Low FPS during siege assaults

Hi everyone,

I play M2TW for a about a month now and it were not the bugs that disappointed me in this game, but the crippled siege assaults. The FPS is simply too low and I cant play like this.

My PC specs:

- AMD Athlon XP 2400 +
- 1024 MB DDR 400MHz
- GeForce 6600GT 128MB
- Windows XP Professional

Sure its not a great computer (the graphic card has only 128 mb of VRAM instead of 256 mb and my processor is getting a bit too old for today's standards) but giving that im using medium settings (even then i use texture on low and I dont use V-Sync for example) I cant get it why does the game get that slow. Im not talking about 15 FPS im talking about 9 FPS!!! Its impossible to play like this.

But thats not all. I've decided to install the 1.2 (L) patch and went to play the tutorial to see how the game was. On the second siege tutorial of the Norman Conquest in which you assault the nottingham castle the game ran perfectly well, with an average of 30 FPS.

Indeed small settlements usually provide good FPS. A good example are the villages which have no walls and are quite small. However as you advance through the grand campaign your (and other factions of course) settlements will evolve and become larger (like citadels and cities) thus when you go to play on the Battle-Map you get very low FPS. You cant simply look at the city...and how can you assault a target if you cant see it?

It really sucks to have trebuchets and only be able to use em against armies and not walls!

I've read in the buglist something about this matter but it looked inconclusive when it came to the causes of this FPS drop as far as I can remember.

I'm currently investigating the subject, but I need YOUR help to do it. Please post your PC performance in siege assaults and post your hardware specs. If possible tell me about the different types of settlements, unit numbers and scale and respective performance.

PS - I really hope that to play a siege assault you dont have to buy a ultra-mega powerful PC.

PSS - Sorry if this subject has already been discussed.

Look at my sig.

One thing worth trying is setting building detail to low - it seems to remove a lot of the useless graphical effects, such as smoke coming from chimneys...

Originally Posted by sapi

One thing worth trying is setting building detail to low - it seems to remove a lot of the useless graphical effects, such as smoke coming from chimneys...

Yeah I did that but it didnt help much...

Details to low does not remove smoke from chimneys at all actually. Maybe lessens the amount. To really remove em, you gotta do what I outlined :D

Originally Posted by FactionHeir

Details to low does not remove smoke from chimneys at all actually. Maybe lessens the amount. To really remove em, you gotta do what I outlined :D

Really?

Interesting - I haven't seen any since I changed that setting; guess I've just been playing the wrong size sieges

I stand corrected

A rather interesting solution FactionHeir. I will give it a try i guess.

My computer is about the same spec as yours running a 128MB video card (Geoforce 7300), same processor, 2 meg RAM and its fine - I had exactly this lag problem before I upgraded the video card to what I have now, so maybe you need to increase the RAM? I have most of the graphic features on and it runs smoothly.

Originally Posted by Matty

My computer is about the same spec as yours running a 128MB video card (Geoforce 7300), same processor, 2 meg RAM and its fine - I had exactly this lag problem before I upgraded the video card to what I have now, so maybe you need to increase the RAM? I have most of the graphic features on and it runs smoothly.

Runs smoothly on all settlements/castle types? Geforce7300 and the Geforce6600GT do not have a substantial performance difference. I even think that the 6600 beats the 7300, although im not sure.

About the RAM, does anyone share Matty's opinion?

Laggy big settlement type is game problem, do not think hardware exists to eliminate.
M2TW never used all my system memory (check Task Manager), I have 7950 also and much fast Core2duo.
Other type battles nice frame rate with many options and high resolution.

I have more or less the same specs that you have, and suffered severe lag in siege battles, even on low settings. Then i exchanged my very old Ti4200 videocard with a new X1300(can't remember specs, but it's a decent card at an affordable price), and every battle is running smoothly

Originally Posted by Richard The Tiger Heart

Runs smoothly on all settlements/castle types?

Yep, cannon towers, flaming arrows, the full shooting match

Pay attention to the shadows quality and antialising either. When I'm in a massive battle I used to set down the units details, that really increases my perfomance besides shadow and antialiasing, however you cannot set down shadow in the game, only in main options.

I have another suggestion for you. This tweak replaces the city textures with low res (512*512) ones and it's really helped remove the lag for me:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1103

Originally Posted by Sinan

I have another suggestion for you. This tweak replaces the city textures with low res (512*512) ones and it's really helped remove the lag for me:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1103

So the settlement lag seems to be a texture problem. Seems as if some cards dont use of its full power to process the textures. Rather weird. It may also be a problem driver...Ill need to do some testing.

But thanks for the tweak anyway. If it works then it is even better than the one FactionHeir suggested.

FactionHeir's tweaks are good too. I almost did change the look of the settlement, but then I found these textures. The originals are 2048*2048 I believe and these reduce the textures considerably. I've installed it and the lag has been reduced by about 100% at least. I still have some lag at times, but it's very infrequent. edit: Also, since you run the textures from a command line, it does not affect your original installation.

One would think that having bloom on would make a pretty big difference too so if you have that on, turn it off

I just tried the textures that were linked to in conjunction with smaller settlements, and didn't actually notice any change in terms of battle lag when facing the settlement. Not quite sure though whether I would need to turn textures in general to a higher level (currently on lowest) to have those files have an effect or not, as the uploader mentioned playing on high texture levels.

Originally Posted by Sinan

I have another suggestion for you. This tweak replaces the city textures with low res (512*512) ones and it's really helped remove the lag for me:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1103

Originally Posted by Sinan

FactionHeir's tweaks are good too. I almost did change the look of the settlement, but then I found these textures. The originals are 2048*2048 I believe and these reduce the textures considerably. I've installed it and the lag has been reduced by about 100% at least. I still have some lag at times, but it's very infrequent. Also, since you run the textures from a command line, it does not affect your original installation.

LOL... ya don't say. 512*512 is 1/4 of 2048*2048 in each dimension, for a combined 1/16th size texture in each case. I can certainly see why that might improve your performance considerably.

As to the overall "problem" here, it's simply that the game has very demanding graphics in the larger settlements. I honestly don't see any underlying problem being the cause of this: larger settlements have tons more buildings in them since the outskirt area covered by each size increase is ever expanding. This means each successive settlement size, even if wider by the same amount in each case, will contain a bigger increase in buildings than the last. Let's use x's to represent area covered by building, and call an extra layer of x's the size upgrade scheme for each successive settlement. Then we have the following:

X

XXX
XXX
XXX

XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX

XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX

The smallest settlement has, obviously, 1 area unit covered by buildings. The second has 9 total, an increase of 8. The 3rd has 25, an increase of 17. The 4th then has 49 units covered with buildings, for an increase of 24. As you can easily see, the increased sizes provide far larger increases in the area covered by buildings. Thus, the building area goes up ever faster as the settlement size increases, so it's no wonder the performance drops so quickly: the amount of things to be rendered simply becomes overwhelming. This is further compounded by the taller and more detailed nature of buildings in the larger cities, which may put even further strain on the graphics processing. The combination of those effects undoubtedly is the reason why performance drags down so much in larger settlements.

FactionHeir, That happened to me first time around as well. I think I was wrong earlier, actually since it's a texture it has to be in the main data folder and cannot be used with command line ?. I'm kind of confused now. I don't know, but I know that new unit textures don't work with switches, at least it did'nt work for me. Did you try putting the files into the main folder ?

Thanks for the explanation Foz :D

Check my sig for my specs. I run the game at 1280 by 1024, medium unit detail, high textures, high grass, high buildings, high shadows, bloom OFF,
4XAA and 4XAF. It gets laggy in big siege battles (huge unit sizes, 2 opposing full stacks in a huge city) averaging at 10-15 FPS but I can tolerate it.

Try getting a modified video card driver, look at LeftEyeNine's guide here. It helped out a lot for me, and he was saying something there that the modified drivers for the GeForce 6 series are really good (he's been using them).

Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by Sinan

FactionHeir, That happened to me first time around as well. I think I was wrong earlier, actually since it's a texture it has to be in the main data folder and cannot be used with command line ?. I'm kind of confused now. I don't know, but I know that new unit textures don't work with switches, at least it did'nt work for me. Did you try putting the files into the main folder ?

Thanks for the explanation Foz :D

I've got them where they belong, as a subfolder in the data folder and activated not using the bat file but my own shortcut for my mods. This is pretty much also was the readme I think it was said.
The thing I wonder about is whether the textures are specific for a certain level of detail setting (low, medium, high) or whether they apply across the board. My guess is that it does not apply to low textures.

Hi FactionHeir, you're right it's meant for high texture settings:

Originally Posted by ziher

February 06, 2007 at 07:44 PM

Maybe you play on low texture setting? In that case u want see any difference.

This mod should be used on high texture detail, it might help on medium a bit, on low it has no effect. Also it is unlikely that it will improve fps, only reduce stuttering and depending on your hardware it could have zero effect.

This is an excerpt from the messages here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1103

Cheers mate, and apologies. I had this installed on my PC for about a week now, but forgot to tell you about it.
Thanks for your tweaks and hope this helps your game. I have to say though that I'm seriously thinking of a new machine because if I want to continue to play this game it needs hardware.

Hello Hello,

Was one of the original posters about this bug, I'm still playing with

AMD X2 4800+, 4Gb Ram, 7900GTX, etc... with latest ForceWare 94.24 & Patch 1.2

Still the same lag facing the huge cities & fortress, even with all settings to low apart from resolution which is staying at 1280x1024... hum...

- Changing texture resolution can't help.. i'm experiencing lag even when I use 'Med1 quality' video settings.

Playing with a replay I found that I'm not experiencing lag in some part of a city while exploring it... weird isn't it ?

++

.X.

Originally Posted by XaaRn

Hello Hello,

Was one of the original posters about this bug, I'm still playing with

AMD X2 4800+, 4Gb Ram, 7900GTX, etc... with latest ForceWare 94.24 & Patch 1.2

Still the same lag facing the huge cities & fortress, even with all settings to low apart from resolution which is staying at 1280x1024... hum...

- Changing texture resolution can't help.. i'm experiencing lag even when I use 'Med1 quality' video settings.

Playing with a replay I found that I'm not experiencing lag in some part of a city while exploring it... weird isn't it ?

++

.X.

I think this proves that there IS a lack of optimization on the cities and castle textures. However finding the solution for this seems to be harder than I thought!

Originally Posted by Richard The Tiger Heart

However finding the solution for this seems to be harder than I thought!

Watching threads about it since december, the bug seems mainly Nvidia related, see very few ATI users reporting problems with siege.

2cts.

.X.