PC Performance with Empire TW

[RedFox]

With the not so recent addition of Medieval 2 to the TW series, many framerate issues even on the more high-end systems appeared.
Almost everything in M2TW was so unoptimized that it made me feel that RTW had a lot more work put into it. RTW modeling is much more cleaner and thought out, where as M2TW likes to throw polys around like they were nothing.

That choppy framerate really killed the M2TW experience for me and I honestly had to go back to RTW - the graphics weren't that bad and at least it ran smoothly.

The whole point of this topic is: Will Empire TW have less performance issues than M2TW?
In most games, graphics don't do squat. I'd rather fight out magnificent battles with Peter the Great, having thousands of men on my screen and have them look like less detailed - but still be able to enjoy the experience, than just have a few hundred very well detailed men, with a choppy framerate.

It would be very nice if we had as many Graphics options as RTW had, whereas M2TW just lacked any decent settings and it truly ruined such a wonderful game.

P.S. - And no, I don't need to upgrade my machine, it can run other newer games well without any framerate issues.

[Discoman]

I second the question, more so after reading that the new game engine allows better graphics and more units. Does this mean it will use up more power or will it remain the same?

Honestly I hope performance does improve after MTW2 which used to lag in siege battles badly if your computer was very bad.

[pevergreen]

I believe it will be more optimised, but use up a bit more power, as PC's will always get more powerful.

[hoom]

'Optimised', huh! Thats just weasel words for 'I need a better graphics card'
M2TW engine is just doing much more than RTW engine.

RTW engine is essentially a pure DirectX 7.0 renderer.
It uses Vertex Shader 2.0 if present to help with all the soldiers but the lighting etc is all DX7 standard per-vertex, no shaders.

M2TW is doing per-pixel lighting, bump, reflection & other shaders such as water & windows, all DX9 stuff that uses vastly more computation power than per-vertex fixed function as used by RTW engine.

Add to that the higher texture resolution, higher poly count per soldier, much more detailed terrain/vegetation & buildings.

That said, EB 1.1 on the RTW engine manages to cause my ATI 3870 to crash at the overclock I run everything else at, have to downclock significantly to keep stable.
This is RTW engine pretty much at max & its able to still put a lot of load on a high-end late 2007 GPU.

[RedFox]

'Optimized', huh! Thats just weasel words for 'I need a better graphics card'

Well, if you have taken a look at some M2TW files then you can find that model files are usually 10 times bigger in size and polycounts are several thousands, compared to the meager under thousand RTW had.
It would be ok, if the high detail lod had such tremendous detail, but the modeling was so awful that they barely achieved any extra detail with so many polygons being thrown away. Now if M2TW had a proper low lods like RTW had, then it would at least be bearable.


Surprisingly though, as M2TW was built on the RTW engine, the new shaders caused even more choppy framerate, while barely giving any extra detail.
I could run major battles with all settings on high without any trouble, but once a large town+ was addded, it suddenly became a bottleneck for the PC, because of improper shader handling.


I'd be really glad if Empire TW managed to deliver FPS relatively on par with the Graphics, while as M2TW often delivered somewhat good graphics, but a shameful FPS.
I will upgrade my machine for ETW though, but still, that doesn't mean the game can't be optimized for lower end machines and handle even more troops.
I trust that CA knows what it's doing tho, or at least, that's what I'm trying to find out.

[RLucid]

I think you've got a good point. I tried M2TW demo, on a Autumn 2007 Direct X 10, dual core system with 4GB RAM (but with Vista). I saw choppiness and control issues, turning down graphics settings, slightly improved things but rather defeats the point of their development effort. Result, no inclination to buy M2TW, just stick to RTW which runs smoothly even at high detail settings.

There's no performance revolution going on at the moment, which could be expected to rescue a poor implementation.