Performance

[Skybird]

hi,

I am just curious about the specs this game is demanding. I used shogun on my old system, that was a P3-450, 128 MB, TNT2, Win98, and with maximum unit size and 1024 resolution I had a fluid game experience with no stutters.

No I have Medieval on my new system, a P4-2.53, 1024 MB, GF4TI4200 and WinXP. While the game doesn'T really suffer from this scrolling the landscape in 3D mode showed "micro-pauses" every second of movment or so, unit size standard, 1024 resolution. Is this a known issue, or did I miss something important? I would expect this game with that small unit size to run fluid at this non-demanding screen-resolution.

Skybird

[SmokWawelski]

Well, my guess is that you have to look into your system for answers. The game and engine was designed before you could by the CPU you have, maybe the GPU as well, so I do not think that it is the game.

Try diferent drivers (my GF2 runs fine only with Creative drivers, official NVidia ones slash the memory from 32 to 16) if you havent yet and some Win settings. Should help: I have P3 933, 512 133MHz and GF2 32Ram and it flies at the same resolution that you are trying............

Good Luck

[Leet Eriksson]

i nearly have the same specs as yours but with a gfti4600,never expereinced any lag so far.but i'm thinking you have many desktop programs running(they cuase lag sometimes)so you should close the uneeded ones(especially any anti-virus prgrams).

[Lion King]

in my computer this is caused by sound, even though my sound card is a Live 5.1 digital, it still lags, put your sound quality to low, it should help.
it does make a difference, inmy PC, a battle with ALL graphics options disabled/minimal with high quality sound runs slower than 1600x1200 4xAA 2x anistropic filtering, huge units sizes and everything on with sound on low/mute.
and my computer is not very high end

[Skybird]

Thanks,

antivirus and firewall is only running when I am online, that cannot be the cause of the "problem". Background tasks, well they are spiking between 0 and 1% CPU usage, I better don'T close any tasks that I don't know what they are doing. Drivers, I tried 30.xx and 40.7x, no change. But the sound issue I need to check, since I only have onboard sound, maybe that's where the dragon is hiding...

Thanks again,

skybird

[Al Qasim Hussein]

I have a dinosaur of a system but can still run the highest resolution graphics if I have the sound on the lowest setting. I have a Pentium 2, 600Mhz processor, 192 RAM and a GF3 running the show. Definitely check the sound, even though I notice that it sounds like your going to already

[Satyr]

I run a PIII 800 with 512mb ram. I put an ATI Radion 9700 Pro card in (yeah I know, overkill) and run MTW at 1200x1024 with all detail and I have no lag anywhere ever.

[FesterShinetop]

Well, the only tasks you need to keep on are Explorer and Systray. So you might wanna try shutting all else of?

Man, I was just thinking today what a stable game MTW is, truly amazing - well maybe it's because I bought Morrowind a few days before and the &%#$&**&^% thing keeps crashing on me

[Satyr]

I bought Morrowind when it first came out. After updating every thing possible I took it back to the store cause that POS would not stop crashing. They refused to take it back and so I crushed it right then and there and left the pieces on the desk. Out 40 bucks but very satisfying.

[FesterShinetop]

It's terrible isn't it . I've been playing games for over 20 years now and this must be one of THE most instable games ever It even crashed my computer when I tried to install the patch

Only good thing that came out of it was that I started playing MTW again as MTW never gave me any problems

[SmokWawelski]

Skybird: If you are using an onboard sound than you just found your power-hugger. You can get SB Live for $30 bucks nowadays, and I would do it ASAP

[Skybird]

Switching everything off exept the two mentioned tasks crashes the system. It was repeatedly said at web forums around that win XP (XP&#33 needs to have around 15-17 tasks running. You cannot live without them. Thing is to fiddle out the remaining 15 (it's not only the icons in the systray). But if they use around 0.2% or less of CPU power it can be argued that they can have any noticable effect, or that it is worth to risk system stability for such a minor gain. This is not Win98 and no old P3, for example, where shutting down applications resulted in up to 15% gain on my old system.

Even when I switch off sound, the lag (hard word, I still call the thing I experience here "micro-pauses"), these "pauses" still appear. It is not noticable with the animation of units. It is only noticable when scrolling the landscape. It seems to have something to do with time needed to load the textures for the landscape, or with mip mapping or something like that.

Currently on medium unit size, battle map 1024 resolution resluting in fluid unit animation. Strategy map at 1280, no problems at all. Only the landscape scrolling "locks" for a tenth of a second every two seconds, approx.

Ehem, and switching off animals had a surprisingly high relief on frame rates. Must be some very strange piece of code.


skybird