Performance issues in Swarming/Final missions

[brunodema]

I'm currently trying to play the last level of the campaign but good god, the lag I'm getting is unreal. I usually can play around 40-50 fps with my settings and 30 fps on some retaliations. A couple levels like HQ Assaults or late game main quest missions take longer alien turns due to the number of enemies involved, and I have no problem with that, but I'm having so much trouble and slowdowns on the last mission that I'm not having fun at all playing it. I just wanna know if this is a common issue between players or if it's some mod conflict that I'm having with my game.

[trihero]

It's an issue for me too, in fact I first saw this in vanilla on the last mission where it takes literal minutes to go through the alien turn. As I understand it, the game is actually trying to animate all the pods on the map whether you see them or not, so this gets exponentially worse the more mobs there are on the map.

It's one of the achilles heels of XCOM 2 in general but just have to live with it....

[Bill]

Try reloading a save. Most of my slowdown comes from debris

[brunodema]

Try reloading a save. Most of my slowdown comes from debris

I tried but had no luck. And I even reloaded a lot of times, because it was so painful to play with the slowdowns that I couldn't play more than 30 minutes straight without losing the will to play the game.

[nightwyrm]

Suppression is also a big offender. The screaming, stomping Berserkers does a number on my sound too.

[Shaenix]

My game slows down and even freezes during big missions like the Haven and HQ Assault.
I could play vanilla fine with the same setting, but since there are way more things on those big missions in LW, using the same setting may not be optimal anymore.
What I found useful was reboot the game. It feels like after running those big missions for a while, the game generates a lot of junks that slow down the system.

[Zyxpsilon]

ONE word -- Graphics.

With all the particle-effects, animations, map size.. it's absolutely normal to bring most CPU & GPU (memory + cycles) to their knees.

Add the XC2 processing of "History" tracking and you get a huge OS impact on system resources gathering & coordination.

And with these Bloom, Texturing, FXAA, V-Sync (etc) graphic options.. even the most powerful PC out there can suffer on the effective speed needed to smooth out WaterWorld.

Thus here's the low-down truth sadly -- choose between quality or performance & verify your VCard driver settings because there *ARE* various adjustments anyone can do to limit the impacts. Check Online for these old tricks as i can clearly remember the February/16 rush for optimal setups that somehow "repaired" most conditions in a number of tricky ways.

Good luck.

[Arcalane]

As I understand it, the game is actually trying to animate all the pods on the map whether you see them or not, so this gets exponentially worse the more mobs there are on the map.

If I had to guess, this is to solve complaints about X1/X2 having 'teleporting' pods that could bounce around in the fog of war, completely ignoring the actual terrain and occasionally sane movement limits -- it was very rarely possible for a pod to even circle around and appear behind you just as you were about to walk into it from the front.

This was obviously not very popular and also bad for stealth.

~~

Unfortunately performance loss is basically inevitable. The base game never really exceeded more than about 20-25 enemies outside of a few set pieces, and was usually far lower (pods were pretty much always 4 units). Long War 2 can easily hit double those numbers, and X2's "maximum" is more like LW2's "average" now.

Now it's also still possible you're seeing a mod conflict (I had to disable Upcoming Events In Hours because the geoscape ran extremely poorly with it and LW2 combined, for instance) but it's kinda hard to say if we don't know what mods you're running.

~~

Try reloading a save. Most of my slowdown comes from debris

Most of the problematic debris should automatically be cleaned up/deleted anyway. Anyone who's blown a hole in an ADVENT Blacksite can probably tell you that it spawns an absurd amount of debris that fades away after 10-15 seconds or so, but will absolutely murder your FPS until it's gone.