Poor performance post- v1.4.

[Michael Slaunwhite]

What gets me is that why create dual, and quad cores for if no one is going to use them. Damn shame to let that kind of processing power to go waste.

It must be harder to code software to utilize more than one processor, and that is why very few programmers ever create software which will take advantage of it.

OR

The whole dual, and quad core is nothing more than a marketing scam, just a nicer way to sell a particular product.

Oh well...

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Michael Slaunwhite wrote:

What gets me is that why create dual, and quad cores for if no one is going to use them. Damn shame to let that kind of processing power to go waste.

Your system is constantly utilizing multiple cores. One is used for the OS, another for your AV another for whatever program is in the foreground, etc., etc. As a result, your computer runs much, much faster than if you had a 3GHz Pentium IV. I doubt SOW would even load on such a machine, let alone run.

redcoat wrote:

but it seems odd that games dont have an option to utilise more than one,the total war games are the same.i also have a quad core machine so if games like this one and indeed the tw games were able to use all the power in ones processer,would we actually see a huge leap in performance?

Concurrent running would be completely wasted on a game like TW. It's a toy compared to SOW. It hardly needs the horsepower. Norb gave a good accounting of the problems associated with this. Reread his note. HistWar has the problem Norb described. At times the calculating engine will get out of synch with the graphics engine which leads to some bizarre events. JMM has worked very long and hard on this and has managed to get things to run smoothly nearly all the time now, but what a nightmare it must have been. I'd rather see Norb spending his time working on further improvements to the AI than take that journey, IMHO.

[Michael Slaunwhite]

Marching Thru Georgia Wrote:

Your system is constantly utilizing multiple cores. One is used for the OS, another for your AV another for whatever program is in the foreground, etc., etc. As a result, your computer runs much, much faster than if you had a 3GHz Pentium IV. I doubt SOW would even load on such a machine, let alone run.

First I have to say that I am ignorant when it comes to Multi-Cores, which makes it easy for me to ask why not have one processor look after the business of the union side, and another processor look after the business end for the Confederate side, and so on.

You mentioned that Windows itself divies up the workload, and so I decided to take a few screenshots of before, and during game play what the processors are actually doing.

Now what actually is going on here, is SOW using all four processors, or is Windows making SOW use them?

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[redcoat]

Michael Slaunwhite wrote:

What gets me is that why create dual, and quad cores for if no one is going to use them. Damn shame to let that kind of processing power to go waste.

Your system is constantly utilizing multiple cores. One is used for the OS, another for your AV another for whatever program is in the foreground, etc., etc. As a result, your computer runs much, much faster than if you had a 3GHz Pentium IV. I doubt SOW would even load on such a machine, let alone run.

redcoat wrote:

but it seems odd that games dont have an option to utilise more than one,the total war games are the same.i also have a quad core machine so if games like this one and indeed the tw games were able to use all the power in ones processer,would we actually see a huge leap in performance?

Concurrent running would be completely wasted on a game like TW. It's a toy compared to SOW. It hardly needs the horsepower. Norb gave a good accounting of the problems associated with this. Reread his note. HistWar has the problem Norb described. At times the calculating engine will get out of synch with the graphics engine which leads to some bizarre events. JMM has worked very long and hard on this and has managed to get things to run smoothly nearly all the time now, but what a nightmare it must have been. I'd rather see Norb spending his time working on further improvements to the AI than take that journey, IMHO.

i totally agree with you.theres no point in norb and his team wasting time with all this stuff.the thing with the total war stuff is that its all the same game,no matter how the figures on screen are dressed.i watched a mate of mine play ntw and wax lyrical about the strategy and tactics that the game portrayed,then i got him to play the third tutorial on sow on my machine.within 15 minutes he was in so much trouble he was actually sweating!
and improve the ai??im having enough trouble fighting this one thanks! cheers

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Michael Slaunwhite wrote:

Now what actually is going on here, is SOW using all four processors, or is Windows making SOW use them?

You are seeing the OS services needed for the game being divvied up among the different cores. The game itself is only running on one core. It's all the auxiliary support that goes to the other cores. Nice, huh?

[Michael Slaunwhite]

Michael Slaunwhite wrote:

Now what actually is going on here, is SOW using all four processors, or is Windows making SOW use them?

You are seeing the OS services needed for the game being divvied up among the different cores. The game itself is only running on one core. It's all the auxiliary support that goes to the other cores. Nice, huh?

Oh okay, that is pretty cool, and thanks for explaining it to me.

[Nudz]

So I'm most likely never going to have my game playable, again, then?

[norb]

So you've turned down all the options to their minimum and it's still unplayable?

[Baldwin]

Also note how half the RAM gets used up once your'e in game, but I guess that's no biggie.

[Gudadantza]

The performance is not perfect at all even on good configurations. If it is your problem, good computer/poor performance, the result is not exactly "unplayable" but clumpsy, laggy gameplay, uncomfortable gameplay... something like this, but even in the most populated scenarios the things get better during the battle.

In a first approach I considered the reason was the no multithreading compatibility of the engine but Now I consider it is more graphics or RAM related ( the framerate improves depending where you are looking at ).

I play with all high and I am in the edge of gameplay on the first minutes. But it is High graphics level or near.

And in my case the vegetation is the critical point for lowering if I want more frames. Try to change it first. Things will improve.

I have a dream, one day the smoothness will be great.

Because playing TC2M from time to time I can say the smoothness and good framerates counts in the gameplay a lot making management faster and as I say, smooth. I remember in stone age TC2M ran like crap in my old computer :S, It was the amount of RAM.

Resuming. Unless you have a very poor computer "unplayable" is not the exact word.