New Hardware requirements ?

[FloLePanda]

The game cannot run on dual core, even 3.6Ghz overclocked one. 

Home Base configuration for my computer and my 2 kids :

Core2Duo 3.6Ghz Overclocked, 16GB DDR3, GT710. Playing fine a couple months ago on 41.5x, cannot play on 41.68 (gets ejected from car in multiplayer, map crash, black screen, etc)

Xeon 5440 3.6GHz Overclocked, 8GB DDR2, Radeon 7850 w/ 2GB (20-30outdoor-40FPS indoor)

Xeon 5440 3.6Ghz Overclocked, 8GB DDR2, GT710 w/ 2GB (20-30outdoor -40FPS indoor)

 

note concerning the 8GB computers :

 

Texture compression is unchecked by default, which makes a lot more memory used, maxing the 8GB, game gets very slow to load, and ingame is not smooth despite correct FPS.

if i check texture compression, the video memory used is around 1800MB out of 2GB available, and system + game takes around 6GB base memory. If i uncheck memory compression, video memory used is 1800MB still, but base system RAM gets maxed at 100% (8GB). It is WEIRD to see the video memory is strictly the same with the option on or off.

 

so have to play with texture compression : on if 8GB memory.

 

to be able to run the game over 10fps on my elder s son computer, (dualcore 3.6, 16GB DDR3, GT710), i had to change the cpu for a i5 4590 and replace the 710 with  GTX960 to get roughly 35-50Fps indoor, 20-30FPS outdoor, which is the same than the older DD2 Gen computers with less efficient video cards. again, weird.)

 

the game seems to be extremely demanding to the CPU. takes 80-90% of each 4 cores on the i5 or the Xeons. Makes it the most demanding game we have on hand. To compare, the latest lego skywalker runs super smooth on my younger's son, Xeon / 8GB / Radeon 7850. Total core load is less than zomboid, the Lego game is just out last week.

 

When i see that people with uber rigs, involving 8/12/20 cores and RTX do have also problems to get the game smooth, i m wondering what kind of computer is able to run the game in good conditions.

 

when i look to system requirements on steam :

 

Processor: Intel 2.77GHz Quad-core
Memory: 8Gb Ram

 

i m kind of puzzled. so i tried to optimize a LOT of things, few to no zombies, cutting off all details, lowering resolution down to 1280.... it wont ever be "smooth". The amount of items around has a direct impact, driving on a road where you dismantled a lot of cars (aka south of muldraugh burnt traffic jam) can make the game go under 10FPS whatever the details settings are.

 

There is really something to do about that. You cannot imagine how hard it was to get a second hand GTX 960, and the price for it was 50% more than before covid. There is nothing to be bought under 300€ on the "new" market. This situation is going to last until S2 2023, maybe it is time to seriously optimize the game.

 

On LAN multiplayer, what does it do to lag :

 

when going one floor up or down in houses, i can see my kids falling from nowhere instead of going down the stairs.

If i jump over a fence, one of my kid sees me on one side, the other not

item loot is random, my kid grabs an item, he sees it in inventory, but in fact the item is still on the ground, and will disappear from his bag later on

travelling in a car over a speed of 50 gets them ejected from the car to end up in the middle of a pitch black forest with roadsigns cone everywhere

Fighting is EXTREMELY hard

Characters teleport

 

The server :

i5 2500k @ 4.5Ghz, 16GB DDR3, win 10 in command line server mode.

the whole lan is Cat 6, no collisions, no packet loss.

 

3 months ago when MP was released, there was no problems, none. game ran smooth.

 

What happened since then ? 

Also, "Zulu" is the new java platform ? did it change recently ? Is there anything to make it more optimized ?

 

I appreciate a lot the efforts of development. It took time to make the game stable for MP, now it is, on the code side, i'd like to play with my kids and.... wow. i have to invest how many hundred euros, precisely, to do so ?

 

thanks for your attention.

 

[Fregrant]

,Maybe because C2D is so ancient, it does not even have SSE 4.2, not mention AVX instructions - which are pretty standard novadays.

 

Im using i5 3320M - two cores, 3.1 GHz. No much problem, crashes are pretty rare.

[EnigmaGrey]

Yeah, I think a lot of this is going to come down the age of the cpus involved vs the gpu. I'll grab a profiler and double-check the VRAM usage, as last I looked it was 800-1200 MB without texture compression, but this could have changed with caching animations.

 

It could be that the CPU can't shuffle textures to the GPU fast enough, so it's somehow getting overloaded caching that data itself. Try full screen in Options and reduce the framerate lock to something like 30 (turn off vsync if it is on). See if that helps with the vram usage.

 

For LAN, make sure you/the other users enter the LAN IP of the server in addition to the Public IP of the server (there are two fields). That should remove the possibility of sending packets out to the Internet that immediately have to return, which some routers can't handle well.  

 

If the server itself is running a vintage HDD, this can negatively effect streaming, as well. Generally, budget high capacity mechanical hdds prior to 2014 will have trouble streaming the map.  If this the case, I'd strongly recommend any cheap SSD or even thumbdrive to run and save the game from on the server.

 

Do make sure the server is using at least 4 GB of RAM, just to be safe.  Note though that the default script does, iirc, have 16 gb as the max default, which will be too much, so it's worth editing the startServer64.bat (assuming windows) just to be safe. I assume this is the "dedicated server package?" If you're just using Hosts, in-game, then it's enough to set the max RAM there.

 

Zulu is the new JVM, which supports pauseless garbage collection and dynamic RAM allocation. It's far better than the old version.

[FloLePanda]

well, i always run the games in fullscreen, i ll check by tweaking the FPS lock though, didnt think of it. there is no vintage hdd, the cpus might be old, but i know how to manage those, a bit like old muscle cars. Xeons are full of cache and extremely efficients, C2D is history now, but i5 doesnt do much better so i ll dig deeper. Server has 10 dedicated in the command line, the whole thing is airproof as i dont want anyone to come mess with me and my kids, it s firewall blocked, nothing gets in or out. I used to manage gaming rooms with 200+ counterstike pc's in 2001-2002, i m just using the same old recipes.

Zulu seems to litterally put the systems on their knees. i ll check if everything is fine on the java side, maybe an old machine still installed in the system creating side effects. will do those tomorrow, will post any new things i d find.

 

[EnigmaGrey]

I'm seeing only 800 MB used at 1600 x 900 res. Texture compression halves this to 400 MB. (This is in windowed mode with the framerate uncapped). 

 

How much used will be related to resolution and framerate, as well as whether there are mods running. What are you using?

 

Unfortunately I had to go on task manager's performance tab to get these results. Couldn't get an opengl profiler to behave nicely with PZ. 

[FloLePanda]

Wow

ok there s something really wrong, because i m not even talking full hd there, mine is 1680, kids are lower, still we get max memory used. i ll double check with other tools maybe it s also not reading the correct values (even though, same thing reported from task manager and libre hardware monitor)

there must be something activated, i ll try windowed vs full screen, change resolution, and definitely inspect the nividia control panel (seems to be a problem on the nvidia cards, the radeon behaves more or less normally, i mean, the computer isnt strong so i wouldnt expect anything from it. the weird is the two nvidia computers showing the same problem with a super low end vcard and a decent 960gtx)

i wonder if "disable threaded optimization" in nvidia control panel is still a thing, forgot to check if it was still off.

will keep you in touch, with screenshots and everything. seems i m not alone (steam forums and reddit full of it)

[FloLePanda]

my day was a bit different than what i expected so i couldnt do things exactly like i wanted.

but

on my computer :

Xeon quadcore @3.4Ghz / 8GB DDR2 / SSD in Sata2 / GT710 with 2GB Vram

Vanilla Zomboid, no mods, fullscreen

resolution 1680x1050

lock framerate 60

graphics settings : everything on LOW, lightning update 15, no skybox, puddles, wind movements, etc

 

with texture compression unchecked :

VRAM 98% load. Ingame Indoors : 60FPS, outdoors 35FPS

checking texture compression :

VRAM 47% load, ingame indoors : 40-60FPS, outdoors 10-30FPS

 

CPU Load : average 70% on all cores

System memory load : 6.5GB used in both case (compression on or off) (1.8GB before launching steam)

that is _without_ mods

 

i can get back the 400MB Vram number. that is before launching a game, at start screen.

 

so basically, in 20 minutes quick test, if i enable texture compression, my computer seems unable to handle it correctly, and i get a very not smooth at all game (because 30FPS is an illusion, there are frame blocks, stuttering, i miss the correct words, it s not smooth at all). If i disable texture compression, things are better, but i wont run any mod due to lack of memory

 

weird thing : 

i went out of the game back to the main menu while typing this. Memory usage went from 6.4 to 7.3GB.

 

There s something definitely strange here. really.

 

edit : i doubt zomboid's forum is _that_ heavy to manage for chrome, i dont think it needs 900MB to go from viewing the topic to edit a post mode.

 

edit2 : console.txt, a few questions :

 

LOG  : General     , 1650462850227> Processor cores: 4
LOG  : General     , 1650462850229> Available processors (cores): 4
LOG  : General     , 1650462850232> Memory free: 76.0 MB
LOG  : General     , 1650462850233> Memory max: 3072.0 MB
LOG  : General     , 1650462850233> Memory  total available to JVM: 128.0 MB <<<<---------------- this ?????

 

LOG  : General     , 1650462850680> Mobo = [Product=EP45-DS3LR]
LOG  : General     , 1650462850975> CPU = { [Manufacturer=GenuineIntel,MaxClockSpeed=3400,Name=Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU] }
LOG  : General     , 1650462851292> Graphics = [AdapterRAM=2147483648,DriverVersion=27.21.14.5709,Name=NVIDIA GeForce GT 710]
LOG  : General     , 1650462851596> VideoMode = [VideoModeDescription=1680 x 1050 x 4294967296 couleurs]
LOG  : General     , 1650462851883> Sound = { [Manufacturer=Microsoft,Name=P‚riph‚rique High Definition Audio], [Manufacturer=Realtek,Name=Realtek High Definition Audio] }
LOG  : General     , 1650462852191> Memory RAM = { [Capacity=2147483648,Manufacturer=2147483648], [Capacity=2147483648,Manufacturer=2147483648] }

 

LOG  : General     , 1650462853595> GraphicsCard: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce GT 710/PCIe/SSE2
LOG  : General     , 1650462853596> OpenGL version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 457.09
LOG  : General     , 1650462853599> Desktop resolution 1680x1050
LOG  : General     , 1650462853609> Initial resolution 1680x1050 fullScreen=true
LOG  : General     , 1650462853610> OpenGL 1.5 buffer objects supported
LOG  : General     , 1650462853612> VSync: OFF
LOG  : General     , 1650462853645> NVIDIA: current available GPU memory is 1324 MB
LOG  : General     , 1650462853646> NVIDIA: dedicated available GPU memory is 2048 MB
LOG  : General     , 1650462853646> NVIDIA: total available GPU memory is 2048 MB

 

(cutting pages of lua loading and missing fonts and missing stuff)

LOG  : General     , 1650462881240> texturepack: loading Tiles2x
LOG  : General     , 1650462881326> texturepack: loading Overlays2x
LOG  : General     , 1650462881655> texturepack: loading JumboTrees2x
LOG  : General     , 1650462882206> texturepack: loading Tiles2x.floor
LOG  : General     , 1650462882214> LOADED UP A TOTAL OF 6 TEXTURES
DEBUG: General     , 1650462882293> TextureFBO.checkFBOSupport          > OpenGL 3.0 framebuffer objects supported

 

that s all that i see that is hardware related.

Edited April 20, 2022 by FloLePanda

[Intulect]

LOG  : General     , 1650462850232> Memory free: 76.0 MB - This portion is quite odd as it should be higher, I would look at testing your ram speeds as you are DDR3, your sticks may be dying (Just realized you said DDR3 in higher post, and DDR2 latest, if DDR2 that is 100% the issue)

Edited April 20, 2022 by Intulect

[Intulect]

Also to add, if your CPU is slower than the data being processed, it will be offloading more to the RAM, which in turn a DDR4 stick will show something that'd usually be around 500mb ,where as running the same thing on DDR3=1.5GBish, and DDR2=5GBish, since these sticks cant compress data as well

 

"When i see that people with uber rigs, involving 8/12/20 cores and RTX do have also problems to get the game smooth, i m wondering what kind of computer is able to run the game in good conditions."

 

I run-

3600x OCd

2060 Super OCd

16gb DDR4

NMVe+SSD+HDD (PZ Running off NVMe)

 

 

"when going one floor up or down in houses, i can see my kids falling from nowhere instead of going down the stairs.

If i jump over a fence, one of my kid sees me on one side, the other not

item loot is random, my kid grabs an item, he sees it in inventory, but in fact the item is still on the ground, and will disappear from his bag later on

travelling in a car over a speed of 50 gets them ejected from the car to end up in the middle of a pitch black forest with roadsigns cone everywhere

Fighting is EXTREMELY hard

Characters teleport"

^

This I see often in the 3 high pop servers I run, if RAM gets low on server end, everyone drops, and player side desync is kinda a nightmare, but we live through it while these beautiful devs work their magic.

 

Aside from this I have no issues however, issues are 100% to do with MP and will be sorted out as optimization in games usually is, looking at it logically, it was far more prevalent to deal with the cheaters, then move forward with fixing the small desyncs and such, so they had some hiccups as cheaters plagued for a small period (which was quickly fixed beautifully)

 

 

 

Edited April 20, 2022 by Intulect

[FloLePanda]

mmmmh

my server is DDR3 and we are 3 to play on it, locally, it uses barely 6gbs total (system incluced)

what you are saying about DDR2 though is extremely interesting, i didnt see things this way.

ok it s been 14 years since DD3 is out, for sure it would be about time to turn the page, slight problem though, the hardcore state of 2nd hand market, not even talking of new parts market (i just built a 4000€ rig for a customer, the 3080 just increased 50% price in 18 months going from 950 to 1500. i mean seriously. i tried to reason him, i hate to see money wasted like that, but people are free, after all)

 

sigh

 

a decent DDR3 (H97/Z97) is around 80€. an i5 is 25€ and DDR3 sticks around 40€ for 16gb, 2 computers to upgrade, that s around 300€ to spend. 

well i ll have to wait for another madman to request a 12thGen w/ RTX 3000+ setup

like

next years

on the other hand that s cool, i guess there will be cows and chickens and npc and lots of new stuff

 

Zomboid was the only game me and my kids really got into. any suggestion for another coop game that would run on 10 years old rigs ? cause we have 2hours per week together for playtime, the rest of the time it s schooldays with no time to play, and weekends they re at their mother's

 

playing with such low performances is not exactly fun, raises tensions, stress, etc... not fun.

 

Hardware Req should be corrected on steam. I m not exactly a unique case, many people use "what they can" right now (you know, loss of job, inflation skyrocketing, all that)

 

[EnigmaGrey]

You can ignore the memory free bit. That just shows what the JVM had on launch and it'll no doubt grab more as it proceeds. 

 

It could also be that PZ's texture compression isn't supported on certain nVidia hardware, so the driver falls back on software either for those missing functions or for the whole thing? I find it very unlikely though given that the gtx710 is reasonably modern and should support S3's DXT3.. It's usually a problem on nVidia-enabled Macs due to poor driver support from Apple, but manifests as textures being solid blocks of color vs. vram usage. 

Unfortunately, I really don't know enough about this sort of thing to be very helpful. Totally out of my wheelhouse.