Rendering everything at high resolutions ?

[Redshank]

I'm running EB at 1920x1200. I have perfectly playable framerates with all settings enabled on large unit sizes but it just doesn't feel the same as when using huge units. However, if I do use huge units my fps slows to a crawl ; around 8 - 15 frames per second in a battle between 2 full stack armies when most units are visible on screen at once.


Most graphical settings don't appear to have much bearing on that, except switching model detail to 'high' rather than 'highest'. The effect of this change is to render only the units in the immediate vicinity of the camera and replace everything else with sprites, as far as I can tell at any rate. Although, While this does drastically improve framerates, the distance at which the sprites are displayed is incredibly small - especially when zoomed out. Sure, the opposing army is composed entirely of sprites which really helps performance, but it also means that several of my own units in the camera's immediate line of sight are also displayed as sprites, which is quite irritating when considering how close they are.


So, I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is perchance any way to edit the distance at which the sprites kick in somehow as an alternative to the stupidly short one 'high' sets it at ? Especially as the hardware I'm using could comfortably render say, one full-stack @ huge sizes at any given time for example.

Thanks.

[overweightninja]

I can't help in regards to the sprites, but I can say that lowering/disabling anti-aliasing and dropping the resolution should make more difference than the model detail.
Hope that helps
Cheers

[Redshank]

Thanks for the reply. Oddly enough, going from High AA to AA Disabled makes very little difference to my fps. We're talking on average one frame higher when disabled from the 'high' setting . And, I'd really like to keep my resolution as it is ideally to avoid scaling or playing in a window.



I have just noticed this thread about disabling sprites totally which would suggest that fiddling with the values in that file might do the trick. (?) Don't suppose anyone knows what to change them to to increase the distance where models are visible instead of sprites - or if that's even possible, short of simply following the game's own draw distance / keeping sprites disabled totally as I have them now ?

[Tellos Athenaios]

For obvious reasons allowing 2d sprites to replace 3d models will make much more of a difference in regards to the workload of your GPU (the CPU on your GFX card) than *any* other setting with the exception of maximum number of troops.

It's one image which can be directly drawn onto the screen versus the output of various calculations; and no filtering effects need to be applied...

Of course playing on large instead of hughe roughly reduces the workload by a factor of 2 already.

[Redshank]

Right - after having a good fiddle with descr_model_battle.txt I think I've got it sorted. For the sake of posterity, it was as simple as using notepad to find & replace the numbers at each and every reference to sprites & set it a bit higher. I'm assuming they're set in metres.


In any case, changing them from 60.0 or 100.0 to 200.0 vastly increased the distance at which 3d models are displayed but still meant that the 2d models are used at large distances which in turn is much less hardware intensive. For example, providing the enemy army doesn't start right beside you - at the beginning of the battle, all, or at least most of, my troops were in clearly visible 3d while the enemy army were clearly visible as 2d. This gave me just less than double the fps of rendering ALL the 3d models on the screen at one time - which is a massive improvement!

At a distance of 200 metres the models look very small so the transition between 2d and 3d, imo anyway, is much better than panning along your line at ground level and physically seeing the models going from 2d to 3d right before your eyes which is what the 'high' model detail preset does - at least using BI.exe anyway.