my computer, I tried it out on a couple laptops I have laying around. One was getting 60-90% usage, and the other was at 80-99%.

As another check, I tried out an old version of the game. It ran great. The loading screen lasted for about five seconds, as opposed to the twenty it takes now.

I love the new features, but it's like playing the game in slow motion. I know I can't be the only one seeing this, as I've got the same results on three computers, but no one else has mentioned it yet.

[digdug]

mmmh, I just got a new laptop, but even with vista that eat 800Mb of ram at startup, i have no problems.

Transcendence here stays at 20-30% of CPU and 142Mb of ram. (if I remember correctly 0.98d was around 120Mb)

[Sponge]

I'm using around 130Mb of ram, which is really close to the old versions of Transc. However, that same old version wouldn't get over 3% system usage, which is considerably less than the 50-80 that I'm getting now.

I'm running XP as opposed to Vista.

[Betelgeuse]

hmm my ram use is 140K and my cpu use is 40%
the game is running like it always did

[Bobby]

no problems like that here either, cpu usage hovers between 12 and 20 something most of the time, and is not choppy unles using some serious firepower or explosions. it's a newer machine still running xp, almost clean reinstall too.

do your computers have tons of security software? lots of startup items? low ram?

apart from hardware issues perhaps your copy of the game is corrupted?

could it be a virus or spyware?

maybe some other program is using high cpu and starving transcendence?

have you applied any performance tweaks? one i know of for preventing .avi programs from using 100% cpu actualy makes audacity really choppy for example.

[Sponge]

Each of the computers has a different security software setup. This one is just running AVG. One of the laptops is just about a clean install- just about no startup crap, and I don't think it's running any security software other than the default Windows crap.

I should probably redownload the game and see if I still get the same issues, because the same zip was used for all three computers.

No virus/spyware. My virus scanner is up to date, and I just ran a complete scan a couple days ago.

This computer has some occasional issues with random processes grinding up CPU, but I'm at around 95% idle right now, and the other computers I tested on don't have the same problem.

No performance tweaks.

It just seems odd that .98 versions run perfectly, but .99 is choppy and hogging CPU on three separate computers.

[Periculi]

I don't have any problems with 099a's performance, it appears to be taking about the same as 098d, around 22% - 40% cpu usage and 140mb.

[Sponge]

Hmm. I just tried an older version with a very CPU intensive mod, and still didn't get the kind of choppy gameplay that I'm getting with a no-mod version of .99. I have no idea what's going on here, but because older versions are working perfectly, something has to have changed with .99 that's causing me to get poor performance.

[Periculi]

You are using 99 and not 99a? Maybe that is your problem.

[george moromisato]

Try a couple of things:

Use the /debugVideo command-line switch. This will show a frame rate at the top of the screen. I would be interested in seeing the numbers (captured in Debug.log)

After that, try the /dx command-line switch. This will use DirectX, which should be faster.

[Psycholis]

>_> doesn't even peg 10% on a quad... threadjack over.

[FAD]

...try the /dx command-line switch. This will use DirectX, which should be faster.

That's what I had to do and it runs fine now.

For those not knowing:

1)Create a shortcut to Transcendence.exe and send to your desktop.
2) Right click the new icon and select "properties"
3) In "Target", find (or similar): C:\Transcendence\Trans099\Transcendence.exe
4) Add "/dx" as such: C:\Transcendence\Trans099\Transcendence.exe /dx

Remember to put a space between .exe and /dx

Save and play!

[Sponge]

In .99a, I was getting a frame rate of 8-9. With my .98 version, I'm getting 26-30. Not sure what could cause that kind of performance drop. The /dx switch worked great, though. Thanks!

As an aside, FAD's method doesn't work on my computer. I get an error about the shortcut path being invalid. Here's another method in case this is happening to anyone else.

Go to Start, and click "Run."
Type "cmd" into the input box and press enter
Type "cd" followed by the path to your Transcendence folder and press enter
Type "Transcendence.exe /dx" and press enter

If you want a more long term solution, right click in your Transcendence directory and create a new text file.
Name it whatever you want, and change the extension from .txt to .bat
Edit the file (with a text editor) and type the following: Transcendence.exe /dx
Save the file
Running that will have the same effect as the first method, and FAD's method.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out!

[F50]

odd. works for me

[george moromisato]

In .99a, I was getting a frame rate of 8-9. With my .98 version, I'm getting 26-30. Not sure what could cause that kind of performance drop. The \dx switch worked great, though. Thanks!

Starting in 0.98d, the game uses GDI instead of DirectX. GDI is slower than DirectX, but it is more compatible (and doesn't switch resolutions).

The /dx switch reverts back to the original behavior (DirectX).

In the future I will add some auto-sensing code to use DirectX if the frame rate is too low.