Best way to improve performance

[con20or]

Maybe we could put together a few tips on how best to improve performance in the game for low end machines. I love the game, but one thing that puts mee off the big battles is how slowly it runs on my machine. If i switch off trees, grass etc it speeds up, but i dont want to! They look great.


I have a 8800GTX GPU, E6600 2.4 Ghz processor, 4Gb Ram. Monitor res is 1680 x 1050.

I've only messed around with a few settings, not sure what effect some of them have had. Can you see FPS?

I know you can set visibility distance for units, but I like to keep this and objects set reasonably far. i like to know what im going to run into. I think I have them around 900.

Uniform quality - it can handle high easily for small battles like 'greene alone' etc. But I set it to low for smaller battles.

I have the unit distance thing switched off.

I have rifle smoke and cannon esxplosions on.

I have keep all dead bodies off.

Thats all i can think of for now (im not at my home pc).

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

[Little Powell]

Keep in mind that Trees are the biggest killers. Also decreasing sight distance helps a lot. On my last machine, for the big battles I would set the trees to 30, all site distance options set to 800. Also bring the arty explosions down to the lowest number. As far as the other options, sounds like you are on the right track. Remember that if you still want the cool uniforms at low resolution, set uniforms to medium.

Make sure no other programs are running when you run SOWGB (virus scanners etc.). There's a great free utility out there called "End It All 2" that will close all programs running. I always run it before running any game.

To display FPS, create a Debug section in your sowgb.ini. It can be at the top.

[Debug]
DbgLvl=1

[Michael Slaunwhite]

Hi.

I have found the level of smoke is my fps killer.

Cheers...

[con20or]

thanks guys.

so all i do is add debug = 1 and it will show fps in game? its probably a mistake, once you see the fps i find you cant go back, your constantly checking it,ruins the immersion. ive found that with other games!

how do i change the level of smoke/arty explosions? its not in the options I or II, and the sowgb.ini file seems to just mirror them. did i miss a line?

i installed enditall2 last night, the only programme it found to shut down was itself:)

i noticed last night that theres an option for transparent tree distance. is it better to have that set high or low?

also what does transparent next to wall mean in the options.

[Marching Thru Georgia]

con20or wrote:

so all i do is add debug = 1 and it will show fps in game? its probably a mistake, once you see the fps i find you cant go back, your constantly checking it,ruins the immersion. ive found that with other games!

Just press the 'U' key once. The numbers will go away.

[con20or]

ok thanks.

[Little Powell]

thanks guys.

so all i do is add debug = 1 and it will show fps in game? its probably a mistake, once you see the fps i find you cant go back, your constantly checking it,ruins the immersion. ive found that with other games!

how do i change the level of smoke/arty explosions? its not in the options I or II, and the sowgb.ini file seems to just mirror them. did i miss a line?

i installed enditall2 last night, the only programme it found to shut down was itself:)

i noticed last night that theres an option for transparent tree distance. is it better to have that set high or low?

also what does transparent next to wall mean in the options.

Check the mods section, mikesla has a mod that reduces the smoke to help boost fps.

I haven't really noticed any difference in FPS by making the trees/walls more transparent. To me, that's mostly for making it easier to see the action when fighting in woods. But you can you mess with it though, do some benchmarking.. It might indeed help your fps.