It's not supposed to lag this much!

[InferiorBeing]

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 with the latest drivers, a 3.5 GHZ CPU, and 1 GIG of RAM. When I run everything on max save for unit detail which is only on "High" for obvious reasons, things are really slowing down.

(In other words, 4X Anti-Aliasing, 1280 x 1024 Res, "High"/"Extreme" shadows, "High" grass, "Highest"/"High" Vegetation Detail and "High" Building Detail as well as Anisotropic x 16.)

Right now, I started a custom battle with two armies, of only 1 unit each. In other words, there were two damn units on the whole freaking map. ("Canyon"), and I had a general of 10/12 FPS when zoomed all the way up, and roughly the same when zoomed in, although it went up to 20 when I was looking away from the map. The camera was also damn choppy. Yup, so a machine like mine can't show 240 units at the same time without slowing down. That's a load of ********. Especially considering that people with lesser machines than me can have roughly the same details and unit scale as me with much higher FPS. What the hell is going on here?

I can understand that FPS would drop a lot in battles with two full stacks on the "Huge" setting, but when there's only two units? :hmmm:

[Tom Servo]

Have you tried turning off shadows? High shadows means every single thing can drop a shadow into every other single thing. It wouldnt surprise me if a computer 2 years in the future had a problem with this.

[HorseArcher]

Have you tried turning off shadows? High shadows means every single thing can drop a shadow into every other single thing. It wouldnt surprise me if a computer 2 years in the future had a problem with this.

exactly. try turning off the shadows. They are ugly anyway. Appearantly many games have shadow problems, such as Oblivion (it looked horrible) and it really doesn't take away from the details if you turn them off. You'll get a nice boost of framerate instead.

[InferiorBeing]

I'm not as concerned about shadows on the ground as much as on the units themelves.

I know it's probably only me, but I really love the shadows. Even if you think they are ugly; it looks so much more realistic with the units casting shadow upon each other, even if the ground stays shadow-free. And, when I turn the shadows off completely, the soldiers won't get shaded either. When all the units are perfectly illuminated all the time without the tiniest little creek of shading, it looks cartoonish and a little... well, Playstation 2.

Before you say that it's only my own fault if the game lags because I foolishly disdain the well-meant, (And wholly true),advice about the shadows being FPS killers, let me ask you a quick question: Is there any noticable difference between "High" and "Extreme"? At which detail setting does the units stop shading each other? I can't seem to notice a difference at all.

[Tom Servo]

I know that things look uglier without shadows but instead of asking you could go ingame switch them off and start a quick battle in 20 seconds and test this yourself. Your problems will get solved i bet.

[InferiorBeing]

I've done it several times. I might not have been too clear on that. My mistake. Here's what happens.

1) On "Extreme", the shadows look gorgeous, and kills my FPS without remorse.

2) On "High", I see no difference, either in FPS or shadow detail.

3) On "Medium", they flicker on and off.

4) On "Low"; Well, I haven't tried that one yet. But my bet is that it looks God-awful.

5) On "Off", it's... off.

And yet I can't really seem to figure out at which point the unit shading gets removed.

[Tom Servo]

Yes but on Off to Medium is your fps as high as you expect? If yes then what is obviously hurting you is the shadows, which there is nothing that you can do i guess.

[AlfonsoVIII]

1. How many men are in the screen where you get the 10-12 fps and also you might want to add another GB of RAM and when you say you have a 3.5 GHz processor, what is the exact processor. A Celeron or P4 at those speeds cannot handle the same amount as the newer Pent D and Core 2 Duo.