Slow fps in large battles

[Brighdaasa]

I'm playing on 1012*768, but with sound the game gets very choppy on large battles (4vs4), without sound or at lower resolution it seems to be a bit better (sound on low quality, hardware mixed or not doesn't seem to affect it much)

specs:
AMD 2000+
Win XP
512 DDR @ 333MHz
Radeon8500 (64MB ram)
ON-board sound (CMI8738) from Apogee chaintech Motherboard
my old PCI128 gives about the same performance

this is at standard unit size, testes with custom games of 960 men/army for each of the 8 factions

i thought i should have no problem running this, but i am, so, did i overestimate my system? or will a new soundcard fix this?

PS. i'd post this in the apothecary, but i'm not allowed
i also followed a few of the tips mentionned there, ad-aware, new drivers, defragment, reinstall...

[Lord Of Storms]

what worked for me when I had a similar problem was to turn down all the sound settings on the game itself ,now when I had the hardware mix box checked it caused trouble, with it unchecked and sound and effect quality on low or med, this helped some of the problems I am also using WIN XP home as my OS. The others like slow framerates or erratic mouse pointing I fixed by downloading the MTW game patch and some vid card tweaking . I learned by gathering info on the forums and surfing manufacturers sites like Nvidia,Dell etc. and learning how to optimize my settings for the best performance. hope this helped some .

[Nelson]

My system is very similar to yours, Brighdaasa. I run an Athlon 2000+, 512 ram, XP. I have an SB XGamer for sound.

Off line in SP, with a GeForce3 I experienced unacceptably jerky frame rates in big battles with large unit sizes at 1024x768 resolution and medium sound, especially if water was present on the map. A GeForce4 4200 allowed the game run fine even with huge units.

Medieval is very demanding when a lot of men are running about.

[Brighdaasa]

hmm, a new gfx card is out of the question atm, all out of money from the processor and motherboard
and i'm not spending money on a new soundcard unless i'm pretty sure it's gonna help

i'll try and see if i can find some info on tweaking the Radeon 8500

thx on the info so far

[Gregoshi]

Brighdaasa, there is always tomorrow for posting in the other forums.

Did you try some of the things with AGP apeture, anti-lasing off, etc.?

[Avenger]

Not that I have a similar system to yours´, but here are some tips that cleared the probs for me:

Agp Aperture setting in the bios: at 128MB
DXDiag-Sound: Put hardware acceleration to nothing
Graphic Card-Advanced setting: Set Anti Aliasing to none
If there is a PCI texture setting (as in NVidia cards) put it as low as it can get, mine are at 2 megs
In the Game: Set sound quality to LOW
Turn off the music
Uncheck Ambient Fauna
Uncheck Smoke
Use low resolutions like 800x640
Get rid of extras in the sound drivers (like EAX)
Turn off the SB 16 emulation device in the System Manager
Upgrade the drivers for soundcard and graph card
Install the new VIA 4 in 1 drivers (hyperion), if you have a VIA mobo that is
Reinstall the DirectX 8.1
Do a Defrag....

Hopefully you will be able to play this addictive game

[Brighdaasa]

Avenger, thank you for your reply, but i did all of this, except turn hardware acceleration off in DX-diagnostics, i'll go try this now, and check the VIA drivers again

Also, i'm trying to play the game at 1024*768 and with sound, it runs almost smooth without sound (4vs4 battles with 960 units army) since i was convinced it should be able to do that, maybe i'm wrong in that

Gregoshi, yep, fiddled around with that, agp aperture to 128 (since i have about 300MB ram left when laying the game, weird, that, you'd think the game would use more than 50MB), AA off, D3D to lowest settings.
I got myself RAGE3Dtweaker and overclocked, it got me 800 extra points with 3DMARK

Ah, well, maybe i set the standards too high

PS. anyone wanna lend me their soundcard to see if it solves my prob?

[Kraellin]

your hardware is fine. it shld run the game quite nicely. so that leaves your hardware settings, drivers and tweaks and that sort of thing. the 8500 was one of the vid cards that had a LOT of problems when the game first came out, especially with win xp.

avenger has the right idea, with one exception; before you go tweaking all those things, try some other vid card drivers. this can make a HUGE difference sometimes. and like i said, the 8500 had a lot of problems with xp.

onboard sound and vid cards also bother me, but try the vid drivers first and then work with what avenger said.

K.

[Brighdaasa]

ah, ok, i'll try some older vid card drivers.

i have been fiddling around with Rage3D, and set all the options that said: Might impove performance slightly, like enabling HyperZ and HierarchicalZ,...
then i ran 3DMark2001SE, and the score dropped from 8500 to 2200 (??), yet MTW performance is much better now, i can play custom games with 8 armies of 1200 units on Bulgaria2 (lots of trees) without a twitch, and 1600 units with a lil twitch (sound enabled), without sound, i get the same performance at 1280*1042

so, i'll try and change drivers a bit and see what that does.

However, it seems sound is seriously slowing down the game, will a new soundcard help this or does framerate and sound not go hand in hand in MTW? If another soundcard would improve things, what do you recommend, i think you said a few times SB live is giving problems too?

[Gregoshi]

Yes, the SB Lives seem to be the biggest culprit.