Massive FPS drop when fighting inside cities/fortresses

[Foz]

Seems like setting shadow to medium solved the problem for me. I get smooth fps in big sieges now. Everything else is still high +AA, AF, bloom and reflections.

This is worth quoting just to note the general trend. Many people have said that shadows in this game are quite resource intensive. It's possible the shadows are invoking a whole lot of dynamic lighting, which is traditionally a huge drain on resources. The reason I suggest this is that I was watching a unit of knights move through a city gate the other day, and the sun happened to be above and behind the gate. As the unit passed through, the effect of them marching from the light, into the shadow, and back into light on the other side was simply amazing. I'm not sure just how much of that is from the high-end shadows, but it's got to take some resources to constantly figure out which men, and which specific parts of those men, are casting shadows onto the ground, and to determine where exactly those shadows fall. It also seems worth noting that not only do men cast shadows, but buildings in the city seem to as well, which almost certainly accounts for a vastly larger amount of area than do all the men involved in the battle. The shadows from the walls alone are probably significantly more than all the men combined. This wouldn't seem problematic since the walls are stationary... except they're really not, for the purposes of shadows. The walls and buildings are all destructible, which means it's likely even the shadows for them would have to be dynamically calculated as opposed to being static, invoking more calculations. I haven't really watched closely to determine this, but it strikes me that the sun does seem to pour through gaps I've blasted in the walls. If anyone can comment on that further, one way or the other, it would be helpful - I have no clear memory, just a fleeting notion. If it turns out to be the case, this would be one major reason we might note big performance hits in larger settlements: the walls and buildings would be responsible for casting significantly larger amounts of shadows in those cases. Especially the walls getting a lot taller could have drastic effects: they have a huge amount of area to them.

I can also say for certain that campaign map shadows can be a cause of campaign map lag. I disabled campaign shadows, and suddenly my campaign map was right as rain. That would seem to say they could be problematic in battles too.

[Quickening]

I have shadows completely disabled in my game even though I can run them without worries. What upsets my PC is AA. I can't bear to switch it off totally so I have it at 2x but that definately affects performance seriously with my Geforce 7600 GT.

[AussieGiant]

I'm on medium settings for the most part and have a few things on high with x2 AA and x 4 AF.

No disrespect to anyone but my machine should be kicking the living crap out of this game and it isn't.

Something is not right IMO and it is not my machine.

Especially when you consider that the technical part of the game wuold have been basically finished by the beginnnig of 2005 and is based on the engine they were using for Rome. In effect this engine is 3 to 4 years old at the least.

As a counter point BF2142 is on FULL everything and the lowest FRAPS I get is in the 80's.

Rainbow Six Las Vegas is also in the mid 30's at the lowest.

Just a reminder.

E6600 2.4 OC'd to 3.4 by professionals see this link to get an idea of what I'm talking about. www.overdrivepc.com
8800GTX 768mb
2 Gigs of 800MHz Ram
WD 150 Gig 10 000rpm SATAII with 16mb of cache.

AND I'm only running a 21inch monitor @ 1600x1200

The 8800GTX destroys games using 24 and 30 inch screens on 1680x1050 and 1920x1200.

[sapi]

m2tw's lag is from the cpu, not the graphics card, imo

There's very little 'work' involved in displaying fps games such as 2142 but a whole lot in keeping track of thousands of troops at once.

[Omisan]

I also noticed that dawn and dusk battles where the shadows are very long and dramatic lowered my fps. One more points for shadows causing slowdowns.

[FactionHeir]

I investigated a bit further and noticed that if the camera is above or showing any gatehouse in at least a minor city (minor, large, huge) and fortress+ (fortress, citadel), the FPS goes down to around 1-4.

I could be slightly to the left or the right of a gatehouse and easily move my camera to show walls and towers with no noticeable decrease in fps at all.

Moving into the city didn't go too well on the other hand, possibly due to either large amounts of buildings and/or the emergence of the other 3 gatehouses in the field of vision.

[TB666]

I too suffer from this problem.
2.3 ghz
128mb ATI Radeon 9800pro
512 mb

Run things on medium, no shadows, AA or bloom.
Battles run smooth and so does castles(citadels there is a decrease in performance but still playable) however once I get to cities it is a nightmare.
Doesn't matter what settings I have nor how many troops I got, it still runs poorly, damn near unplayable.
I noticed that if I zoom all the way out my frame rate becomes better(because playable) however as soon as I get alittle bit closer the fps just drops to 1.

[The Spartan (Returns)]

af also makes a big difference - google for some comparison screenshots to see what i mean.

you were correct i saw comparison photos and objects from farther distances and it looked clearer. like putting on your glasses.

but it was comparison between no af and afx16.

is there a good difference at afx2 of afx4?

[John_Imperator]

As a question of interest, does any of you guys who got the siege lag problem also got campaign map lag?
Trying to figure whether those two are actually related. I got both - on lowest settings.

I have the same problem when I play in a massive siege battles;even on low setting with buildings.

My Rig Intel core dual 6600
ATI x1950 PRO 256 mb pci-E
1 GB heat spreader
Mother board Evga
Sony Q17 18x DVD dual

I think the game is not really compatible with Intel core dual processor;thats why its causing lag in battles;or jest the graphics card.

hmm any one know what is causing the problem?

Not me,at least.

[Whacker]

As Foz pointed out earlier, Shadows tend to suck the life and frames per second out of a game. This applies not just to M2TW but to the current crop of games in general, if you are having framerate issues on what should otherwise be a playable game, drop the shadows way down or turn them off, and you're almost guaranteed to make it fully playable.

Just say no to Shadows.

[Hollerbach]

Apologies if this has been raised already, but it's a long thread....

I've noticed the slowdown in cities as well, but I was seriously whacked with lag the other day in a field battle. It was fought in some mountains in Wales, my Scots v some very lost Spanish. The main feature on the map was the this enormous mountain with a lot of shear impassable cliffs with some very steep paths through them. There wasn't a really high number of troops in the battle but I got some serious slow down. I play with all GFX setting at the very lowest and anything that can be off is turned off (not that my system is that bad, I'm just happy to compromise the candy for maximum performance) so I don't think this one is from shadows. I assume drawing all the details of the cliffs must have done it??

[sapi]

Maybe it's a pathfinding issue then?

Now i think about it i recall getting lag on clifftop maps as well...

[Lusted]

Yeah with really steep cliff maps it looks it's a pathfinding issue. i've mad battles where the game was lagging until i got within a certain range of the enemy as the ai wasn't doing the best job at pathfinding and changed path once i moved to a certain spot.

[FactionHeir]

So noone has an explanation for my observation?

[TB666]

So noone has an explanation for my observation?

Can you try mine and see if you get the same results ??

[AussieGiant]

m2tw's lag is from the cpu, not the graphics card, imo

There's very little 'work' involved in displaying fps games such as 2142 but a whole lot in keeping track of thousands of troops at once.

I agree sapi,


but my OC'd Core 2 Duo is benchmaking numbers that you get with a stock Quad core. I have more than enough processing power in my opinion. I just don't think it is utilised correctly in the application.

[FactionHeir]

Can you try mine and see if you get the same results ??

I do, as I stated a few pages back.
Anything above minor city (and even that is a stretch) and larger than castle kills my fps if i have the town in view or a gatehouse.
Southern castles are as bad as fortresses too.

[Foz]

The huge mountains in question could again be playing with shadow calculations. Not only is it a huge surface area which could require massive shadow calculations as a result (it's likely to be casting complex shadows even onto itself in a lot of cases and could also play hell casting them onto troops), but it is also a fairly complex surface for shadows to be cast onto from units and other things as well. Either or both of those factors could significantly drive up the amount of computational power required to accomplish the dynamic shadow calculations. I haven't personally experienced any lag on mountain maps, though, so I can't really comment on whether it appears to be due to one thing or the other, and my comments here aren't trying to win an argument, merely present possible explanations.

Thinking more on that though... I imagine trees are casting shadows about everywhere too, though I can't remember ever seeing the specific effects of that. If they do cast shadows then one might expect forests to have as much impact as a mountain does (maybe not, their surface area is still probably a lot less), if shadows are a factor in this problem. If they don't, then it still could make sense for mountains affecting shadows to be a source of slowdown.

[TB666]

shadows are a drain indeed.
However they can't be the cause of the FPS drop in cities since atleast I have them turned off.

[Bobo]

IMHO it is at least path finding combined with a memory leak. When I sally from Jerusalem (Huge) against 3 full stacks of Mongols, it starts OK (2.9 GHz, 1gb RAM, old NVidia 4200 or something) on lowest settings. But when I tell one disposable unit to move outside the main gate (to lure the sieging stack of Mongols in range of my archers), the FPS drops instantly and dramatically. Once the unit reaches its destination, the FPS goes up again, but when the Mongols start moving, the FPS drops. And when the other stacks also start moving, the game almost freezes to 1 frame per 3 seconds... But when they reach their destination, FPS goes up again.

However, looking at the memory footprint of the game, it gradually goes up during the battle until all my pysical ram is taken up, and then the FPS drops permanently, probably because it is reverting to virtual memory. Killing some other processes to free up ram helps for a couple of minutes, until this ram is also taken up by M2TW.

So my simplistic assumption is: path finding plus a memory leak.
Hope this helps.

[Foz]

Just to explore how intense the shadows really are, I toyed with my settings for a while last night while replaying the same assault (on a fortress). It turns out that lowering shadows one level from high to medium made a bigger performance increase than putting 4x AA down to 2x and 16x AF down to 8x at the same time. It was a pretty decent gain. Shadows from medium to low also gained some significant extra performance. Not surprisingly, then, further switching to lowest gained me a very noticeable performance boost - this level disables unit shadows, but keeps those of buildings. Setting no shadows at all probably represented the best gain from the previous level, though, and I believe accounts for all shadows of anything that isn't a unit - trees, walls, buildings, mountains, etc.

While doing this I also noticed just how poor the unit shadows look when they're not set to high. They get all blocky and seem to jump around a lot on the ground, and it was actually bothering me a lot - they're poor enough that it was distracting me from the rest of the scene. It was like a breath of fresh air when I hit Lowest setting and they turned off - I enjoyed the high unit shadows immensely, but outside of that I prefer them off instead of lower quality, it's simply less distracting and easier to look at. The building/tree/etc shadows on the other hand look pretty decent at any setting, and one of the effects I really like is how the building shadows affect the way units are lit - just having the building shadows there makes the walls especially look much better, and the light effect on units basically made them easy to want around. So after seeing how much it killed my FPS I couldn't go with the high shadow setting - it's just way too demanding even though it looks stellar. After that the choice for me was down to Off for best performance, or Lowest which preserved the majority of what I liked about the shadows. I ended up going with Lowest, and would recommend it as a great compromise if your card can't whiz through high shadows - it gives a big performance boost knocking the setting down to Low, while keeping most of the best parts of the shadows around.

As for the particular quirk at hand, TB666 pretty much shows that it's not from shadows. Even so I wanted to get the shadow info out there, since some players may be needlessly suffering.

I don't have any real further ideas about the problem, but I too have at least the gatehouse-related performance hit that has been mentioned on here a few times. It honestly may just be that the gatehouse designs are so much more complicated in construction than anything else. They have a lot more faces due to the towers there often trying to be round instead of square like the other locations, as well as arch construction, portculis... it's a lot more detail than you'd initially think. In any case, I don't have the severe 1-4 fps mentioned by someone here, more along the lines of 15 fps with a gatehouse nearby and in view, but it's still considerably worse than viewing other things...

[FactionHeir]

Actually fighting in a large town today I noticed a large amount of lag when facing the town, which usually does not happen for me at this level of settlement. Oddly enough, the only building that differed in this settlement from most other large towns I have been attacking was that it had a level 2 church (christian). Wonder whether churches are also quite intensive on the rig?

[Supervark]

Thought it was my system, 128 mb graphics card 1.5 gig ram 2.4 processer. Have experianced very bad frame rate drop sigeing cities and castles, but i do find if I face away from the place the frame rate picks up abi. Any fixes out there?

[Whacker]

It could also be a "map leak". I have no idea how CA handles or stores their map data, but in other games that use BSP based maps, if you leave open "holes" in the map and you don't close them out with brushes or whatnaught, the game can take a serious hit as it's trying to calculate the space beyond the hole, possibly texture leaks, etc etc, basically a slew of stuff. One of the old ways of catching it was by checking your r_speeds and watching for it to dip way more than normal in certain areas. Some of the old Action Quake 2 maps has this problem for awhile until they fixed them.

[FactionHeir]

It could also be a "map leak". I have no idea how CA handles or stores their map data, but in other games that use BSP based maps, if you leave open "holes" in the map and you don't close them out with brushes or whatnaught, the game can take a serious hit as it's trying to calculate the space beyond the hole, possibly texture leaks, etc etc, basically a slew of stuff. One of the old ways of catching it was by checking your r_speeds and watching for it to dip way more than normal in certain areas. Some of the old Action Quake 2 maps has this problem for awhile until they fixed them.

That would be the literal meaning of leak, no?

[FactionHeir]

This could be proof of a memory leak in general in M2TW:

Playing about 2-4 hours per session (accounts to about 2-4 turns) in late game, after closing down M2TW, my task manager will still show medieval2 being run, usually at 75-80 megs of memory.

Playing only 1 hour and closing down would show the program as taking up 50 megs.

Since I'm doing pretty much the same each turn (battle, economy, diplomac, agents), this seems to point to a rather serious issue.

[TB666]

Well minor memory leaks are pretty natural tho.
If you play for 2-4 hours, I'm pretty sure you can see that in all games they use up alittle more memory.
It is the big ones that are the trouble, the ones that suck up all your memory in less then 10 minutes, like in Vampires: Bloodlines.

[Forward Observer]

When Stronghold 2 (the first true 3D game in the series) was released, it had the same same slow down issues as the game progressed and the castles got more complex. The game would get almost unplayable in the later missions.

Saving, exiting, and re-starting the game would temporarily improve the situation but not for long.

It effected most players regardless of their system specs. After a while quite a few experienced players with technical backgrounds all agreed it was a memory leak issue and it appears that the developers either listened or were already aware of the problem. They eventually fixed it in a patch and the issue all but went away.

Let's hope that the CA boys can do the same.

Cheers

[TB666]

Well it all depends.
I have reported this on TWC twice when it was buglist time and it never once made it on the list and yet "give danes proper danish accent" did.
So I wouldn't be surprised if CA has no idea of the issue.

[Veresov]

A good video card is no guarrantee that you won't experience the FPS drop. I have a 8800 GEForce, 3 gigs of ram, and an Intel Dual CPU and MTW2 is still laggy. If I run the game full out with the highest settings and huge units the lag is insane.