[V17.52 - everywhere] FPS not limited; CPU only single core usage

[munchimon]

Howdy,

two bugs or at least structural deficits.

1. FPS not limited

The screen redraws do not seem to be limited. So when a screen has been drawn the next one is right away in the pipeline.

I usually use a framerate limiter (60 fps) so this was not that apparent to me but when I removed the limiter I noticed Xenonauts to shoot up FPS like gone crazy. This is not a good way. The screen should be redrawn only, and ONLY then, when the contents of the display have changed. This might sound a little weird and maybe many people are not caring about this, but with the current state my GPU is redrawing frames like wild, consuming power (200 Watt). Entirely unnecessarily, because the screen has not changed - there's just nothing new to show the user again.

Please see attached screenshots, the FPS are highlighted by a red rectangle.

And pleeease fix this, it's just a bad practice.

2. CPU only single core usage

I've got a six-core Phenom-II. Multicore processors have been around like nearly 10 years. Even my phone has 4 cores. Thus by only utilizing one of the, in my case, six cores, makes this core go to 100% usage, which in return makes the whole CPU go to it's fullest speed (in my case 3.6 GHz), consuming power unnecessarily. The other cores are nearly idle and just don't know what to do with their increased free processing time.

Making the game multicore capable and spreading the workload across cores would therefore use only 1/6th of the power necessary, or the other way around: currently it is wasting 83% processing power, consumes energy, heats the CPU and makes the fans swirl for nothing.

In the attached graphics the cores are highlighted with a green box, right from this you can see the CPU frequency.

Programming with multiple threads isn't that hard, please make it right. However I think in this late phase of development improving code that way is not easily done.

Sorry if this might sound rude, english isn't my native language. However I was frankly stumped by these two points.

Edited February 23, 2013 by munchimon

[Gauddlike]

The engine used is not developed by Goldhawk.

They also have no rights to the source code of the engine so cannot make any changes to the way it operates.

It is a ten year old (roughly) engine that probably pre-dates the widespread adoption of multi-core processors.

You may have been stumped but a bit of research on the forum would have easily located this information.

Hopefully the kind of optimisation you mention is within the areas Goldhawk have access to, if not then there is nothing that can be done.

[munchimon]

Yes I read about the engine and half expected such an answer. But maybe some other load could be sent into another thread so the OS puts it on a different core?

If redrawing the screen only when necessary isn't possible then at least vsync should be done. This limits redraw to 60 Hz against the 300+ Hz otherwise which are complete overkill.