Poor performance post- v1.4.

[Beef Stu]

for me its the units, i load a game with 2 whole armys or 2 brigades i am still waiting 3-5 minutes for just the unit sprites to load. i dont understand what was wrong with the way it was . the option was there before if i wanted to wait this long for my games. I played on medium graphics BECAUSE THATS ALL I WANTED. now i dont have a choice.

[Jubal Early]

The Units are defiantly the problem I can run trees ,draw distance and resolution on full, If I lower the settings for those it makes little difference to my FPS. Its the units and their movement that kill FPS for me. If I turn the ratio setting down to 1.10 I get a massive boost in FPS but I really like the 1.4 ratio .
The thing is those of us with multi core computers ( I have a quad core) are at no advantage at all because the game is not optimised to run on multi cores it runs on a single core so really for me its using just 25% of my computers power. If SOW ever gets optimised for multi core id say we could be running the game flat out with huge size battles with no problem.
For me having a multi core has been good as I play all the total war games but it’s about as useful as a snowman in the Sahara desert for running SOW on and thats disappointing because I really bought it with this game in mind.

[Marching Thru Georgia]

JubalEarly wrote:

For me having a multi core has been good as I play all the total war games but it’s about as useful as a snowman in the Sahara desert for running SOW on and thats disappointing because I really bought it with this game in mind.

That's not quite true. Indeed SOW will only utilize one core, but your OS will use another, and your AV will use still another. If you are doing SOW MP then TeamSpeak or Skype will use the 4th. That's a tremendous overhead savings. That snowman isn't in the Sahara, rather he's sitting fat and sassy in the Arctic.

[Nudz]

To whoever asked: I'm not using any mods.

[norb]

The new options always draw high res and they do it with less memory than the old low res by using packed sprites. The low and high option will still load less uniforms than the other two levels there by reducing the memory even more. On all our test systems there was an improvement in loading speed and game fps by using the packed sprites.

In your log file you'll now find a line like the following:
20:58:56 Ansi:16, TexH:16384, TexW:16384

This shows the max ansi value and max texture size. It also prints another warning if your card cannot support the larger textures as we are now using 2048 textures for uniforms. We did this because cards today can easily handle this texture size. It's actually still not cutting edge. We do try to do updates with technology, but always stay a few years behind. Our engine still uses DX9C which is many years old at this point.

The only reason that I can think of that these would cause worse performance is because of the video card. Either it's default support is too low, video ram, or throughput with some on board graphics systems. Texture swapping takes time, so by reducing the number of textures required to support all our uniforms, we expected and did receive an fps boost on all our systems.

If you do not like the reduced uniform count and the performance is not where you want it to play. I suggest upgrading your video card. They are not expensive today for something that will run the game well. We seriously do try to keep the game as compatible as possible with many older systems, but we do have to keep moving forward and upgrading items that we feel will offer speed increases. Since the vast majority of players are having no issues and many are reporting loading and fps improvements, we feel that the improvement was a good one. We apologize to those that are having issues and hope that you will be able to improve your system to the point where you feel the game is playable.

[Blacklander]

I guess I've been "patched" out of using my copy of SCOWG. I'll go ahead and revert to 1.3.

A friend is sending me 2-gigs of RAM. Maybe that'll help my situation. 4 gigs total, which I think is an embarrassment of riches. :laugh: And yes, the game played PERFECTLY with "just" 2 gigs before I installed patch 1.4. We play mostly online. I've played probably 5 games multiplayer for every one played solitaire. Or maybe it'll be easier for them to switch back to 1.3 with me. Was looking forward to buying Antietam, my favorite battle (if a battle can be called that). I had great fun fighting around Sharpsburg using the mod for Take Command: Second Manassas. Good times.

I guess the next full release from Norbsoft will probably be off-limits as well, at least until I get a new computer in about a year or two.

[Davinci]

In your log file you'll now find a line like the following:
20:58:56 Ansi:16, TexH:16384, TexW:16384

This shows the max ansi value and max texture size. It also prints another warning if your card cannot support the larger textures as we are now using 2048 textures for uniforms. .

Norb if my video card is only showing this in the Log file – does this mean that I need to convert the Antietam.bmp back to the size of 2048x2048 – considering that that is the only file that I can see that uses the larger size of 16386x16386 ?

01:47:33 Ansi:16, TexH:8192, TexW:8192
01:47:33 SOWGB Loaded
01:47:33 01:47:33

If there is another warning I’m not seeing that one show up, so I guess that I am alright there!

davinci

[Little Powell]

4 gigs total

That should help quite a bit. I play the game on a laptop with 4 gigs. It's a gaming laptop, but still not near as fast as a desktop and my graphics card is on-board. I get great framerates, but do get some slow downs on huge sandbox battles and large intense scenarios.

You'll definitely get a speed increase with 4 gigs though, more ram always helps.

[Jubal Early]

I have a quad core Ati Radeon 4850 graphics card 2.40 ghz 64 bit with 4 G of ram and I was getting 8-10 FPS last night playing the round tops scenario with 1.10 unit scale. SOW is harder on my system graphically than Company of heroes and even Shogun 2, Napoleon and Empire total war maxed out with full smoke and other graphic effects. I took this screen today to show the detail my computer can handle.



TC2M runs perfectly with huge battles while I struggle to play division v division in SOW. The games great and I wish so much that it would run well on my computer but it runs like a pig with no legs. I’ve tried everything and have no idea why it’s so sluggish, I think 1.4 made some improvement but really not much that’s noticeable the game is virtually unplayable at times. All other games run like a dream on my computer maxed out.

[Jubal Early]

My computer:

"Two Radeon HD 6990s in CrossFireX.
6GB RAM.
Intel Core i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz (8CPUs), ~ 1.6GHz.
Windows 7 64-bit.
The game runs on a fast SSD-drive."

Please help, if you can. :pinch:

Nudz Ive noticed that like me you have an Ati Radeon card I wonder is this Significant and that perhaps the ATi drivers are not good with this game.