Strange performance fix (for me anyway)

[Ninjaheman]

Greetings,

For days now I've been tweaking settings in game and via the preferences tab in the launcher. It was running pretty choppy for me and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, there was no reason my rig should run it with such low FPS. I persevered and kept tweaking things.

The solution, quite strangely, came when I moved the unit detail/quality slider in game from the highest setting to one notch lower, then back up to highest again. Amazingly this fixed all of my FPS issues and I run with everything maxed out save the vegetation setting in the launcher. Who knows, I may be able to do that now as well but I don't want to push my luck.

I had to share this with everyone because: A, hopefully it helps someone and B, to maybe get a discussion going on why this is and bring it to the attention of the team if my situation doesn't happen to be just a fluke.

Edit: It seems the way I was able to permanently fix this so I don't need to adjust the slider down and then up every battle is to just set UNIT_DETAIL to 'super high' in the preferences tab of the launcher. It shows as maxed out with the in game slider and I haven't noticed any degradation in unit quality.

[viktorslama]

Doesn't this mean that the game no longer uses sprites for distant units? What rig do you play it on? Maybe RTW uses the CPU for sprites but makes the GPU draw the full 3D units.

[dvk901]

If you set the unit detail to the highest setting, it is true that the game no longer uses the sprites. For a system that can handle that, that's great. Why this fixed your issue is a mystery...especially since you set it down a notch, and then back up again. I expected you to say you just set it down a notch! However, this is something I have often posted in our Forum, that people need to tweak their own systems in order to find the best settings, rather than just howl because performance is poor. For example, RTW's method of auto-detecting the best video settings is absolutely worthless at this point. Why? This is why:

Auto-optimise options
Processor Speed
1.5 2 2.5 3
Physical RAM
256 384 512 1024
Video RAM
64 128 256 512

These are the system capabilities that RTW was based on, and there are few systems left with such modest hardware. So RTW has no idea what to do with a more modern system. I can set my game settings to the max in all areas and it will play fine. But an auto-detect of my system will treat it like it's a piece of junk!
And I have an Intel I5 processor, 6GB of ram, and 2GB of video memory! So yes...people need to do a bit of experimenting with their RTW settings to find the best settings that work for them on their PC.