Poor performance post- v1.4.

[A.S. Johnston]

I played an MP - first game in months for me - and I have the 1.4 patch. Played using Hamachi with a gent from Britain and had no lag or other problems related to CPU or video display. Here's my rig's basic specs:

Pentium Dual-Core CPU E6300 2.80 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
64-bit OS Windows 7 Pro
ATI Radeon HD4870
1 TB WDC hard drive

I'm not running any mods at the moment nor do I have any speed-up programs installed, but my load times are significantly improved over 1.3 and before. Video is set on "Best Uniforms" and pretty much the highest settings otherwise. Resolution set to my monitor's native resolution of 1680 x 1050 and the monitor is an Acer X223W.

[Michael Slaunwhite]

I see a real drop in fps like everyone else out there when the A.I starts thinking. I know it's not anything to do with my Video card at all.

I have a quad core AMD Phenom II, 3ghz, 4gig mem, and it runs slow once the troops begin moving. I don't get it really, I have nothing running in the background to cause slowdown so I don't know what's going on with it.

I should do a test though between version 1.3, and 1.4, and see what I come up with.

[Stevedrumsdw]

AI stuff is usually processor heavy, I have seen a hit on my PC and I have a quad core I7 920 overclocked to 3.2 with a GTX 260 video card. The loads takes twice as long now as before it did it in about 5 seconds. But oh well

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Norb wrote:

The improvements have worked, but the problem is that every time I speed up the game, the designers use it for bigger more complex battles, so the engine never seems to improve.

Yup, just the way we like it.

[A.S. Johnston]

Perhaps the controlling factor is system RAM in much of these problems?

[Michael Slaunwhite]

I'm wondering how much better the game would run if the game was optimized to use more than one core.

Be nice to see this baby use all four cores I'm running.

I'm not a code maniac like the NSD team is so I could be talking out of my rear end, but I always thought if you have a quad/dual core, use one core for the computations for the Union Army, one core the Confed army, and the other two can be used to compute other cycles...

Like I said I could be talking out of behind here.

[A.S. Johnston]

No, that's an excellent idea, but what would that do to the folks with only one core or with only two cores? Wouldn't that 'mess up' how their CPU handles the program?

[Michael Slaunwhite]

No, that's an excellent idea, but what would that do to the folks with only one core or with only two cores? Wouldn't that 'mess up' how their CPU handles the program?

No Idea, but how about a patch that would allow people who have more cores to use them.

The standard download, purchased game would be for single core machines (default), and of course the dual-quad core edition can be posted for download (patch).

Easy to speculate, but could be something that would make Norbs hair grow grey, or make his head shrink to the size of a dried up prune...No idea. :blink:

[norb]

I think a lot of the issues is just that we have so many men on the battlefield and a free form camera. We didn't want to ever restrict the game, rather allow people to set their own options. Poor performance can be fixed in the options, but most people always want to play on the best no matter what type of machine they have, I know that I do.

[redcoat]

i, being a luddite dont understand how the whole core thing works. but it seems odd that games dont have an option to utilise more than one,the total war games are the same.i also have a quad core machine so if games like this one and indeed the tw games were able to use all the power in ones processer,would we actually see a huge leap in performance?
and many thanks jubal for the game booster link,works really well! cheers