Only One/two cores used in No Mans Sky?

[Brennan Price]

Hello there,

 

I am currently encountering a very strange issue within No Mans Sky, I've tried several things to resolve it with no luck, thought I should ask here so it would help others too if it is resolved.

 

So today, I have started playing No Mans Sky, I've had no crashing or anything, just extremely poor performance throughout, roughly between 15 and 30fps. I've turned off V-Sync, FPS caps, absolutely everything. I've played it in Fullscreen and in windowed mode at a much smaller resolution yet my FPS stays relatively the same no matter what I do. When I decided to play in a much smaller resolution however I noticed that my GPU is at roughly 50% usage and my CPU is at between 5 and 25% usage often meaning that only one or two cores are being pushed to 100%. I know that when I play in fullscreen however my GPU is at 100% utilisation. 

 

I have also tried changing the textures from high to low (and all other settings with no luck) plus editing values within the config files in its steam folder with no luck, this includes changing the Low and high core count figures etc. 

 

Can anyone suggest what is wrong and find an answer? 

 

My Specs are on my profile but I'll mention my main specs here anyway: 

 

Xeon X5675 @4.5GHz

8GB RAM

HD 7970 3GB

 

Cheers, BP.

[Eastman51]

If you go into task manager>performance tab you can right click on the CPU usage graph and then go to "change graph to" and select "logical processors" 

This will show you usage for each individual core, which should give you a better idea of whether or not NMS is under-utilizing your CPU. 

 

I haven't run the game in a good while, but I remember it running fairly well before. Just some slight optimization issues, don't think I ever had a stable 60fps; but that was on my last GPU and CPU.

[Brennan Price]

2 minutes ago, Eastman51 said:

If you go into task manager>performance tab you can right click on the CPU usage graph and then go to "change graph to" and select "logical processors" 

This will show you usage for each individual core, which should give you a better idea of whether or not NMS is under-utilizing your CPU. 

 

I haven't run the game in a good while, but I remember it running fairly well before. Just some slight optimization issues, don't think I ever had a stable 60fps; but that was on my last GPU and CPU.

Thanks for your input and I've already done that I'm afraid. Here's a screenshot with my OC dialled back to make sure my OC wasn't causing the issue. 

 

[Eastman51]

1 minute ago, Brennan_Price said:

Thanks for your input and I've already done that I'm afraid. Here's a screenshot with my OC dialled back to make sure my OC wasn't causing the issue. 

I'll run it and see what happens with me.

 

My specs:
Ryzen 5 2600x

16 GB DDR4

GTX 1070

[Brennan Price]

Just now, Eastman51 said:

I'll run it and see what happens with me.

 

My specs:
Ryzen 5 2600x

16 GB DDR4

GTX 1070

Cheers would be greatly Appreciated  

[DarkEnergy]

Try running it in compatibility mode for say, windows 7. (or 8.1).

Looks like you've maxed out ram usage as well, perhaps only some things are being loaded/reloaded resulting in poor performance. 

[Eastman51]

2 minutes ago, DarkEnergy said:

Try running it in compatibility mode for say, windows 7. (or 8.1).

Looks like you've maxed out ram usage as well, perhaps only some things are being loaded/reloaded resulting in poor performance. 

This could be a possibility

14 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Cheers would be greatly Appreciated  

Had trouble getting the game to show up in prntscrn, but got a pic of my other screen with Task Manager and HWmonitor running. The game ran mostly fine for me, averaging between 45 and 60 fps at 1440p ultra. Toning some settings down, I think I could get stable 60. I can try running on my other PC to see if it has issues.

[Brennan Price]

9 minutes ago, DarkEnergy said:

Try running it in compatibility mode for say, windows 7. (or 8.1).

Looks like you've maxed out ram usage as well, perhaps only some things are being loaded/reloaded resulting in poor performance. 

Cheers, I'll try that tomorrow and I'll get back to you with the results

4 minutes ago, Eastman51 said:

This could be a possibility

Had trouble getting the game to show up in prntscrn, but got a pic of my other screen with Task Manager and HWmonitor running. The game ran mostly fine for me, averaging between 45 and 60 fps at 1440p ultra. Toning some settings down, I think I could get stable 60. I can try running on my other PC to see if it has issues.

Go for it, I have no doubt that your other system will run it fine too. Its just something weird that I seem to get with procedurally generated games, Minecraft is the same where I get similar fps and CPU/GPU usage and I can't understand why. All other games are fine and have no issues though

[Eastman51]

12 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Go for it, I have no doubt that your other system will run it fine too. Its just something weird that I seem to get with procedurally generated games, Minecraft is the same where I get similar fps and CPU/GPU usage and I can't understand why. All other games are fine and have no issues though

I'd almost bet its your RAM. Your screenshot shows that you have 300MB of RAM left, which Windows is likely trying to avoid crashes by not letting you use it. 
Notice that in my screenshot, I am using 8 GB of RAM (about 2.5 GB is Chrome, and 2GB-ish is Windows; leaving NMS at around 6-ish GB). Then remember that once your GPU runs out of dedicated VRAM, Windows will use available system RAM to give the GPU an extra bump. The 1070 is an 8GB card, your GPU is only a 3GB. I ran the game again, looking at the GPU tab in task manager; my GPU used a healthy 3.8GB of VRAM. 

 

Edit: If I were to run NMS on my other PC, it would likely run just as well. My old GPU was/is a 4GB 960. So based off my results from my 1070, my 960 should be good to go; especially once you factor in that my 960 will be running at 1080p vs 1440p and it is less powerful, requiring me to turn down settings that could potentially lower VRAM usage even more. That PC also has 16GB of RAM, so even if my 960 got maxed out somehow I would have plenty of RAM left over for helping it out. Also remember that when your GPU runs off system RAM, you do increase latency (aka decrease performance).

 

If you can, borrow some RAM from a friend and see if that helps. Otherwise/in the meantime, I'd try increasing your pagefile size and see if that helps. But if it ends up being your GPU's limited VRAM, only increasing your system RAM (or ideally, getting a new GPU with more VRAM) will actually help.

[Brennan Price]

18 hours ago, Eastman51 said:

I'd almost bet its your RAM. Your screenshot shows that you have 300MB of RAM left, which Windows is likely trying to avoid crashes by not letting you use it. 
Notice that in my screenshot, I am using 8 GB of RAM (about 2.5 GB is Chrome, and 2GB-ish is Windows; leaving NMS at around 6-ish GB). Then remember that once your GPU runs out of dedicated VRAM, Windows will use available system RAM to give the GPU an extra bump. The 1070 is an 8GB card, your GPU is only a 3GB. I ran the game again, looking at the GPU tab in task manager; my GPU used a healthy 3.8GB of VRAM. 

 

Edit: If I were to run NMS on my other PC, it would likely run just as well. My old GPU was/is a 4GB 960. So based off my results from my 1070, my 960 should be good to go; especially once you factor in that my 960 will be running at 1080p vs 1440p and it is less powerful, requiring me to turn down settings that could potentially lower VRAM usage even more. That PC also has 16GB of RAM, so even if my 960 got maxed out somehow I would have plenty of RAM left over for helping it out. Also remember that when your GPU runs off system RAM, you do increase latency (aka decrease performance).

 

If you can, borrow some RAM from a friend and see if that helps. Otherwise/in the meantime, I'd try increasing your pagefile size and see if that helps. But if it ends up being your GPU's limited VRAM, only increasing your system RAM (or ideally, getting a new GPU with more VRAM) will actually help.

Hiya, thanks for all your info. Even on medium textures, I saw my GPU only using roughly 1.7GB VRAM so I don't think it would be that especially if I am only trying to play at lowest settings yet it's useful info to have. I understand where you're coming from with RAM yet I do not have a friend I could borrow from sadly, instead, I've straight up bought a whole new matching kit of 6 x 2GB DIMMs equalling 12GB total so the game, therefore, has an extra 4GB to use, I've been meaning to upgrade my ram from my current 8GB for a while now so perhaps this was the correct time. I am also running out of storage so I've decided to buy a 4TB WD Black as my secondary drive, maybe the game was stuttering from high HDD capacity, very unlikely though?

 

I've also been meaning to lap my CPU for a while to get an even higher overclock out of it, so I've now bought the resources to do so and hopefully, I can get more FPS just by getting a better overclock from not having to worry about temperature so much. All in all, maybe now was the right time to upgrade anyway, I can probs leave my build for a little while longer without worrying about upgrades if it fixes no mans sky.

 

I also see your CPU usage not too far off mine in No Mans sky so perhaps it's all RAM related... Who knows eh, I'll get back to ya with the results after everything has arrived  

 

Edit: Forgot to mention that I only let Windows use 7GB so that I had 1GB hardware reserved... I tried it with and without and it didn't make much difference sadly so I've not removed that 1GB hardware reserved portion as I'll change my RAM out when it arrives anyway.

[Brennan Price]

Heya guys @DarkEnergy @Eastman51 

 

I have upgraded my RAM, absolutely no difference at all to performance. The game just can't seem to use any more than 20% of my CPU.