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.

[hellenes]

M2TW is MUCH more optimised than RTW....RTW brought $1000 CPUs to their knees...it wasnt the GPU the CPU was choking....
M2TW finally has been maxxed on a Quad Core I can bet that RTW will choke that CPU...
So I can only expect ETW to be more opimised...ok it will demand GPUs but at least the CPU wont struggle...

[RedFox]

M2TW is MUCH more optimised than RTW....RTW brought $1000 CPUs to their knees...

Have you even played unmodified RTW? Or did you mess up M2TW with RTW, because honestly, that makes no sense. RTW ran very well on even the older PC's. Even when there were over 8000 units on the field in Multiplayer, it ran and synced without a hitch. M2TW just couldn't run that well on an inferior machine...

[pevergreen]

M2TW, imo, was built for higher end computers.

It could still run low units, on low settings.

RTW could run huge battles, but I have a good gaming pc by todays standards and rome lagged in single player with 6-8k men. RTW did not sync without a hitch either

The demo for M2TW, was almost unplayable, it was about 2-3 fps on this machine. When i played the full game, it was thankfully, much better.

Think about it, people are basing their opinions on how they have it play. Someone with a gf 7600 is going to say worse things than a person with a dual 9800's.

[rajpoot]

Empire, apart from all the graphical and numarical unit improvements is also going to have the ragdoll physics thingy, and I believe it's going to be that which is going to bring even the best of gaming PCs to their knees.

[pevergreen]

Mount and Blade uses Ragdoll, and with good graphics mods, only 200+ men in vision at once slightly lag it.

[rajpoot]

Well, Mount and Blade does not have cannons and muskets booming away spouting smoke and actually making the bodies move (I have never seen the ragdoll effect in M&B apart from when you kill a guy on a slope), and, as you say, 200 men; we are hoping for atleast 50 times that number in a single ETW battle.
I do wish that they'll hurry up and give the min. requirements soon.....

[RLucid]

Hopefully expensive graphical details will only be "on" when you're very close up to the action with only a few objects in view, and not when zoomed out to actually control a battle.

[pevergreen]

Well, Mount and Blade does not have cannons and muskets booming away spouting smoke and actually making the bodies move (I have never seen the ragdoll effect in M&B apart from when you kill a guy on a slope), and, as you say, 200 men; we are hoping for atleast 50 times that number in a single ETW battle.
I do wish that they'll hurry up and give the min. requirements soon.....

The mod im playing does have firearms. I shot a guy in the chest from about 10 feet away, he flew back quite far.

Difference between M&B 200 men and ETW is ETW each unit is still a unit, maybe hundreds of men, but still a unit. In M&B each guy is thinking for himself. Plus they dont have a whole company doing it.

[hellenes]

Have you even played unmodified RTW? Or did you mess up M2TW with RTW, because honestly, that makes no sense. RTW ran very well on even the older PC's. Even when there were over 8000 units on the field in Multiplayer, it ran and synced without a hitch. M2TW just couldn't run that well on an inferior machine...

Oh oh...NO WAY...over 10k soldiers RTW code ate CPU cycles for breakfast...unoptimised as hell...M2TW actually takes advantage of strong rigs...rigs that choke to run RTW on 38720 soldiers....

[RLucid]

Who cares how many CPU cycles a program uses, if it runs smoothly?
It's not a multi-user timesharing system billing by CPU seconds!

Nor how optimised a program is, if it runs choppy and gives a poor impression.

[hellenes]

Who cares how many CPU cycles a program uses, if it runs smoothly?
It's not a multi-user timesharing system billing by CPU seconds!

Nor how optimised a program is, if it runs choppy and gives a poor impression.

Medieval 2 runs fine on strongs machines...its optimised far better than RTW....the campaignmap especially....
RTW cannot have 38720 soldiers without slideshow M2TW can....

[RLucid]

In my experience it didn't run well. That could be because I downloaded the demo, in which case CA have made a mistake not updating that to their production quality executable.

The game M2TW was out before, Direct X 10 & Aero, so I think my machine really ought to be strong enough for the game, it certainly exceed the requirements.

Optimised generally means needing fewer resources. The game could be tuned for larger L1 cache sizes than RTW, but it looks to me that you've fallen for CPU manufacturer marketing, trying to sell new CPU features.

The effect "runs fine on a strong machine" is a symptom of bloat and poor implementation, not an optimised one.

If you compile a source OS, with CPU optimisations on, you'll find very little benefit (just a few % on benchmarks) and hardly noticeable in real use, because modern machines spend most of their time waiting on memory and disk access. Though ricer's are not going to admit it, after all the trouble they go to.

So once again....

CPU cycles rarely matter, they are cheap!! Bottle necks tend to lie in other areas.

[Pantsalot]

I'll be buying a £1,350 PC b4 E:TW comes out so that I can actually play
it. With M2TW then most PC's I used with it were made around 2004 Dell
XP's & a last years laptop worth £600, all worked M2TW but lagged a bloody
lot with 1 unit highlandrs on the screen
So I got at what the time was a graphics card worth £100 & then it worked
pretty well, able to fit 2 & a 1/2 armies on a screen on the original M2TW
& about 4 armies in the Kingdoms X pack which seemed to be able to hold
more units with less lag strangely
RTW it far smoother but with the upgraded PC when putting the graphics to
max then I could only get 3 full armies on a map without lag. The M2TW
graphics are a lot sharper than RTW's smooth graphics, but normally smooth
graphics work better than sharp, e.g WoW to Guild Wars. WoW has smoother
graphics & therefore works better. E:TW screenshots look quite smooth so
they might be trying to keep the graphics high with lag down. Though it's
almost a next generation like game & graphics & it's unlikely u'd be able to
at most 4 armies with a £1,350 PC I hope.. All I can really advise is get
one of the £3,500 PC's. It's currently the best purchasable PC atm apparently

[RLucid]

Love of graphics is proving expensive for you!

[Nelson]

The TW franchise is more demanding than most games in some key areas. They are graphically heavy duty and very CPU intense regarding AI. Either can result in a bottleneck that slows down framerates. I have never been able to run any new TW release with all options maxed. I doubt that anyone in this forum will be able to install Empires out of the box, set all options to the highest setting and get silky performance under every game condition.

I upgrade every couple of years to near the bleeding edge but never quite catch up with the newest TW offering. When I upgraded in February 2007 I was finally able to run Rome full tilt. M2TW is generally fine but a couple of horde armies will tank the framerate every time. I expect this will improve after my next upgrade, which in turn will not be quite good enough for Empires…

[pevergreen]

I disagree Nelson.

I bought rome about a year after it came out, and it has never lagged for me.

Med 2, got it about a week after release, and it has only lagged a few times in siege battles, because it always does that. I refuse to play any TW games on any options except full and the biggest unit sizes. And my computer is not a gaming computer.

When you upgraded in 2007, what did you upgrade to?

[Belgolas]

Um well For me W2TW runs with multi core optimized while RTW isn't. Didn't you hear about a lot of people complaining because they got a dual core cpu and RTW running badly because it only uses one core. M2TW I can have 4 full armies in a citadel or a Huge city and it runs fine. Can't do that with RTW.

I have a...
Q6600 3.4 GHZ
4 Gigs of DDR 2 1066mhz
8800 GTS 320 mb (upgrading this summer :))

I am sure I will be able to run ETW maxed settings. Maybe not at 1920 x 1200 but at least maxed when I upgrade this summer.

And you can bet that there will be a DX10 and DX9 mode.

[rajpoot]

One thing I've never been able to clear up, lags are due to problem with the RAM or graphics, while the low frame rate is due to trouble with the processor.....right?

[RLucid]

I don't think the choppy low frame rate I saw, could be due to processor, as I ran demo on dual core machine. Furthermore reducing graphics details, partly helped the issue, so I assumed it was a graphics card/driver issue.