Why this game run so poor on current hardware

[horendus]

The problem is, that the game engine is inherently old. Its basicly the same engine as Rome Total War, its just been drasticly added on to. The game engine ran beautifully with the Rome Total War level of detail.

It's Graphics, AI, Audio, ect. all ran very nicely, threaded through the single core era's single core CPU's. The absence of realtime lighting, partical effects, "grass" meant there wasnt to much overhead on processing, keeping the frame rate pretty good on high end hardware.

Then came Medival Total War 2. HDR lighitng, volumetric smoke effects and "grass" was added to the game. The campaign map also became much more complex, however there was still just enough processesing power in high end and overclocked CPU that the game could be rendered at an apropriatly stable frame rate, even on single core CPU's. This is because the game is still effectivly a single threaded application. Not much work has been done to "break up" the game into "smaller chunks" to thread simultaneouly through the now quit common, multicore CPU.

And then came the Empire Total War. Suddenly the games engine has huge ammounts of smoke, particals, post processing effects, realtime shadow, more things going on at once then ever before. Yet there still has been little to no work done to seperate this, now bloated game code, into smaller, more deliberate and manageable chunks.

Thats why this game NEVER runs great (40+ Frames) And may never, even on faster hardware. Im of cource refering to the WHOLE game, this mean land battles, sea battles and the campaign map


The game is simply too big to run on a single core, yet too ineffient to run on a QuadCore.



I just hope that the CA programs are up to the task of fixing this inefficient, bloated engine and at the same time reduce its memory footprint to stop the "Out Of Memory" crashes

[civildude892]

I get the out of memory crashes every second battle, so annoying having to save and close the game after each one.

But my game does run fine on land and sea battles, only slowdowns i get are when I move the camera into large smoke clouds while running the smoke and blood mod. Vanilla game runs fine at very high.

amd quadcore, 2.5ghz per core. I forget the actual model # and im at work so i cant check =(.
4gb ram
9800gtx

[guerra]

What are your specs? The game runs fine on my rig, you just have to compromise some settings.

[horendus]

This was intended as a philosophical debate regarding multi core programing methodology rather than a "My PC also gets the crashes" thread

[MyKingforahorse]

Disable affinity for the prog if you have a quad core on certain boards and the game will run like silk.

If you have a dual core with Vista do the same thing

Other than that, you have to make some sacrifices for performance. SSOA and Volumetric are the two biggies that give the largest performance boost.

Just as an example, the game runs like silk on mine.

Intel Core 2 E6850
Shuttle XPC
Gigabyte Nvidia 9600+
Corsair 128gb SSD
Dual Boot with Vista SP1/Windows XP SP3

[ckangas]

Disable affinity for the prog if you have a quad core on certain boards and the game will run like silk.

If you have a dual core with Vista do the same thing

Other than that, you have to make some sacrifices for performance. SSOA and Volumetric are the two biggies that give the largest performance boost.

Just as an example, the game runs like silk on mine.

Intel Core 2 E6850
Shuttle XPC
Gigabyte Nvidia 9600+
Corsair 128gb SSD
Dual Boot with Vista SP1/Windows XP SP3

Although I've heard terrible reports from nearly everyone with a quadcore, the game seems to split threads on my dualcore (E8400) just fine. Watching core activity on my G15, the game appears to split jobs just fine. The cores both appear rather full on the turn cycle, but rarely max out anywhere else. When one core is disabled the other one runs at nearly a constant 100% and performance suffers significantly - especially on the turn cycle.

When you say "smooth as silk" with your current hardware...I'm not sure what to say - apparently I'm playing a different game. The battles run well even on higher settings. The turn cycle; however, is painfully slow. Especially in later games or when playing the last segment of RTI, I find the sudden urge to bring in a TV or go make a sandwich...SOMETHING to pass the horrifically long turn cycle. After which you play for a minute...then get to wait all over again. I'm not going to mention the apparent memory leaks regarding naval fleets and certain cities such as Paris.

I'm not quite sure I agree with the OP. My game personally seems to have no issues splitting the processor load, although again I've only hear bad reports from quad-core users. I would also disagree about general performance. Outside of the memory leaks (and heck, the turn cycle could be similar issues), I would argue that 90% of my performance frustration can be pointed towards the turn cycle. When RTW came out (assuming new hardware) the turn cycle took around 10 seconds - when on earth did a 30 second to 3 minute wait become acceptable?

E8400
8GB ram (vista 64)
GTX-280

[MyKingforahorse]

When you say "smooth as silk" with your current hardware...I'm not sure what to say - apparently I'm playing a different game. The battles run well even on higher settings. The turn cycle; however, is painfully slow.

Apologies, I figured the turn issue was a forlorn mentioned issue.

Yes, everything except the occasional unit select and the turn length runs without issue.

It has however gotten MUCH better with the most recent patch, and was helped at least on my hardware platform by tweaking some of my sound settings and reverting to specific mainboard driver sets.

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Disable affinity for the prog if you have a quad core on certain boards and the game will run like silk.

Can you clarify this please? According to my what I've looked up if you "disable" affinity it means your computer won't run a program because no processors are assigned to it. I'm not great with computers, so I dunno.

[Sir Robin]

Well I'm running a dual core with an SLI mobo and a 640 MB 8800 card. I've only had one CTD and it runs everything great though I use "High" settings. That seems like "current" hardware to me.

[horendus]

Ok so heres how I feel about the games performance.

- Battles generally run pretty good once optimal setting have been found for your system

- Games campaign map runs like a dog. Its jumps all over the place (affinity helps abit)

- Battles later in campaign will be randomly be unplayaby, stuttering with poor frame rate

- The campain eventually hits a point where you either get a crash to desktop on your next turn even after save/re-load or it becomes so chopy on the campaign map its not fun to play anymore

- Campaign map will sometimes reach a point to where certain ports you click on freeze the game for upwards of 40 seconds.


I dont think you could run the game on medium setting, on top range hardware, from start of long campagin to finish, without either reaching a point where the game is to unstable to reach the next turn, or the performance has degreated to un unplayable level.



Mind you I luv the game and would still vote for it Game of the Year.....

...I just cant get my fill of it because of the problems with engine

[Coilz]

Try out OS Windows 7 instead - it seems to handle the game better than xp/vista did for me. Less lag, faster rendering and maps are loading quick.

If you are running vista - well that's probably the root of the problem from my point of view. It's a terrible gaming operating system.

[Plank of Wood]

If you are running vista - well that's probably the root of the problem from my point of view. It's a terrible gaming operating system.

Nope, sorry. Games never crashed nearly as much on vista for as they did on XP. If I ran ETW on XP I suspect my computer would explode, yet on Vista it runs with the smoothness and silence of a shy ninja.

[Legionnaire151]

If you are running vista - well that's probably the root of the problem from my point of view. It's a terrible gaming operating system.

Vista is not the problem. Vista simply requires a little more of everything from your computer than XP does. I'm sure that anyone that had issues with Vista ( like myself ) had them when it first came out. With all the updates and improvements, Vista is a very capable OS and handles ALL of my gaming needs without a hiccup. If one is going to have a negative opinion about anything, I believe one should thoroughly test both sides of the fence totally and completely un-biased.

Personally I haven't used Windows 7 and I'm sure it'll be great in a year or so.

P.S.

I run ETW with 50+ FPS...but that's due to an unnecessary, monstrously built RIG.

P.S.S.

ETW utilizes a completely new engine built on the i7 core btw...and also the same thing with M2TW, it uses a newer engine than RTW.

[Steel55677]

I have to disagree. My game runs smooth. I never lag in this game in battles or campaign map unless I press fast forward x3. I can play Ultra + Ultra unit size with no comprise to fps.

(Oh, I've got Q6600, ATI 4870 1GB, on Vista Ultimate x64)

[Switch]

I have to disagree. My game runs smooth. I never lag in this game in battles or campaign map unless I press fast forward x3. I can play Ultra + Ultra unit size with no comprise to fps.

(Oh, I've got Q6600, ATI 4870 1GB, on Vista Ultimate x64)

That's strange, I also have a Q6600 (overclocked to 3.0Ghz) and a 4870 1Gb , along with 4Gb of memory but my campaign map suffers from stuttering. I wouldn't say it makes it unplayable, it's just very irritating. Battles are fine with lots of knobs and switches turned to maximum, however. Although very occassionaly I seem to find battles afflicted by chronic choppiness which so far as I can tell is random - doesn't seem to bear relation to how many troops are on the field.

I've never had this memory leak issue people keep referring to. Turns take a while, longer than previous TW games but definitely nowhere close to three minutes.

My main beef is with the issues relating to fleets.. Clicking on late-game fleets can cause long period of freezing, some of which can be terminal. Extremely frustrating, even if adding a sloop to the fleet sorts it out.

[Arej]

Your graphic card isn't current hardware, maybe that's why? Lower your settings

[Duck]

Your graphic card isn't current hardware, maybe that's why? Lower your settings

I have an 8800GT and it works fine.

[Steel55677]

That's strange, I also have a Q6600 (overclocked to 3.0Ghz) and a 4870 1Gb , along with 4Gb of memory but my campaign map suffers from stuttering. I wouldn't say it makes it unplayable, it's just very irritating. Battles are fine with lots of knobs and switches turned to maximum, however. Although very occassionaly I seem to find battles afflicted by chronic choppiness which so far as I can tell is random - doesn't seem to bear relation to how many troops are on the field.

I've never had this memory leak issue people keep referring to. Turns take a while, longer than previous TW games but definitely nowhere close to three minutes.

My main beef is with the issues relating to fleets.. Clicking on late-game fleets can cause long period of freezing, some of which can be terminal. Extremely frustrating, even if adding a sloop to the fleet sorts it out.

That is strange. I've never lagged in a battle, it's always been smooth for me. Although I Oc the 4870 to 800/1100 and I tweaked CPU affinity.

[Lord Leopold]

The game seems to run fine on my notebook. I have most all the settings on ultra with the light smoke mod and darth's mod commander edition. But I run it at 1024x768 instead of 1400x900 mainly because of the text it seems to be way to small for me even at 1024. At 1400x900 it still runs fine.

Dual core 2.0
Vista 64 Bit
4 GB ram
Nvidia 512 MB
System is optimized to the T

The only issue I have found is the campaign map tends to shutter or get stuck for a few seconds every once in a while.

[TeutonicKnight]

I disagree with the OP's premise - that people are having issues due to an outdated engine. I don't buy the argument that "adding on" all the bits and pieces have done in the engine's efficiency. While I can agree that there may have been some downgrade in performance of the engine itself due to all the new features, I'm not noticing any failure of the hardware to compensate, and indeed exceed, in every way.

Fore me, Empire runs more smoothly than M2TW.