Poor performance post- v1.4.

[Jubal Early]

Sorry everyone ! I should have warned you all not to download the junk stuff I didn’t tick for any of them so didn’t install them but as the saying goes “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”. The game booster itself is great works fine for me and I’m glad some of you are getting better performance using it .

[Blaugrana]

Thanks Jubal.

I just have Game Booster and Switch to Gaming Mode installed but realise I don't know how to use them

I rushed in and now need to check how I should be using them. To complicate matters I first installed and used Smart Close ...

[IronBMike]

I just want to say that I am disappointed with the performance as well. I run a quad core i7 2600, with 8 gigs of RAM and an ATI 6770 GPU w/ 1 GB ram. It should be PLENTY to handle whatever I can throw at it. But this game lags it very mysteriously. When I get around to it I'll do some FPS tests, but this is very disappointing.

[Little Powell]

I just want to say that I am disappointed with the performance as well. I run a quad core i7 2600, with 8 gigs of RAM and an ATI 6770 GPU w/ 1 GB ram. It should be PLENTY to handle whatever I can throw at it. But this game lags it very mysteriously. When I get around to it I'll do some FPS tests, but this is very disappointing.

You've got something else going on with your machine.. Your machine blows mine out of the water, and I get great framerates. 20-30 normally, but they will go down to 8-15 on the memory intensive scenarios.

[IronBMike]

I just want to say that I am disappointed with the performance as well. I run a quad core i7 2600, with 8 gigs of RAM and an ATI 6770 GPU w/ 1 GB ram. It should be PLENTY to handle whatever I can throw at it. But this game lags it very mysteriously. When I get around to it I'll do some FPS tests, but this is very disappointing.

You've got something else going on with your machine.. Your machine blows mine out of the water, and I get great framerates. 20-30 normally, but they will go down to 8-15 on the memory intensive scenarios.

Nope. Nothing else. I'm an experienced gamer and computer geek and there's nothing. I run Battlefield 3 and NTW on ultra settings no problem. I will say that SoW isn't unplayable by any means, it just starts to feel a bit laggy in large battles with smoke, dead bodies, etc.

I'll do a framerate test to see what it actually is.

[Little Powell]

I think there is something important that everyone has to remember here.

This game engine is a lot different than Total War, or Battlefield, or any other game really. Our game is about ultimate realism in American Civil War combat. The player controls thousands of troops, sometimes 60,000 plus. You won't see that possible in Napoleon Total war. This is why we use sprites instead of 3D models for our troops to make this possible. Also, our AI actually thinks, unlike any other game. This also takes up memory, so combine that with the number of troops, and of course there are going to be slow downs on the large battles. This is why we created so many different options to tweak your graphics settings to find a happy medium between performance and eye candy.

[Davinci]

I would add that the biggest problem I have with the game is the road marching orders as far as the FPS is involved.

If Norb could find a way of moving the movement over to another processor, I think that this would solve a lot of problems that some of us are having.

The good news for myself is that, once the majority of road-movements are stopped and the fighting begins, my FPS will go up and then stay at an acceptable level to play the game.

davinci

[Marching Thru Georgia]

LittlePowell wrote:

Also, our AI actually thinks, unlike any other game.

This is very true. I wonder if all the AI improvements Norb made in this patch are partially contributing to the slowdown some are seeing. I only see a 1-2 fps increase with this patch, probably due to the new sprites. But I can run much larger armies that perform much better in the field.

[RDBoles]

I agree with Davinci, My marching seems a little static. When the fighting begins everything seems very good. I up graded my cpu and went to Windows 7. At first the game seemed to pause too much but after playing a few games it goes great. The marching is still little static but not the fighting. I have been playing Army vs Army with a small corps or a division in my command.

[norb]

I did put a lot of time into researching threading the game. I had a version working and the improvements were nice as far as fps goes, but the actual game AI went the same speed. So it looked a little choppy. I would have kept going, except that then I tried working with MP and that was a complete mess. Some members of the team had worse problems. Since it wasn't a complete win, I shelved it. The idea was to keep the main thread drawing and move the game logic off to other threads. But still they had to all coordinate on the draws of the men, and there are a lot of men. Threads cannot read and write the same memory at the same time, so for each draw, there had to be some sort of coordination. The AI depends on updating many of the fields used for drawing, so although on the surface it seems like a good idea, the scale of the game makes it less probable.

Our biggest issues are things that cannot be fixed. We just have way too much going on. Fighting all over the map and a decreased sprite ration from TC2M. None of this adds up to better performance. If you increase the sprite ratio and reduce the battle size, it runs better than tc2m, at least for me on my box. The improvements have worked, but the problem is that every time I speed up the game, the designers use it for bigger more complex battles, so the engine never seems to improve.

I would say that increasing the sprite ratio to 10 would go a long way to helping the speed of the game, that's what it was set to in tc2m.