I noticed that PQ3 has very high CPU usage, even when just idling at a menu screen. It’s the only program that causes my M4 Macbook Air to become quite hot when running. Activity Monitor reports the process taking around 300% CPU usage.
I also noticed when running the game on my Xbox One X it seems to stress the system more than much more graphically intense games, causing the fan to become quite loud.
I took the liberty of profiling the game with Instruments and the culprit seems to be the Timer-Scheduler thread. It looks like this is a thread that dispatches timed events, but instead of sleeping until the next event arrives it appears to be a busy loop that constantly queries the current time - 43.3% of the CPU time in this thread is spent just calling mach_absolute_time() which is the macOS function to get the monotonic clock time.
I think the developers should take a look in to the implementation and consider using sleeps to wait for the next event instead of busy looping which burns my lap and kills my battery life!
A simple, quick fix might be to just put a small (e.g. 10ms) sleep in the loop, which would slightly reduce the accuracy of timers but greatly reduce CPU usage.
I really admire that you have tracked this down. I hope the dev team will look into this. CPU usage and battery life have plagued this game from the very beginning. @Jeto, can you please pass this on?
I really hope the devs can fix this. There’s no reason this game should be a CPU hog. It’s not doing realtime physics or simulating a massive open world environment - the core game logic could run on an 8088. Most of the CPU time should be sending rendering commands to the GPU and handling the network stuff. The main thread is only using about 25% of a CPU core and all the other threads are mostly idle.
Yep. Even after adjusting all settings. I’ve got 3 PS4 Pros and 2 OG PS4s and the fans ramp up drastically on all of them when playing PQ3. (I’m also extremely fastidious about keeping my kit clean and dust-free)
On my PS5 and PS5 Pro the game runs fine and the consoles remain silent.
Anyone playing on console, are you using Performance mode or Quality mode? Since Performance mode should be less intensive on the system.
As for your report @shaurz, do you know if you are playing an iOS version of PQ3 or the PC version, from Steam? Just because if it’s a weird Apple App port to Mac, because we don’t officially support Mac, then that could have it’s whole own range of issues because it’s unsupported
The mach_absolute_time is actually not something we have control over, and would be a weird Unity issue/interaction etc.
Play on the PS4 and use 30fps and performance mode and it does help alot.
One huge positive of the way the game is right now is when it does crash, you almost always go back to the moment you were at just prior to the crash or loss of internet or whatever, when you get back on afterwards. So losing out on something can happen, but its pretty rare.
Considering the amount of time you invest in PQ3 you really owe yourself an upgrade Kenpo. The PS5 version is far more pleasurable to play purely because of the greatly reduced load times (and lack of fan noise).
I really hate the term now that it’s so often used, but it is a game changer.
I looked in to this further with regards to what APIs are provided by Unity, and mach_absolute_time is probably being called whenever the game accesses Time.realtimeSinceStartup or Time.unscaledTime. I wondered if Unity provided a built-in component for scheduling timers, but it appears this is not the case, so this loop is likely in the game code.
I actually run my house AC at cooler temp when playing pq3. The ambient temperature appears to have an effect on the PS5 ability to remain cool. I do hear the fan from time to time, it is obnoxious lol. Not with The Show or COD do I have to hear the console fan so often and strong.
I don’t like the idea of diminishing the quality of my gameplay visually, if it is a bandaid for bad game code as is suggested previously. I have done it too. PQ3 is the only game I have played and got an excessive temperature warning. Yes I play a lot, but not more or less than other games when I am into them.
Anyways, I am hopeful the team can come up with a solution in time. They have been pretty good about implementing fixes so far.
As mentioned for Mac users specifically, as Puzzle Quest 3 is not currently supported for Mac devices, especially when downloading the app version, there are likely issues that will stem from this that we won’t be able to address.
The team is looking further into performance testing.
both consoles however I’m not as malicious as Swivel when it comes to dusting 