Why do I get better performance with M2TW than RTW?

**econ21** · 12-04-2006, 18:10

Not sure this is the right forum, but I recently went back to RTW after upgrading my graphics card for M2TW. I have a top of the line AGP graphics card (Geforce 7800GS) and an otherwise ok computer (1 GB ram). M2TW plays great on it, as do most other games. But I ran FRAPS on RTW and got only about 16 FPS. I swear I am getting twice that in M2TW. Has anyone got any insights? Any settings I should tweak to make it better? (It's ok, just not great).

I also get a black screen crash after exiting RTW which might be related, although that's more an apothecary issue.

**Lusted** · 12-04-2006, 19:12

But I ran FRAPS on RTW and got only about 16 FPS.

I know this seems low, but you really don't need that high a fps in games like RTW/M2TW compared to fps's.

**Dutch_guy** · 12-08-2006, 20:55

Originally Posted by Lusted

I know this seems low, but you really don't need that high a fps in games like RTW/M2TW compared to fps's.

Well, for the campaign map you're absolutely right. However, Real time battles are a different matter I daresay.

**pevergreen** · 12-09-2006, 11:32

Just a thought...because your running FRAPS?

I have a better computer than yours, but running FRAPS.... soooo slooowwww

**Caius** · 12-13-2006, 19:22

Originally Posted by econ21

Not sure this is the right forum, but I recently went back to RTW after upgrading my graphics card for M2TW. I have a top of the line AGP graphics card (Geforce 7800GS) and an otherwise ok computer (1 GB ram). M2TW plays great on it, as do most other games. But I ran FRAPS on RTW and got only about 16 FPS. I swear I am getting twice that in M2TW. Has anyone got any insights? Any settings I should tweak to make it better? (It's ok, just not great).

I also get a black screen crash after exiting RTW which might be related, although that's more an apothecary issue.

econ21, have you tried your new card in RTW and M2TW or only M2TW?

**econ21** · 12-14-2006, 22:17

Updating my graphics card drivers helped me avoid the black screen crashes on exiting RTW. Thanks for suggesting that, Caius.

But the FPS in battles is still rather low. It's not a big deal, as it's perfectly playable, but it's just counter-intuitive getting lower FPS in RTW as M2TW seems to have much more demanding graphics.

**Whacker** · 12-14-2006, 22:44

I have a couple of ideas to toss out.

First, econ, one thing you should be careful of is making apples to apples comparison between the games as closely as possible. To do something like this justice, you'll need to take pains to ensure that all of the settings match, or are at least as close as they can get. This would mean doing things like ensuring texture quality is the same, bloom is off (as I think RTW lacked bloom), etc. Turning shadows off completely in both games would probably help even the playing field as well. Try doing two battles in each game

Second, my other thought which primarly came out of reading the SSE2 rants was that it's quite possible CA did some real honest to god hard work at optimizing some of their code and routines in the game.

It's not really that farfetched either, consider the example of the Quake 4 to Doom 3 comparison. Doom 3 was new and pretty well optimized when it was released, but it still could have had a better job done. Witness Quake 4, which was better looking in my opinion, and also undoubtedly faster. I consistently got better framerates in Q4 with more demanding settings than I did with D3, upwards of 10-25% better. That to me is insanely impressive, considering how much of the actual code was written in assembly just to ensure it was optimized as evidenced by the Q3 source code, which is old news at this point!

Cheers and good luck!