Dual/Quad core?

[Sashko]

I'm having pretty bad dips when zoomed in at the unit (down to 17-19 in naval battles with alot going on) running on Ultra. Land battles have dips downs to 20-22 fps while in closeup when unit is firing. HAven't tried lowering the graphics out of principle - gtx 260 sli system should handle this game without any hiccups on highest graphical settings. I just hope it's demo optimization issues.

Q9900 2.5 Ghz Quad, EVGA gtx260 SC in SLI (with 185.20 beta), Raptor2 HD, Vista ultimate 32-bit - running the game at 1680x1050, x4 AA, and x16 AF.

[avesta]

I have a suggestion for CA - Release a benchmark tool like a timedemo that will contain a sample all varieties of action and scenarios. ie - zoomed in, zoomed out, concentrated troops, lots of musketfire, lots of water, trees, grass, multiple armies etc. Then allow users to publish their results and specs on the TW website for comparison's sake. And obviously it'd be important that the action isn't scripted or else that will take a huge load off of the cpu's resulting in inaccurate results.

[apostolosm]

Totally agree!

[Eriol]

An article about Empire dual-core usage:

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...most/Practice/

"However our German colleagues of Gamestar were assured that "mid-year an update will be released that optimizes Empire for multi-core processors”. "

[Agent Provocateur]

I'm getting about 20-30 fps with just about everything on ultra. It dips a lot. I have a Q6600 @ stock speed, 3.5 GB of G Skill DDR2 RAM, Gigabyte EP45, EVGA 9800 GTX, and I'm only playing at 1024 x 768. When I get home i'll provide more details. Oh yeah and I'm playing on XP. Is there a way for me to get higher fps' or is it just that graphic intensive?

You should def be getting better res fps than that.

I've got my Q6600 @ 3.6 and an old 3870X2 with 2 gig and I'm getting beter fps that you on 1680x1050 res...

[s0meguy]

its strange that people are saying that the game cant use double dual cores like q6600, because for me all 4 cores are about equally active while playing the game

[Wartz]

You should def be getting better res fps than that.

I've got my Q6600 @ 3.6 and an old 3870X2 with 2 gig and I'm getting beter fps that you on 1680x1050 res...

your CPU is 1ghz faster than his and your graphics card (if ETW takes advantage of multi-GPU setups) is just as fast as his card. Also at that resolution(1024x768) and with ETW being pretty much a single threaded game, his graphics card is just spinning its wheels, ro use a car racing analogy. He would probably see a big jump in FPS if he overclocked to 3.2ghz+ to get rid of the clockspeed bottleneck.

To be honest, ETW isnt really resolution limited, I don't get very much performance increases on Ultra when shifting between 1280x1024 and 1920x1200 resolutions. Maybe 10fps at the most.

its strange that people are saying that the game cant use double dual cores like q6600, because for me all 4 cores are about equally active while playing the game

I'd love to see a screenshot of a CPU monitor while ETW is running on your system.

[Pizza de Oveja]

Due to a bunch of reasons that only programmers will understand, games are not really the best App to make use of multithreading or multicore benefits. (In fact I understand they are some of the worst kind of apps for that) But on the plus side, they do benefit a lot from a good GPU (something of which photoshop or video decoding for example doesn’t really benefit much). So as long as your CPU is not so old that it makes a bottleneck and limits the top speed your graphic card can give you, you should spend your money in a good graphic card that can give you enough frames to run the game on decent graphics. I have a venerable old athlon 4600+ dual core, and all the games I’ve tested run at 30 or more frames, the minimum rate to achive so a game is playable (the top that my monitor can give is 60). This is thanks to the excellent 8800 GTx card. Only in ultrahuge total war battles my cpu started botleneckin the hell out of my pc and the troops started going on slow motion with crappy jumps in the animation.
Your pc will always be as fast as your slower component in the equation allows for a particular app.

So I would suggest investing on graphics first if you plan on using the pc for games.

Multicore is not really a tech for games, and the marketing hype just thrives in ignorance and futility….What good is it if you can run a ton of apps at the same time for gaming? I dare say there are not a lot of dumber things you can do on a pc than try to play a hugely resource demanding game while doing some video coding, running emule and auto cropping a ton of pics in photoshop all at the same time. Most games recommend closing all other apps before running, especially your anti virus, which places a great demand on the hard disk and memory.
But hey our new quad core cpu allows you to do incredibly stupid things you never thought you could possibly do!

The good thing about a modern multi core computer for games its not the cores themselves, but that the CPU its more optimized and thus even in a single core app like gamin thing will go faster, not because of its lots of cores but because of other CPU babble stuff.
Hope it helped…

[Wartz]

Due to a bunch of reasons that only programmers will understand, games are not really the best App to make use of multithreading or multicore benefits. (In fact I understand they are some of the worst kind of apps for that) But on the plus side, they do benefit a lot from a good GPU (something of which photoshop or video decoding for example doesn’t really benefit much). So as long as your CPU is not so old that it makes a bottleneck and limits the top speed your graphic card can give you, you should spend your money in a good graphic card that can give you enough frames to run the game on decent graphics. I have a venerable old athlon 4600+ dual core, and all the games I’ve tested run at 30 or more frames, the minimum rate to achive so a game is playable (the top that my monitor can give is 60). This is thanks to the excellent 8800 GTx card. Only in ultrahuge total war battles my cpu started botleneckin the hell out of my pc and the troops started going on slow motion with crappy jumps in the animation.
Your pc will always be as fast as your slower component in the equation allows for a particular app.

So I would suggest investing on graphics first if you plan on using the pc for games.

Multicore is not really a tech for games, and the marketing hype just thrives in ignorance and futility….What good is it if you can run a ton of apps at the same time for gaming? I dare say there are not a lot of dumber things you can do on a pc than try to play a hugely resource demanding game while doing some video coding, running emule and auto cropping a ton of pics in photoshop all at the same time. Most games recommend closing all other apps before running, especially your anti virus, which places a great demand on the hard disk and memory.
But hey our new quad core cpu allows you to do incredibly stupid things you never thought you could possibly do!

The good thing about a modern multi core computer for games its not the cores themselves, but that the CPU its more optimized and thus even in a single core app like gamin thing will go faster, not because of its lots of cores but because of other CPU babble stuff.
Hope it helped…

There are some games that make great use of multiple cores. Supreme Commander, Flight Simulator X, etc.

Developers just need to stop being lazy. Sure, multi-threaded developing is hard, but you can't always have it easy.

[s0meguy]

@wartz
http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/6444/empiretwcpu.jpg with a q6600

this screenshot is taken while the game is minimized and on the campaign map... i couldn't alt-tab while playing the actual battle, but theres no lag and it doesnt seem to break a sweat.

looks like the first core is a bit more active - what do you think

when not playing the game the cores aren't nearly that active

activity when not running empire tw
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/5654/noempireactivity.jpg

[Cadmium77]

Dual Core programming has been done CA said, but we wont know if ETW can even use quad cores, i doubt it.

I was wondering if my 8 core was the reason I could install the demo and get it up and running but it refused to load either battle, just getting stuck. And I let it load for a couple hours several times.

[firefly2442]

Due to a bunch of reasons that only programmers will understand, games are not really the best App to make use of multithreading or multicore benefits. (In fact I understand they are some of the worst kind of apps for that) But on the plus side, they do benefit a lot from a good GPU (something of which photoshop or video decoding for example doesn’t really benefit much). So as long as your CPU is not so old that it makes a bottleneck and limits the top speed your graphic card can give you, you should spend your money in a good graphic card that can give you enough frames to run the game on decent graphics. I have a venerable old athlon 4600+ dual core, and all the games I’ve tested run at 30 or more frames, the minimum rate to achive so a game is playable (the top that my monitor can give is 60). This is thanks to the excellent 8800 GTx card. Only in ultrahuge total war battles my cpu started botleneckin the hell out of my pc and the troops started going on slow motion with crappy jumps in the animation.
Your pc will always be as fast as your slower component in the equation allows for a particular app.

So I would suggest investing on graphics first if you plan on using the pc for games.

Multicore is not really a tech for games, and the marketing hype just thrives in ignorance and futility….What good is it if you can run a ton of apps at the same time for gaming? I dare say there are not a lot of dumber things you can do on a pc than try to play a hugely resource demanding game while doing some video coding, running emule and auto cropping a ton of pics in photoshop all at the same time. Most games recommend closing all other apps before running, especially your anti virus, which places a great demand on the hard disk and memory.
But hey our new quad core cpu allows you to do incredibly stupid things you never thought you could possibly do!

The good thing about a modern multi core computer for games its not the cores themselves, but that the CPU its more optimized and thus even in a single core app like gamin thing will go faster, not because of its lots of cores but because of other CPU babble stuff.
Hope it helped…

I don't think it's the fact that programmers are lazy, it's the fact that programming for multiple cores is quite hard. You have to deal with issues of deadlock and other problems. I would guess most game programmers don't have these skills yet or are waiting on better tools to help automate the process.

[MrMud]

Coding a big app such as a game is complicated enough as it is before you even start to consider the hassles that is multithreading.

Im a developer myself and we do quite a bit of parallel processing, but I would be scared of trying to do the same for a game.

[Pizza de Oveja]

Once again multiple cores is not a tech made for games to improve their framerate. Visually intensive games that work with scripts are not the perfect envirorment for multithreading or multicore, they are thou for BMF graphic cards.

Someone is not lazy if he is given the worse envirorment and being told to make it go faster with a tecnology that its not suited for that (I get to see that crap at work almost every day!). I think that people are being ignorant and tend to free cheap criticism.
Multicore its not the holly grail, live with that!

For tactical battles, I understand the CPU enters in the equation of what frame rate you get at the selected graphics quality only if it cant deal with the tasks and becomes a bottleneck that limits the frame rate the graphic card can achieve (like it happened to me in a few mega battles with a lot of men per unit in MTW II).

In the campaing map I remember that king kong mod for MTW II that totally crippled my machine, it had apparently some megalithyc scripts to make the AI better and the game more realistic but the net effect on my machine was that each AI turn did last like 5 minutes, making the mod unplayable to me. There I guess the CPU became king and the graphic card went mostly unused.

There are not that many games that have a pretty insane requirements upon graphics on one part and a big demand on scripts for the cpu on the other. I recon flight simulator and that starcraft clone arent like that at all, but I admit that my knoledge about hardcore programing is pretty lame so I wont go being the tough guy behind the computer calling everyone a chimp.

Anyways...Just my two cents

[Barry Lyndon]

"mid-year an update will be released that optimizes Empire for multi-core processors”

Wow, that means I'll have to wait until summer to get a playable game on ultra settings. Hopefully they will release that patch a bit sooner than mid-year.

[♔Icebear77♔]

Where can i see my fps-rate? At the moment, i have no trubles (i play on a laptop with an Intel GM965 video-card. Game runs fine (without lags) on min. Before steam updated the game with patch +0, i could play it smooth on medium... what happend with this patch? Why am i not able to play it med? Iam a noob in technical questions...

[Stoferr]

Download Fraps, it will show your fps ingame.

[♔Icebear77♔]

Oh ok, i only used fraps for screenshots...i will check it..thanks... i need to improve the garfics... :-))

[Barry Lyndon]

Ok, quad core users. Have you noticed an increase in performance after the 1.3 patch?

[impar]

Greetings!

The gameplay is smoother with this patch.
If its from better multi-threading or better programming, dont know.