2 500 inhabitants I had to stop the game, speed 1/2 the game and non stop freezes for a few seconds!in the beginning everything was fine, as the population grows, the problems get bigger
I’m not sure what that has to do with this thread I am trying to help someone in with their issue, but how big of a town you can make will entirely depend on your system specs, which is why we have a population limit enabled by default. The higher you go is entirely up to your PC and tolerance.
This is the wrong thread for that mate.
You’re likely hitting the limits that larger towns run into, as described by the tool tip when enabling larger populations.
This thread is for a brand new game having super high GPU load.
Make another thread if you think it’ll help, but I don’t think it will.
I’ll give this a try when I can.
That Driver didn’t work, and introduced some instability to the game when changing graphics settings like foliage.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
Just to confirm, if you load up the current latest version in steam, and run it with the latest geforce / game ready drivers, it doesn’t cause you any kind of issues/excessive load on yoru GPU with all settings maxed out?
Correct. I was actually running those May drivers up til now and updated to the latest and my GPU utilization sits at 18-20% most of the time and occasionally spikes to 28%.
Well damn… I’m not sure what to do/try next.
A list of things I’ve tried:
- Frame rate limiting set to 60
- Re-installed game
- DDU + reinstall of current driver
- Older driver test
- Change several in-game settings such as Foliage.
Do you get these GPU spikes if you run in the mono launch option?
Yes - just tested it and I get the same thing there.
A few things I’ve noticed which may or may not be related:
- The Game seems to use 7-8GB of RAM and the GPU memory respectively - on a new launch/new game - this seems quite high? - Is it perhaps doing/loading things it shouldn’t?
- Although the game lists DX12 as “Recommended” in its specs, I can only seem to get it to run in DX11 mode - is that expected?
1 Like
I can get to 100% GPU utilization in a new settlement with framerates uncapped, but that makes sense because then the game is effectively GPU bound and will maximize framerate up to the refresh rate. I can get it to immediately go back down if I set the refresh rate lower, or load a larger settlement, at which point the game becomes CPU bound.
Hitting 8 gigs of VRAM when launching the game seems high.
The DX12 recommended spec is wrong, will correct that on the store page.
Yeah it’s a weird one…
So I’m at 11.3 GB of ram, and 2.1GB of video memory used with a bunch of apps like steam, discord, firefox etc open.
When I launch the game, and start a brand new village, I go to 17.7GB of ram, and 9.6GB of vRAM used.
If I launch my existing save with lvl 2 tech unlocked, I hit closer to 25GB of ram used.
I’ve also noticed that zooming in completely, or moving away from trees helps somewhat with the frame rate.
Thanks for confirming on the DX12 part.
I’ve been reading that you ran into something similar before, albeit 3 years ago now, did anything come from that?
Kind of a similar situation though where you will get people all over the map, even with the same GPU series.
What are your video settings in-game?
Everything maxed out/highest/best - apart from supersampling which is 100%
1440p resolution.
The thing that makes the biggest difference is foliage on/off
What’s the refresh rate set to? Do you have it capped?
Maybe a stupid question, but did you try restarting your pc? And then just run steam with FF. No other browsers or anything. Just to make sure nothing else is behaving badly in the background when the game launches.
I have it set to vsync, and the nvidia app is set to limit it to 60 FPS.
I’ve tried with vsync off also.
I did find this thread that suggests deleting shader cache, but I cannot find that on my PC…
Under the path: AppData\LocalLow\Crate Entertainment\Farthest Frontier
I see a folder called Unity, but this has another folder called local.(with a bunch of letters and numbers) and then another folder with some kind of archived events folder.
I just tried this for the sake of it.
All extra programs like MSI/Adobe etc closed, on a fresh reboot and it’s the same issue unfortunately 
I’ve posted in a few threads, across FF forums and steam, so I’ll do a summary here going over what I’ve tried, and to debunk some misinformation I’ve received, as it’s a good time to give a summary.
While I don’t want to throw around the term “poorly optimized”, it very much feels like the game is trying to do something it shouldn’t - so poor optimization feels like the closest thing I can describe.
My Specs & Summary of issues:
Intel i9-14900KF
32GB RAM (DDR4)
RTX3080 10GB
1440p Res (2560x1440)
- FF seems to request an ungodly amount of GPU resources, for what should be a fairly “easy” game to run.
- The GPU makes a huge amount of noise as the fans are at 2.5k minimum, and hit 3.5k (100% I think?) on occasion.
- I can also hear coil whine, which means it’s using as much power as it possibly can.
- This is due to the game forcing the GPU to clock up to it’s MAX clock speed, and sit at 70-100% usage. - confirmed with MSI + Rivia.
- The CPU is almost idle, and sits around 5-15% usage - no single core is close to being maxed out.
- I’ve ruled out frame generation issues, by limiting the FPS to 60, and confirming with MSI/Rivia that 60FPS is what I’m actually getting, and not 120 or something like that.
- I’ve rebooted, used the driver cleaner to re-install the GPU drivers, and even tried an old one from earlier this year - no change.
- I’ve noticed the game uses 7-8GB of RAM & 7-8GB of VRAM, just on a basic new medium map.
Some things that have helped, but not fixed the issue:
- If I turn some things down (AA off, Foliage off, Supersampling down to 70%) Then I start to get a quieter GPU with less load.
- However it’s not fixed, as the clock speed is still max, just the load drops down from 70-100%, to 50-70% give or take.
I wouldn’t call the above a solution - as IMO taking Foliage off + SS down to 70% makes it look pretty crap.
Plus it only reduces the noise a bit, doesn’t actually solve it.
To compare all of the above with other games/utilities that use the GPU.
- BF2042 uses around 70-90% of the GPU, but at a MUCH lower clock of around 1000-1300 depending on what’s on screen. (DLSS OFF)
- 3DMARK Steel Nomad Benchmark - I max out at around 40 FPS on this, however the clock speeds are slightly lower (17-1800) but the usage is 100%.
BF2042 is maxed out, ultra settings and is rock solid at 60 FPS, and uses around 2+ GB LESS vRAM than FF
3DMARK is interesting as although it maxes out the GPU, and I cannot get more frames in, the heat + clocks speeds produced by it are not as significant as FF.
It also uses about 3-4GB LESS vRAM than FF - I know they’re different games/things but it’s interesting.
^^ Both of these games have much higher CPU usage also.
Therefore the only reasonable conclusion I can come to, is that something between FF and my GPU is getting misunderstood.
Either FF is requesting the GPU to do something that is causing the massive load and clock speed spike, or the GPU doesn’t understand and is getting stuck in some kind of loop.
2 Likes