First, regarding the deployment phase, it probably comes from updating all the HP of buildings and it's probably running through a lot of calculations regarding arrows. In addittion, when you are looking at the walls the processor has to do a lot of work figuring out where everything should sit reletive to the way your looking at it, and then feed that data to the graphics card. Each wall/tower segmant probably needs at least 9 chunks of data assosiating with it. That 36 bytes of data, theirs over 500 buildings in the biggest citedals. and thats without including data relating to what visual effect the damage should have, some of that, (for the puroposes of smoke and the like), has to go through the CPU too. Also a lot of instructions relating to what to send to the craphics card do too. I think thats the problem, it can handle the visual data, OR the postional and damage and arrow data, but not both sets a once.

IMHO, considering people with all kinds of processors and memeory are sufffering issues. It isn't a processor issue or a memory storage area issue IMHO.

It's GOT to be down to the FBS, (or the AMD equivelent, i forget the name), being unable to handle the amount of data having to pass to and from the processor. It's probably down to motherboard chipsets. The best can hack it and the rest can't.


Also, bit off topic i know.

But intresting to hear about the AMD/ATI joining up. Although if you ask me i'm shocked the USA competition laws would allow it, and it's going to be hell for PC buyers. It's a given now that both Nividia and Intel will stop making AMD chipsets/buying ATI internal graphics chi[psets as soon as they possibly can within contract limitations. Add to that that Nividia is (or was last time i looked), the only company producing top of the range high performance AMD chipsets and that intel are probably going to tweak their chipsets to nerf ATI performance and buff Nividia performance and it's going to push people who buy intel to get a Nividia card and those who go AMD to get an ATI card.

Not to mention that AMD+ATI is going to lack as good a motherboard as the Intel+Nividia combo, or that AMD used to be cheaper than Intel for a given performance level, (thats probably going to change now).

It bothers me doubly because I allways loved my Nividia+AMD combination, whiklst i do use an ATI ATM, my old Nividia was much better drivers wise and less buggy. Not to mention other things i prefer about nividia cards.

Now i've got that off my chest. Good day.