Low Framerates on a High End System

[Silven]

Hello all.

Currently using SS 6.4 + MSC 6.0, no other mods or sub mods.

System Specs:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 CPU @ 2.80GHz (4 CPUs)
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 w/ 512MB Dedicated Memory
Driver Version: 8.17.12.7061
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Display Resolution: 1600 x 900 (32 bit) (60Hz)

Now my computer is obviously not state-of-the-art but it is very capable of running nearly any software on the market today at at least medium settings if not higher, with framerates comfortably above 30 fps.

I run Shogun 2 on all ultra settings, save for shadows, and the frames consistently stay around 40+. Unit Sizes at Ultra.

However MTW2 is running very sluggishly for some reason. The campaign map does just fine, but my battlefield maps are hovering around 15 fps. The camera moves slowly and is not smooth at all. I turned all the graphics options that are available on the battle map all the way down, and still no improvement. The battles as a whole seem to move very slowly. Unit sizes at Ultra here as well.

Anyone have any ideas?

[bɑne]

Shogun 2 has multicore support, MTW2 hasn't. Try a battle without ultra settings (normal, for starters) and see if it makes a difference fps-wise.

[Silven]

Interesting. I hadn't considered the multicore point you bring up. Still... 1 core at 2.8ghz should be more than enough, no?

I will try your recommendation however. Thanks. I'll report my findings as soon as I have them.

[Losthief]

Interesting. I hadn't considered the multicore point you bring up. Still... 1 core at 2.8ghz should be more than enough, no?

I will try your recommendation however. Thanks. I'll report my findings as soon as I have them.

it's the core issue...another option is after you load ss, go back to your desktop (alt-tab or alt-enter or whatever) and then ctrl-alt-delete to bring up taskmanger and right click on kingdoms.exe and then assign it to a empty core that your not using (i.e. not the first one running windows, virus, etc etc) and then it has its own dedicated core and that should help some.

[Silven]

Thanks for all the advice fellows! I just recently bought my quad core and havn't fully realized all these specifics in how they work in relation to one another yet. +rep for both of you.

I recently got caught up in NTW again so it might be some time before I actually give MTW2 a shot again. but I will definitely post my findings as soon as I return to MTW2. I'm just finding it so hard to return to this game after getting used to all the gameplay polish and eyecandy provided in NTW and S2TW... Even WITH the awesome overhaul of SS.

[Silven]

So I tried out these suggestions today, and WOW. Framerates went through the roof. Everything felt smooth as butter.

It seems kinda obvious that that would happen after turning all the settings down, its just kinda shocking that for whatever reason, even this old game can tax my rig's resources.
All thats left is to start turning things back up and see where the medium ground is, or maybe, if i get lucky, find that one setting that was slowing things down by itself.

Question about the Core assignments though. I assigned it to 1 core at first. Things went fine and the graph showed it was working at 100%, and the others at essentially 0%. So I tried then assigning it to 2 cores, and the graphs showed that both of them were being used and sharing the load. They were both operating about about 40-50% each. And the game was still running fine as before.

So are we positive that the game isnt somehow utilizing more than 1 core when possible? Or am I missing something there.

[Losthief]

So I tried out these suggestions today, and WOW. Framerates went through the roof. Everything felt smooth as butter.

It seems kinda obvious that that would happen after turning all the settings down, its just kinda shocking that for whatever reason, even this old game can tax my rig's resources.
All thats left is to start turning things back up and see where the medium ground is, or maybe, if i get lucky, find that one setting that was slowing things down by itself.

Question about the Core assignments though. I assigned it to 1 core at first. Things went fine and the graph showed it was working at 100%, and the others at essentially 0%. So I tried then assigning it to 2 cores, and the graphs showed that both of them were being used and sharing the load. They were both operating about about 40-50% each. And the game was still running fine as before.

So are we positive that the game isnt somehow utilizing more than 1 core when possible? Or am I missing something there.

*shrug* no idea....my dual core only runs it at one core tho...so i dunno.

[bɑne]

Question about the Core assignments though. I assigned it to 1 core at first. Things went fine and the graph showed it was working at 100%, and the others at essentially 0%. So I tried then assigning it to 2 cores, and the graphs showed that both of them were being used and sharing the load. They were both operating about about 40-50% each. And the game was still running fine as before.

Only relevant info would be the cpu load number next to the kingdoms process - this should stay the same no matter how many cores you assign. The rest of the processes should be automatically assigned to the free cores making manual assignment of cores a bit of a snake-oil approach.

So are we positive that the game isnt somehow utilizing more than 1 core when possible? Or am I missing something there.

It is a bit of a circular logic but if it was using more than 1 core then your system performance would be far better The game is too old for multicore support as it is running on a beefed up engine of an even older game (rome and m2tw share the same base engine).

Programming truly multithreaded code often requires complex co-ordination of threads and can easily introduce subtle and difficult-to-find bugs due to the interleaving of processing on data shared between threads (thread-safety). Consequently, such code is much more difficult to debug than single-threaded code when it breaks. There has been a perceived lack of motivation for writing consumer-level threaded applications because of the relative rarity of consumer-level multiprocessor hardware. Although threaded applications incur little additional performance penalty on single-processor machines, the extra overhead of development has been difficult to justify due to the preponderance of single-processor machines.

Now what this quote from wikipedia hints at is that adaption for mulitcore of the m2tw/rome engine would have been a huge task which is why I believe they dropped it in favor of creating a new multicore supporting engine for empire and later.

[Silven]

Am I to understand that assigning the game to a single core will make no difference then?

[Silven]

So it turns out that shadows were the cause of the problem. With every single setting maxed out, extreme shadows were causing the poor preformance.

If all the settings are maxed out, and the shadows at medium, the game runs great. Interesting find too, as shadows are usually what I have to turn off in Shogun 2 as well.