Massive FPS drop when fighting inside cities/fortresses

[sapi]

I'm pretty sure graphics has NOTHING to do with these slowdowns, even with a Radeon 9800Pro (real old these days), i find my PC's proccessor is chugging along WELL before my graphics card is straining. In fact if the game actually just runs really slowly and dosen't jump thenm it is most defintlly proccessor related. i think it's a combination of keeping track of what units are where and what towers they activate, plus the sheer number of missiles fired means that their are a lot of processor intensive calculations going on. Add that to keeping track of all the hitpoints of all the wall sections and towers and gates and it's a nightmare. I suspect the values stored in memory are updated at least a few times a second, along with tower activation status and probably a few other things besides. thats probably a few tens ofMB worth of data every single second before we even think of all the arrow data and everything else. Moving that much data from Ram to processor and back is probably whats causing the slowdown here. Probably some don't suffer from it because they have a really efficent motherboard, or maybe the ones that do suffer hav really inneficent motherboards. But I suspect it's a data flow rate issue and their isn't much you can do about that kind of thing.

I think the issue in TW games is and always will be the processor - try changing from high to highest unit graphics (increases sprite view distance) - there's no noticable change in fps.

change the unit scale and there is

Well, how do you explain then that facing away from the settlement decreases that "lag" dramatically? It kind of does sound graphics related.

What is processor related is the number of units alive (and to a small extent dead) on the battlefield. You can face away and not get any performance improvement for example.

The smoke from the buildings, for example, puts a strain on not just the gfx but the cpu

same prob.; tested with everything at minimal(playin' normally with high details) and still a siege is unplayable(autoresolving every siege battle after the 1st 30 or so turns - basically anything after "minor city" lvl gets autoresolved unless it's "the battle of the campaign"). All this would point out to mem./proc. bottleneck - 1gb here.

However, when you're not facing the city... though aint' much of tactics you can do without actually facing that bloody city, things are more or less ok.

However, a thing that DEFINITELLY makes me think it's a "graphical design problem" is the fact that lag occurs from the DEPLOYMENT phase of the battle. There are no arrows flying, there's nothing but looking at the city and deploying your troops.

Which is why i think the city graphics, and in particular the fireplaces, are the problem

I've thought of this as I've experienced the same fps drop when facing city/ and sometimes citadel. Could it be that the buildings are partway destructible and cpu or whatever has to keep a tab or re-checking all those buildings. I've tried turning down details and even at lowest setting, the drag still happens- so from this I'm guessing it's not the vid card. Anyone w/more hardware know how weigh in?

that could be it too

again, if it's not a vid card problem, how does it occur also in deployment phase? when there's nothin' to calculate.

if there was nothing to calculate, you'd be seeing a black screen (or a bsod )

The game still has to display the city, hence my theories

re vid card - intuition, and honestly don't really know. When I turned down everything to the lowest setting, it makes zero difference in fps, I'm expecting that w/ lowest setting the units wouldn't all try to re-enact the Matrix - gravity defying casualty

ina campaign map, it doesnt matter #units, vid setting, I have no fps problems - only on seige maps. so why the difference?

I'd say you're on to something

I get that, sometimes. I think it's just the whole elevation bonuses for archers and stuff. It goes down to about 25-30 sometimes...

Sexy specs, too.

-Max

specs seem to matter little, that's for sure

Hi Forward Observer,

Thanks for the tips, I'll try those today.

I'd certainly like to hear with Sapi can suggest when he reads this.

My machine is brand new and purpose built by professionals for gaming. I did not build my machine myself.

My specs are high enough to pretty much ensure that this must be some kind of application side issue.

I'm up to date on all drivers, Windows XP is tweaked for optimum performance and I have only 5 other games installed on a standard clean build I received only two weeks ago.

FWIW the machine bench marks off the Richter scale. This is a 11 000 3dMark 06 machine.

It post 7030Mb per second on memory bandwidth!!

The Dhrystone and Whetstone processor numbers are sky high.

I can't believe this machine is not configured correctly.

BF 2142 runs in the 90's on FRAPs with everything on. I have even gone into the control panel and overridden everything and it still up there.

Rainbow Six: Las Vegas is also very similar. I'm around 50 fprs with everything forced in the control panel. For MIITW I go back and let the application decide and have to play around like I'm doing now.

I get the impression something is just not right with Dual processors and the latest hardware.

Ironically its interesting to note that Total War and RTS games like company of Hero's are more intensive than FPS right now.

Thanks to everyone for the information.

More advise would be greatly appreciated. I still want to get this game running smoothly!!

Cheers
AG

Personally, i'm inclined to agree with you that it's an issue with the game engine regarding cities.

There have been a lot of interesting theories, and we just have to hope that CA are either reading this or already know the cause of this, because I think we've established that specs don't matter in the slightest with this problem.

I don't really believe it's to do with the type of hardware though; as other games run fine with the core 2 duos and the like...