I noticed something quite...curious about this game, for some reason despite my computer having an 8 core CPU, this game always only use 4

The core 1-3-5-6 are always left there doing nothing, while the core 0-2-4-7 seems to struggle in making this game work, despite all core being marked as usable for this process 4 core being forced working for 8

I also tried to force the game using Only the core it normally ignore and excluded the one it seems prefer to use, with the affinity option in task manager; found out the game become impossible to play as only "core 1" is processing while all the others do absolutely nothing related to the game, and are marked as idle

Can someone else that have at least a 6 core CPU try to monitor it's resource usage and confirm this?

Using 1.7 patch, marked as 1.6 here on GOG

The game, as far as I know uses up to 4 cores and it's enough for it. It runs smoothly for me on 4 cores. But programming the game to work on 8 cores is much more work. This team simply lacks the manpower to do so. And since 6 or 8 cores are really not necessary for the game to run smoothly, I don't see why would they spend much time on that instead of making new content.

Just my two cents. :)

4 cores is fairly typical for a game like this. It's not doing so many things at once that it really needs to be running eight major processes on separate cores; the usual bottleneck on games is the graphics card rather than the CPU.

Problem is that at 4 cores the game do not seems to processing properly, as using the system monitor to check out the resources used, this game pretty much use all 4 cores to pretty much 100% and ask for more

Not sure how a dual core could actually run this game smoothly frankly

Also the problem when changing affinity remain, switching to the normally unused core make the game freeze and ignore them completely

Hmm, didn't had any problems so far. Of course guys are constantly optimizing the game so it will be even smoother in the future, but it's running fine for me as it is now. I'm playing on Asus ROG laptop, i7 4700HQ, 8GB RAM, nVidia GTX 870M 2 GB.

When I'm running the game it isn't coming anywhere near 100% utilization of any of the four cores. (Most of them hover in the 10-15% range.)

Is the game running normally when you *don't* alter the affinity settings? If so, the appearance of 100% utilization may be a false positive of sorts from the monitor.

Checked my system and it work fine, but no matter what 4 cores are NOT enough to run this game smoothly, unless you happen to have at least 8GB or RAM that is, in that case it seems that even a 2.8 CPU can run this, not well but it can

@Garran
How in the nine hell it can run at 10-15% load on your cores? While it does nothing you mean, simply standing still admiring nebulas? In that case my load barely touch 5%

Try that test again during combat after cruising for 10 sector straight or after exiting a wormhole and tell me again you CPU load.That's how this game should be tested



Nope, as said in this post this game require at least 8GB of memory to run smoothly, it theoretically can work on a 32 bit system, but in practice it doesn't, the extra load i am experiencing come from the game inability to correctly exchanging memory flow as the RAM saturate pretty quickly, and of course try to compensate by increasing CPU load to exchange more data. But with 8Gb or more this problem will probably not happen


In the end this game requirement, especially the recommended ones are wrong, quadruple the RAM requirement and then everything is golden. Need to update this info to GOG, and here my system info to prove it:

AMD FX 8120 Eight Core Processor 3.2Ghz (Over clocked to reach stable 3.4)

4GB Ram DDR 3

HD Radeon 5870 1GB Ram

Windows 7 Ultimate


Here system requirement of this game from it's own page, recommended:

Microsoft Windows 7, 8 Processor: 3.0 GHz Dual core or equivalent Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: DirectX 11 compliant graphics card with 1GB RAM DirectX: Version 11

My system is beyond this requirement, recommended requirement, still doesn't function correctly. As said before i am pretty sure that with 8GB Ram i won't have any problem, but that is double the recommended requirements.....

I think your performance is as you say more related to lack of ram than the cores of the cpu. I have basically the same system as you, only difference is I have a 4 core cpu at 2.6ghz and 6GB of DDR3. Same graphics card and OS and game runs fine at 40-60fps

The game has had problems with memory leaks and they have constantly fixed them in each patch. With further optimization to memory usage performance should improve. But I agree they probably should have said 4GB minimum and 8GB recommended.

I just took a trip up the left side of the map carrying cargo and dealing with the usual pirate attacks along the way. One core was working hard and the others were, for the most part, sitting at that low usage level. The only time some (not all) of the others rose (rather than the occasional spike) was when a gunfight actually spilled over into a wormhole, which is definitely not a typical situation. :P

Memory use was around 6.5 gigs at peak, although this system has lower memory use than most because I make a habit of killing off the mass of on-by-default Windows services that aren't actually needed and don't typically have anything other than the AV/firewall running in the background.

All told, I'd say that the lack of memory is probably what's causing the issue for you, and if you're getting a lot of disk activity (swapfile) during gameplay, even more so. It's also possible that you have something running in the background that's causing interference - various 'helpful' programs and utilities are known for that.

Due to necessity i "updated" my system to a 64 bit OS, and now posses 8 Gb of ram

Can confirm without a doubt that with the Same Identical Hardware, now this game run without any problems, only very minor slowdown after using a wormhole or the quick jump device for barely a second or two

This game just cannot run on a 32 bit system, at least not as it is, and 6gb of ram seems the minimum necessary to play acceptably

A 32-bit setup will run into a lot of trouble due to addressing limitations because 32-bit, by default, can only allocate up to two gigabytes of memory to a given program. Even with LAA (Large Address Aware) programs, it's still kludgy compared to a proper 64-bit environment.

I'm not sure why, but not many people have this problem. I have 8GB RAM and sometimes I play for hours, go outside, get back and continue without exiting the game and I haven't had any crashes or memory leaks in almost a year and then we were still in beta.

Please, if you encounter Crash to desktop, send us your game save and log.txt from your game folder (immediately after the crash and before restarting the game) to oliver@starpointgemini.com so we can see what's happening.