Ryzen 2700x, 32gigs 3ghz ddr4 RAM, RX580 on samsung sata SSD's all in a Asus Crosshair VI Board, all using latest drivers and bios patches. I get the same results as you, I also upgraded from an old gen AMD Unit (8350 cpu and 32 gigs of ddr 3) but 2 years ago now, it made a large difference at the time, less so these days tbh. We are not the only ones and it is not limited to AMD systems theres a few over on steam with mid-high end intel systems suffering the same issue.

Thanks @Frogboy  here is the link Saved Game

It is ironic that the game locks people out of certain map sizes due to a lack of CPU or RAM when in actuallity the game is exsessivly GPU heavy and this is where the issue/bottlenecks lie. I have the same issue as you btw, CPU at around 25%, RAM at around 16gb of 32 and GPU pretty much maxed out. (Second Largest map (Pre crusade sizes). The sadest thing I find with all this is, the graphics in this game are not what you call out of this world. BTW I have a friend I just built a PC for that has a RX5700 GPU in it with a Ryzen 3600 and 32gig of 3200 ram, when I load one of my saves on that rig.......no difference. SO, save your money for a game that is better optimized and will actually take advantage of a new GPU.

Oh and theres a few peeps over on steam forums that are using 2070 or 2080's and they still complain about game lag and slow turns.

Frogboy, what would you suggest?

GPUs 10 years from now will have an issue still just as GPUs 10 years from now will still have issues with Sins, Stellaris, Civ V, Civ VI, Supreme Commander.  

These are games that use DirectX (or OpenGL).  They were written for a time where there would only be 1 CPU core talking to the GPU at once.  

I have the saved game loaded.

The issue really is that the game shouldn't really have map sizes this large.  You have 303 colonies in a galaxy with 26 other civilizations.  Imagine playing Civilization VI with 303 cities and 26 other players like this. 

I think the answer is probably to just eliminate map sizes from the main UI and have them be an unsupported option in prefs.ini (enablecrazymaps=1).

The game IS using all the cores.

But you can see the two cores related to sending commands to the GPU.  That's a limitation of DirectX 11.  The only way to fix this kind of thing would be to move to Vulkan or DirectX12 where the other cores could send things in parallel.

I really wish this wasn't the overall answer, as I love the scale, just hate the impact.

Let's do this, how do we make this happen lol.  Now I understand this is most likely not feasible but it would be amazing if this could happen as I believe this is a big hurdle minimizing the games full potential and could take a good game, and transform it into a great game if it could greatly minimize the turn times.  With the resources required to even attempt a conversion like this it would be nice if it could be tested at a small scale before applying the resources needed to see if it would really have a huge impact.  I can only imagine what that could look like.

Well I'm now running 64GB of memory on my computer, interesting I didn't see the usage jump to 27GB like you had mentioned I saw it peak at 17-18GB.  

So if I'm understanding if I can minimize the number of ships somehow, the turn time would diminish...  I wonder would limiting the number of certain ship types help with this, such as each player is only allowed to have 10 tiny ships, 10 small ships, ect... Does the game look at fleets as one ship or as many ships? And does this help at all?  As I know the AI, especially those that generate many small ships aren't the best at condensing them into fleets.  So if the Drengin for instance have 100 individual ships and many of them are stacked on top of each other and not condensed into fleets would forcing them to put them into fleets help with relieve some of this problem?  Just trying to think how that could work.  

Another thought, is there a way one could minimize how it's accounting the ships/locations on the map so that it's not using as much data or putting as much of a load on the GPU?  

Final question, would increasing the number of stream processors help on the GPU at least fractionally, such as me upgrading, and would crossfire support with multiple GPU's potentially work even if they are mainly only supported via DX12/vulcan?

And right now would it really be worth jumping to a PCIe4 card vs. staying with the less costly PCIe3 cards right now with this game or other games produced by Stardock?

One final thought...  Curious, what makes this one of the best saved games you've ever received?

Very interesting...  I'm interested to hear what you find out, even if it's just simply I made a tweak, but there wasn't any huge impact but I tried..

Well on my mega system, (3990x) I started with 202 second turns. I've gotten it down to 193 seconds mainly by doing some object culling.  This comes at the cost of low end systems (<4 cores) since I'm doing some filtering.

A faster GPU wouldn't help.   This scenario is basically why things like DirectX12 and Vulkan were developed to solve.

People say "game X isn't even that pretty".  Artwork quality is a factor of budget.  Fundamentally, in your saved game, you have, literally, hundreds of thousands of objects that might *possibly* need to be visible to the GPU and thus have to be kept around even if they're not being drawn.  Compare that to say DOOM Eternal which might have a half dozen objects on screen at once.  It's just a different CS issue.

Hmmm, what map size are you playing? I'm playing on Gigantic with all civs available, including from the DLC's.  At most my wait is about 5 to 8 seconds between the turns. Turn 388.

It really comes down to the specific game.  In his game, there are just so many objects.  I'm writing a filter that will try to purge out some objects that might make turn times faster.  

I don't think that many people play the game with fewer <4 cores and even if they did, they probably aren't playing big maps. So it's probably a good trade off.

The main thing is that CPU core speeds haven't really gotten much faster in recent years.  So we're still bogged down by the fastest single core when it comes to sending commands to the GPU.

So it's not really the GPU that's the problem here OR the CPU.  It's just that DirectX 11 is serialized.

In DirectX 12 and Vulkan, multipe cores can be talking to the GPU at once.

The only reason GalCiv appears to use a lot of GPU is because the particle system just sits in a while(1) loop.  So while DirectX 11 is queuing up commands, the GPU is still kept busy.

Ah what would I do with benefits of hindsight... But I am surprised you supported base game this long. I would drop it long before 3.0. Considering nr of variables it must be pain ****** to support basically two games in one.

This would be amazing, should it work.  What about my question about fleets vs. single ships?  Does the game count fleets as single ships or as a bunch of ships?  And would changing the AI to condense ships to fleets if at all possible (within a certain radius) help this even further?  As a lot of the time the AI has many stacked ships vs. fleeting them up.  Which for the player also can be frustrating when they have to attack the same ship 20x just to kill all of them at that location.  Seems the AI sets a way-point for ships to go to, but then doesn't combine them into a fleet.

Which is one of the reasons why AMD has started taking the advantage with multiple cores and where Intel is falling behind because they at least for a while didn't see the value in it.  However, now as more and more things are using multiple core they have started to look that way as well.

Is there a way to to transfer some of the commands to the particle system?  This may be a dumb question, however, if that side is just looping maybe you could 'trick' some commands over to that side, therefore using 2 streams of information to the GPU vs. just one?

This is the only game I've posted modding to forums ect...  Too bad there isn't an easy way outside of that for posting mods.  Keep in mind Frogboy, this game does have some mods running, such as virtually endless Artifact usage, soft cap versus the in game hard cap for most of them.

Hmmm... still hoping for news of GalCivIV soon??? lol I know you couldn't answer that.  Speaking of Cari, what ever happened to Paul?  Is he still around or did he move on to other things as you have seen to take control of this project and haven't heard a peep about Paul at all.  Maybe I missed a post about that.