Low CPU use, low frames

I'm using a per-core rainmeter skin for HWinfo64- that's why I said single-core use is never over 50%. Total CPU use is never over 25%. Are you seeing 100% use on any of your cores? Maybe it's a hardware problem for me.

OK, thanks for the info!! I'm going to have to investigate this more to figure out what the show-stopper is.

This does seem to be related to # of projectiles in flight for me. Initially, CPU use stays high (90+%) as I add projectiles, with frames gradually dropping off, as expected. As fps dips under 15 or so I start to see less and less CPU use until it's chugging along at 0-1fps and I'm wobbling between 25-50% CPU use on two cores. Weirdly, the process doesn't seem to reverse itself in the same way- frames and CPU use both stay very low until most of the projectiles are eliminated, and suddenly both come up when there are few projectiles still in flight. # of active enemies etc seems to exacerbate all this. I dunno if it's related to guidance as I can get it to happen with railguns, although it happens with many fewer missiles than railgun projectiles.

FWIW I'm running an i5-4670K at 4.7Ghz and a 1070 stock.

Either I don't understand how reported thread CPU use in Process Explorer relates to per-core CPU loads, or there's something really weird going on with the CDE.exe main thread. It seems to constantly be reporting ~25% CPU use in Process Explorer (ie 1/4 cores fully loaded), but this doesn't seem to have anything to do with what the CPU is actually reporting on a per-core basis- if I'm just entering in the main menu or ship design screen, I've got two cores loaded 80-100% initially and I'm getting some thermal load. In a big battle the main CDE.exe thread is still reporting 25% CPU use, but the CPU is telling me those two cores are ~10-30% loaded and there's no thermal load.

I'm an idiot, please feel free to delete this thread. I had thought I had CoaDE's main thread running solely on one core, but this was not the case- the result is that per-core usage looks low because the thread is being bounced around, and there's not much thermal load on any one core. If you force affinity on one core, you can see that CDE.exe's reported process use does correspond properly to the per core loading (ie, one core is being loaded to 100% throughout the slowdown).

I'm actually a little disappointed to discover this, as I thought if there were some bottleneck, it might be possible to substantially improve performance. As it is, it seems that most weapon systems are bounded as much by simulation performance as any design limit (missiles/drones by swarm size, kinetics by fire rate), and long range tactics are going to be hobbled by this. This is a real shame, as many of the likely answers to the questions that CoaDE poses are likely to be out of its reach. If there is some way to simplify calculations for large groups of projectiles, missiles, etc., I would strongly encourage prioritising those solutions almost over any other dev work that might go on.