Lo-Fi Games

Until recently, I last played Kenshi several months ago. After updating to the latest version and trying to play again at the end of February, the game is for some reason essentially unplayable due to frequent lag spikes that lock the entire game on a single frame for 2-5 seconds every 10 seconds or so. The entire game is unresponsive during those periods, so I assume it's the main thread being completely blocked. The game is stored on an SSD, so it's almost certainly not a disk throttling problem.

I am playing vanilla with no mods. Nothing significant with my hardware configuration has changed between the last time playing and now. Nothing else on my machine is using significant resources during the spikes, either. In fact, when I have Task Manager open to the Performance tab while the lag spikes occur, I can see every lag spike accompanied with a significant drop in CPU, Disk, and GPU usage. They all resume to prior levels when the spike ends. This leads me to believe it's not a resource capacity issue.

The issue happens the entire time Kensi is running; in the main menu, in loading screens, during gameplay, and in the pause menu. With nothing else on my system changing significantly, I am suspicious that something in the game itself has changed in an update, within the last few months, which is causing this.

How can I collect more info to try to determine what the problem is?

First thing I would do is back up my mods.cfg file, then disable all mods. Just to make sure it isn't a mod slowing everything down first.

Then, I would take a look at the various log files found in your Kenshi folder, see if anything repeatedly pops up in any of the logs. You can zip and attach those logs here if you'd prefer me to take a look at them.

You also might try reinstalling or updating your graphics drivers. As this issue is not being widely reported, it implies it may be something about your system or game. Posting your specs may also be useful.

Thanks, Shidan, for the quick reply! I'm sure it's not due to mods because I'm not using any currently. Is there something I need to do to enable logging? I see a logs folder in my Kenshi install location, but it's empty during and after running the game. Should I be looking somewhere else? I'll look into graphics drivers in the meantime. Thanks again!

Actually, I just found a driver update for my graphics card. I had updated it a month or so ago, so I thought it would be fine, but I see one from just a couple weeks ago that appears to have fixed the problem with Kenshi after installing it. Thank you for the assistance! You can consider this issue resolved.