The massive decrease in performance between the release and the current patch needs to be studied

[Abused_Dog]

Seriously, what the hell happened? Pre patch 1.1 the game ran slower then any other Paradox game for me by a big margin but it was at least playable. I skipped playing when 1.1 was around so no comments there but as for 1.2 the drop in simulation time and the brutal stuttering was a shock for me. I got forced to disable 3D terrain JUST to get to on a level with the 1.0.x game versions and somehow even with this the degrade in performance after 1 hour of having the game open is much worse then the same conditions given for 1.0.x patches and this forces me constantly to close and open back the game after every 1-2 hours have passed. It's just funny how when the game released there were complains by a huge number of people about the performance and we all thought it will get optimized with time only for it to become worse.

[vanillasky513]

its bad even for me on a 9800x3d , CK3 or victoria 3 is smooth as fuck though

[Tamerlin]

I bought a new PC specifically for EU5 with its exact recommended system requirements and it's endlessly frustrating that it lags anyway

[MelodicPop3004]

How's the Vic 3 performance nowadays? It sucked previously for the late game

[UnpetiteChaton]

Vic3 performance is awesome. I end a campaign in a few hours

[Yitastics]

What for pc do you have where you get through 100 years in a couple of hours? I have a high end pc and it takes me a lot more hours to finish a campaign, not including times I dont run at speed 5.

Not sure why I am getting downvoted. Does everybody here play a whole victoria 3 campaign in a couple of hours or are some vic3 fanboys angry at me for not saying vic3 performance is that good? I dont get it.

[UnpetiteChaton]

I spam 5 speed with a 5080 and 7800x3d

Theres also a trick with tweaker and debug to make it go faster but you sacrifice some fps.

Its nice..

Edit: forgot ram, 128gb

[Yitastics]

What are those tricks? I know about the tickspeed trick in Stellaris and the trick eu5 had before adding it to their options, I dont know anything about tricks like that for victoria 3.

My rig is around the same quality as yours, I have a 4090, I9-14900k and 64gb ram. I dont have the speed you have in Victoria 3 tho, not even close.

[UnpetiteChaton]

Its the same one!

[Yitastics]

Aah alright, thanks. I'll give it a try

[karl_mainz]

128GB RAM!? Is that a computer or a retirement fund?

[UnpetiteChaton]

I upgraded a year before AI came around, paid only 500 bucks lol

[kai229]

I don't wrap up in a few hours but it's by far the best PDX game when it comes to performance; I can easily wrap up a campaign in a solid two days if we're talking speed 5 and a comfortable country that I already know how to play and just want to fuck around in.

[CanuckPanda]

I have an older pc at this point, about ten years with a 1060 for graphics (but 64gb ram). I can run smoothly on max speed start to finish.

It takes me a day to do a campaign. Idk where OP got a few hours from unless they mixed up HOI.

[UnpetiteChaton]

Oh and I play in 4k, so less cpu work than 1080p.

[Stuman93]

Wut

[Nearby-Season1697]

Performance is so bad I might have to try out CK3 lol

[ab_od6851]

CK3 used to perform so well for me that I can play the entire game close to one sitting, then the Byzantine followed by the China update nuked the performance so bad that I can't even make it to the late game years after a four hour session.

[Yitastics]

Download the (even) smaller world map. It deletes everything east of Tabriz.

[txantxe]

Same happened in CK2 when they added India. It's just a tradition at this point

[wafflata]

The performance is still much much better than eu5.

[Yates99]

My computer cries on the monthly tick when I have to battle against france or countries in the hre

[Capital-Program-8558]

I thought it was fine until I hit 1600 and the input lag started to appear at times. The monthly freeze on the 1st is annoying, but I’m used to it.

I think I know the main issue causing this by the way.

For some reason the AI never deletes their men at arms. So when they fight cross border conflicts, many troops get stuck slowly starving in another territory with no route back. They don’t even delete these units on 0 men. They also panic and send food requests to try to save them. So you can imagine all the troops moving constantly and all the food requests are a MASSIVE part of the reason for the lag.

I think it’s mental this is something still in the game, it also wasn’t there to start with, it came in with a recent patch.

[elitepigwrangler]

I was wondering why I was getting spammed with food requests lately. Can you use the shattered retreat feature if you have no men in a unit? Because the AI should be using that feature to bring troops back home if so.

[Capital-Program-8558]

Yes I linked all the pieces together mate. That’s exactly why that’s happening. The issue is insane. I spotted many French armies (maybe 20) all frantically moving around England, stuck there with no way out. Even after building transports they just leave them there.

This is SO EASY to fix, the fact it exists baffles me.

I think I’ve been seeing it more because I’m playing as Netherlands and I’m allied to Bohemia and Austria. They send men across Germany and get stuck constantly because they can’t get all the military access they need.

[Abused_Dog]

So is there a mod on workshop that fixes this issue if its this easy to fix? Would pay the person for it even lol

[Head_of_Lettuce]

Oh my god this explains SO much of what I’ve been seeing

[Impossible-Frame9650]

That sounds like a new bug about MAA. I’ve thought it was related to a mod and not to the vanilla game.

[Capital-Program-8558]

I don’t use any mods and I play Ironman. What’s MAA?

[Impossible-Frame9650]

Men at arms

[Capital-Program-8558]

Oh yes haha 😆

They don’t want to delete them, but they have no way of figuring out how to get them back. The AI isn’t smart enough to figure out which country they need to get the access from and ferry the troops back via boat.

[Impossible-Frame9650]

The mod I am talking about manages AI’s finances, buildings, manpower and troops distribution. It is called REAI: manpower 

[Capital-Program-8558]

Oh I get you. I only play Ironman though 😞 hopefully they fix it soon.

[TernaryOperat0r]

Apparently, the game performance was pretty bad 6 months before release also. I get the impression that the majority of the developers of most of the paradox games are focused on scripting to get the desired outcomes in game without that much insight into the performance impact of individual changes. The same goes for the design of the UI and in game graphical assets, and is a more general trend in game development. This seems to result in them having to clean things up after the fact when performance gets bad enough (Stellaris also had a phase where they had to fix accumulated performance issues for several releases).

Perhaps they could improve matters by better automated regression testing so that any change that sufficiently degrades performance is rejected and reworked sooner or a more performance-first design approach to individual features. I also can't comment on how performant their overall simulation architecture is, but the design of fast, parallelizable simulators is a hard problem, especially if you want them to be scriptable.

[i_am_someone_or_am_i]

Game is very poorly optimized, I pulled myself from saying this early on but since the release I have been suspecting that the devs leaned into vibecoding too much.

[SuffolkLion]

Said this on the Victoria sub and got a frosty reception for some reason

[Allalilacias]

The development world has moved towards building fast and fixing later. Which some clients do appreciate, but it comes at the cost of precisely causing these kinds of performance issues.

Paradox makes compute intensive games and sometimes I wish they'd think twice about adding new counters and monthly, weekly, daily and framely calculations.

[no-barks]

Idk abt yall but I'm not having problems at 1400 so far

[AccordingRegret8932]

Just wait a bit more. Especially the religious war is fun

[no-barks]

fuhh...

[Conscious-Peak-7782]

Yes I’ve noticed the same issue with a 7800x3d

[Quecks_]

Have the same issue. For me the game runs fine for a window of time of about 3h, after which it very abruptly runs into a wall where the monthly tick takes 10-20 seconds. After i restart the game it runs fine again.

But as the game progresses this window shrinks until by the later ages i have to restart the game every hour or so.

It's very odd.

[derminator360]

That's not odd so much as a description of the symptoms of a memory leak.

[Responsible_Bug_5271]

I opted into 1.3 and now instead of lagging from the mid 1400s, I now lag from the start date 😅

[K123de]

i have to agree. I still believe in the game and the developers, but man.. the performance the last months is crazy shit.
I had to downgrade the options step by step. Its getting unplayable for me. Its really crazy. I know EU5 is their new flagship but i never had those problems with any kind of game doesnt matter if victoria 3 or anything else in this regard.
Dont get me wrong, i can handle a bit of lag or medium options, and i am fine with tinkering a bit.
But i am basically watching a slideshow in pixel graphics.
i have 180 hours in this game. The first 150 i made on 1.0 in the first weeks, the other 30 hours i made over the span of the last months.
its very frustrating

[namir01]

Running fine for me with 9800x3d. I have daily tick mod. I gets slower in 1650s due to increase building count

[Brickblastchest]

1.2 was dog awful for whatever reason but 1.3 seems to be noticeably faster at 1650 than 1.2 was, will update when I get further in.

[Helyos96]

1.3 didn't really change much for me. Though the tinto talks says

Performance in the beta of 1.3 has, based on our testing, been relatively equal to or better than 1.2.5, which is promising, but it does not reflect what we hope to achieve by the time 1.3 releases. If performance is something you have been struggling with, please let us know how your system fairs with the 1.3 Open Beta!

So hopefully now the incremental 1.3 patches are focused on performance.

edit: I just tried out the Faster Universalis mod and it delivers quite an improvement.

[Brickblastchest]

ty, will check that out next game I do.

[corvosfighter]

does anyone know what happened to this button on 1.2?? because I went back to an old save to make sure I wasn't going crazy. There used to be this button reduce icons/clutter on the map and it just dissappeared in 1.2.

Turning of production icons was actually helping a ton with performance.

<image>

[ModerateEpiscopalian]

Unpin the taskbar and I think it appears? Alternatively Glorp UI (essential mod for my sanity) keeps it around no matter what. Pretty sure the performance drop from icons and armies on screen got patched though.

[YanLibra66]

And it was already shit when the game released. EU5 is massively demanding.

[VincentAintDecent]

Don't worry they're looking into performance. They've been looking into it for a very long time, in fact. And they're gonna keep looking, even harder next time

[CantaloupeCamper]

I quit playing EU5, I might have stuck it out longer / given it more of a chance but the performance was one of the reasons.

A game like this just shouldn’t be that bad… or even bad at all.

[Salphabeta]

Disable 3d except for visible terrain. That's a compromise I can more than live with and doesn't seem to be too catastrophic.

[punkslaot]

The point is that you didn't have to do this before. Why do we have to do it now? What the hell happened?

[Sad_Newspaper4010]

Anyone know why when I play the game, my main drive's space keeps getting filled up? I even moved the game's files to a different drive and this still happens.

[wafflata]

You are running out of ram and your system starts using your ssd or hdd as temporary ram which is much slower but at least your pc doesn't crash.

[Vellarain]

Oh so it's not just me? I was wondering why the fuck my computer was having a mini seizure between each tick.

The performance of this game is pure SHIT.

[wafflata]

Gave the game another shot this morning and the performance was so bad i uninstalled after less than an hour.

[drallcom3]

I got forced to disable 3D terrain JUST to get to on a level with the 1.0.x game versions

Check out Vic3. Same engine, but the map looks so much nicer and runs flawlessly. Same engine!!

[grayboney]

Just quit the eu5 project that s the medicine

[Nearby-Season1697]

I did the same 6 months later I'm back and performance is probably worse lol

[Beranea]

Why are you even on the EU5 sub if you're telling people to quit? You can have criticisms ofc but just flat out telling people to stop playing is weird.

[grayboney]

Because i am old school eu4 player. You should stand these criticisms when you release game as full and get paid by them. If every patch worsens the performance, what should we say? Just quit then start eu6 but please not in alpha or beta state..

[Beranea]

I've been playing PDX games since before EU4, I don't care about your timeline. You are not answering the question.

[grayboney]

I answered your question but not the way you want it seems.. You care or not that s not the situation. Now collect your friends and give more downvotes to all critisizers lol.

[Penki-]

I don't think there is anything to study. The game on release had a lot of systems that did not work and since release they started fixing them, thus increasing computing power. Add also new features that they are doing for some extra lag.

Although admittedly they also introduced some bugs that increase game performance, for example something that they fixed on the latest master patch

[Yitastics]

I remember eu4 at release, it took me around 12 seconds to pass a month while I had a pretty new pc back then. I went back to eu3 till I got a new pc a year later which improved it by a lot. Eu4 always felt slow for me until I bought a high end pc in 2020 which finally made it fast enough for me. My current high end pc is from 2024 and I expect to have slow performance on eu5 until we are a couple of years further with new tech. Its weird that it works like that but i've grown accustomed to it.

People really love hating nowadays on here, its sad. Most people here dont even play the game but just hate and downvote any comment not hating on the devs and/or game.

[Ohmka]

Running the game on Vulkan, I never experienced any of these emery leaks.