Frequent lags, freezes, not responding for seconds#153

The game runs fine, but CA frequently freezes and lags.
It often freezes for 10 seconds and window is not responding. Sometimes it’s not responding and then crashes. The rest of the system also becomes unresponsive when this happens. The pattern is something like when a program allocates too much memory and causes the system to swap like crazy. But my system has plenty of RAM so that might not be the cause.

My system has 16GB of RAM (one stick).
RAM speed is 1066MHz.
The CPU is an AMD A8-9600
The GPU is an integrated AMD Radeon R7.
Disk is SSD.

So it’s a 6yr old PC and is not a gaming rig.

I also have a dedicated GPU which is not in the PC currently, it’s a Radeon RX 550. But I see no improvement when it’s in the PC, and the GPU utilization generally stays low while the CPU utilization is 100%. So the problem is probably elsewhere.

CA frequently uses 4-5GB of RAM.
AoE2 also uses several gigs of RAM while it’s running.

DxDiag shows RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64 events for CaptureAge.exe and AoE2 as well.

I also couldn’t find minimum system requirements to run CA. Perhaps my PC is too potato for CA.

(It’s currently potato for multiplayer AoE2 too since the previous patch as it doesn’t pass the benchmark…)

@Calmarius I’m afraid the CPU is the bottleneck in this case! When I was on a Ryzen 5 1600 CaptureAge ran okay for 1v1s, but struggled very frequently in TGs. That CPU is about 33% faster in single core than the one you mention, and multi-core performance is about 250% faster, so it would seem that this is the main issue. Just out of curiosity, I’d like to know if you can also check the per-core load while using CaptureAge.

Process explorer shows around 25% CPU utilization (1 core of the 4), so I guess only one thread is churning.

Also the issue happens regardless of playback speed or zoom level, I can get as many long freezes even when playing back at 0.5x speed. So I’m not entirely convinced that only the CPU is the culprit.

Although a slow CPU may cause CA to get stuck in a processing loop if the events come in a faster rate than CA can handle them, so the program freezes until the events clear up. A faster CPU doesn’t have this problem, because it can keep up with the backlog. Maybe improving the scheduling of redraws and processing can help.

@Calmarius That would be correct. Even if you play the game back at a slower rate, CA will periodically do things other than just display the game, which would explain the freezes as these tasks would take the CPU capacity. Thanks for checking the task manager!

Another observation is, that when the freeze occurs, the minimap stays active, that is it still flashes the attacks and the number above the playback button that says eg. 4.5X still updates. So it’s not entirely frozen. But UI does not respond.

I wonder if it’s possible to profile where the bottleneck is.

@Calmarius this could be due to the fact that those parts of the software use different pipelines and can have a different framerate than the world rendering. You will notice that CADE uses several threads as well, so there could be a few different interactions with these things.

Alas, the CPU will continue being a bottleneck, but it would be interesting to see a screenshot of the debug framerate stats that display by the minimap by pressing F10 :)

I recently bought a big QHD monitor, and now I don’t even pass the 1v1 performance test in AoE2, so I will need a upgrade the CPU/GPU soon.

After pressing F10. The typical value near the minimap is something like “2.33 12 (9-1)”. The number before the parenthesis stays around 10. The first number in parenthesis is all over the place, but generally stays below the number that’s before the parenthesis. The second number in the parenthesis ususally stays at 1, but sometimes I see it stay at 4.

When a freeze occurs the numbers freeze, then the first number in the parenthesis start to count up from 1 when the freeze resolves. Freezes occur even when the CA is paused.

My motherboard is quite old, and can’t support CPUs newer then Ryzen 3000 series, maybe with some hardware hacking I can make it support Ryzen 5000 series. Since these CPUs does not have integrated graphics, I need a better dedeicated GPU too. I wonder how much improvement this will be.

That does make sense, for sure. It seems your CPU isn’t an issue, as 3rd gen Ryzen should work well. I’d advise you to check your motherboard manufacturer’s website for a firmware update. In my case, I had a 350 series motherboard I was able to update to support 5th gen Ryzen, in case you wanted to upgrade. Otherwise, you should still be fine in the CPU front as this seems to be a GPU issue based on the fact that the stutters began after upgrading your monitor to a higher resolution one.

Thanks for the data! There isn’t much we can do, unfortunately, in this situation, but the good thing is it that it’s mostly certain the GPU is the issue. What GPU model do you have?

I didn’t compose that previous response well. I forgot to write that I’m planning to upgrade my system.

At the beginning of this thread I said that currently I have an AMD A8-9600 with integrated graphics. And no dedicated GPU currently.

The motherboard is an Asrock A320M Pro4. But its latest BIOS that can support Zen 3 CPUs have dropped support of Bristol Ridge CPUs I currently have, so I cannot update my BIOS all the way up to that point unless I get a loaner CPU for the upgrade.

So I decided to order a Ryzen 5 3600 (Zen 2)and an RX6400 GPU it should arrive tomorrow. Both of them are entry level and pretty relatively cheap.

I’ll report back once I managed to install them.

The hardware upgrade is in. Indeed Upgrading the CPU to Ryzen 5 3600 and RX6400 solved the performance problems.

That’s great to hear! In that case, it would be nice to have some final information about your system. With your new CPU and GPU are you able to maintain 60fps in late game 4v4 scenarios with UHD graphics? We are always interested in knowing more about specific user configurations and performance :)

The monitor is 2560×1440 and the resolution won’t go above that. So it’s “just” QHD.

I’ve just let 8 AIs duke it out in a 4v4 and observed them in CA.

The frame rate stays around 50-60, sometimes goes down to 40, but CA’s UI is responsible now.

When playing it back at 8x speed, the playback speed slows down to 1.9 though. But it doesn’t affect normal speed playback.

EDIT: I don’t have the UHD graphics pack, if you referred to that by “UHD graphics”.

This is amazing! Thanks a lot for that information. It’s great to hear you are not facing any further performance issues. Enjoy CA 💖