Framerate really low no matter which machine I try

I originally posted these on Steam, but I've moved them here per Stardock's recommendations.

 

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I've been having numerous issues getting high fps so I did a bunch of testing and here are my results.

For my first test, I ran an 8 player match with 2 AI, one computer having an Intel i7 4770K, and the other 5 having an AMD A8 5500B. Every AMD processor ran the game as the exact same framerate regardless of the video card, resolution, and graphics settings; and each of those 5 were running different GPUs from the AMD Radeon R9 270X up to an nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

After seeing this, my thought is the game is completely CPU-bound and needs a Threadripper to run well.

I did another 8 player benchmark. I started a multiplayer game with 9 slots, made myself an observer, and watched the FPS. The map was a Huge size.

https://imgur.com/a/LiRU0aw

Notice that my CPU usage is 50% and my GPU usage is 50% and my RAM usage is 50%. If the game was CPU-locked, it should be using 100% of my CPU. This is on my most-powerful system.

Running a 2 player match I noticed it using 8% less CPU overall compared to the 8 player test.

I did some other tests to try and improve framerate; none of which worked:

• Fullscreen vs windowed.
• Graphics mode Low vs High.
• In-game resolution.
• Music on vs off.
• Map size Tiny vs Huge.
• Disabling vs enabling G-Sync via the nVIDIA control panel.
• Set launch options using `-force-glcore` and `-force-d3d9`.
• Skirmish vs Multiplayer modes.
• Verified integrity of game files.
• Switched to `next_version` under Betas.

Based on my testing, Mars yielded 5-10fps more than Io. No clue why.

I got 94-100fps on my main system until the colonies were founded. As soon as that happened, my framerate halfed to 45-52fps. It was actually more-drastic though. The first colony puts me down to 72-88fps, then the next one drops it further. With more players, each extra colony takes off about 5fps each.

So now I'm thinking performance is proportional to the number of players.

A 4 player match yielded the same framerate, but 6 players was slower by 5-10fps depending no how zoomed in you are. So it's definitely player-limiting with the best performance coming from 4 or less from my testing on this system.

My framerate remains relatively stable the entire match after all colonies are founded no matter how many buildings are put down. It does drop a bit, but not that much compared to this initial piece.

Honestly, I'm lost. I don't know what I can do to improve performance.

 

--- TIME PASSED ---

 

This is really bothering me so I did some more testing. My sister just built a new rig with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X. It plays faster on hers than my Intel i7 4770K. It's either clock-speed or core count that helps in that situation. She was averaging 50fps where I was averaging 33fps. I tested with Mars using 8 AI players and myself as an observer.

I went to the Betas tab and tried out older versions on my Intel i7 4770K rig:

• v1.21.21834
• v1.17.18018
• v1.10.14664
• v1.10.14376

I noticed no performance differences from the 3 most-recent builds listed after all AI had founded. During the time when there are no founds, I noticed it ran at 84-88fps instead of 94-100fps like the current build.

v1.10.14376 was special. It didn't allow me to add 9 players so I had to play as player 8. This build allowed me to get to 42-43fps, but that framerate usually dips as the game goes on.

I would say, for Offworld Trading Company, no framerate is acceptable except my monitor's max. With a systems like mine, it would be hard to qualify anything less.

I was thinking today the issue was with AI players, but my original tests were done in an 8 player match where 6 of the players were LAN and only 2 were AI.

Is there a place where the game devs are looking? I'd like to see if we can test out some things to fix this issue.