Promised performance increases observed - with Patch 16.1 - updated 05.02.2015

[alQamar]

Thank you wangrin. In the past 3 years I contacted the CA staff several times. I am not willing to discuss meaningful things like this via email and most of all times people most likely don't get answers. Anyway thank you for presenting me the options to contact them. I'd rather will not contact them anymore as I do not see a reasonable point to spent time into something that is not wished. There has been other examples where CA staff clearly should be in position to undo or question moderator actions but they won't. Maybe you are right it is time to counter those behaviour, but I don't know if those actions would lead to an approriate result.

Even if I would not been banned for literally nothing I'd rather stick to my word than to come back, and seriously I expect a sorry from alJabberwocks absurd presumptions now.

[iWarsaw]

What does it matter if your banned when you requested your own deletion?

Also his points on banning you dont make sense.

If he really didnt like the post, if you really didnt know what you were talking about, if people really did believe you but it was all WHY WHY WHY didnt he just make a reply saying that? Why not just reply to the post? I mean he clearly has enough time to put together this quite elaborate ban message.

me... Rome 2 is tearing apart its own community.

[Radzeer]

I would like to remind everybody that the discussion of totalwar.com moderation practices here is off topic. You can do this in the CA business practice discussion thread as long as your points are about how the way they run their forum is related to their business practices. Individual moderators actions cannot be discussed there either - please continue this part via PMs.

Let's keep this discussion here about the benchmarks and performance. Thanks.

[alQamar]

I would like to remind everybody that the discussion of totalwar.com moderation practices here is off topic. You can do this in the CA business practice discussion thread as long as your points are about how the way they run their forum is related to their business practices. Individual moderators actions cannot be discussed there either - please continue this part via PMs.

Let's keep this discussion here about the benchmarks and performance. Thanks.

removed my postings about the moderation an my perma ban on totalwar.com here and reposted them in the business practice complaint thread where it belongs too.
A move of related posting (clean up) in this topic is appreciated.

[RedFox]

There have been reports on people operating on much lower-end hardware and actually getting higher performance. Does anyone have any performance charts / information / samples of this in action? It would be interesting to see what the bottleneck really is.

[Denco]

There have been reports on people operating on much lower-end hardware and actually getting higher performance. Does anyone have any performance charts / information / samples of this in action? It would be interesting to see what the bottleneck really is.

As far as I remember those people usually played with low to medium unit size which increases performance by a lot.

[Tr0tskY]

As far as I remember those people usually played with low to medium unit size which increases performance by a lot.

seems to be the case, anybody I talk to who actually knows what they are talking about gets lower performance than me (if they have worse hardware). The thing is, I can barely stand my own performance dropping to 30fps on my i5 4670K 7950 3GB boost, so I don't know how in the hell people are satisfied with even worse performance or even having to play battles with really tiny armies (smaller unit sizes also make battles last way less time)

[alQamar]

me neither Trotzky and it confirms me thatmy shared diagnosis in the OP cannot be completely wrong.
The problem I see is that we have no proper tools. Someone said my graphics RAM should be insufficient but it is not. You can tell that by logging the vram usage with afterburner or similar tools, second the game does not write the gfx.log which would certainly happen if he auto degrades settings.

so what now?

[DramaBelli]

About Al Qamar situation in the Official CA totalitarian forum: "disappointed" and negatively stumped.

About the matter of this thread I can sincerously say to the author: well mate, welcome, I've built an high end pc for Rome II to realize that Rome 2 is running worst than shogun 2 on my previous one with a 6850 (now I get a 7970).

Unexpected lag or, more frequently, fps slowdown. A stuttering experience full of graphical horrors NEVER experienced in a total war game °_°!

Settings too...they seem a sort of joke. Not real performance clues when decreasing some parameters. it's a "randomizing" game: sometimes it runs smooth with veg Alpha and shadows on extreme, other times it runs worst in the same condition. Same as siege AI, still broken for the bigger part of situations, but sometimes able to work in a decent way.

[RedFox]

It's probably best to turn off vegetation Alpha. If you implement 'proper Textbook' blending + transparency, it would consist of depth-sorting all visible transparent objects and possibly rendering the object twice in some cases, which gives horrible performance, but great looking transparency. Of course, if one has experience, you can circumvent this by configuring the graphics card for specific alpha-blended rendering. I bet CA went with the Textbook approach, hence bad performance.

If you turn off vegetation alpha, it might disable the expensive depth-sorting.

As for Video RAM usage, 1920x1080 32-bit backbuffer would take 7.9MB, if you add 4x MSAA, it would multiply backbuffer usage by 4: 31.6MB. If you add backbuffer (31.6MB), frontbuffer (31.6MB) and also the depth buffer (7.9MB), you get 71.1MB of Video RAM usage.

Now since they have water reflections, it would require using a framebuffer (custom back/front buffer, not the built-in type). If they do this correctly, they can save 71.1MB and only create the framebuffer and avoid any unnecessary operations. Could probably check that by running RII through VS DirectX debugger. Sadly I don't have RII installed, so I can't check.

So they might end up using up over 150MB of Video RAM just for the rendering device itself. I have no idea what they're filling the rest of video ram with. A simple DXT5 texture takes 1 byte per pixel and +33% for mipmaps, so a 1024x1024 texture would take ~1.33MB or 0.34MB for a 512x512 texture. You can fit a few thousand textures inside say 600MB, leaving the rest for model data and animations. I don't know what they're doing, but 1GB should be enough for high-fidelity graphics.


Was R2 really written by inexperienced programmers? I noticed that their new Aliens title looked pretty good - perhaps they allocated all the experienced devs on that?

P.S. - Sorry for all the technical details, I'm just trying to make a point here. An AAA title should not be this bad.

[kelvin1982lam]

I paid a lots of my saving to build a decent PC just for playing Rome 2, as I love big battle. I could tell the performance has been getting worse and worse since patch7. Now even the worst in Patch 8.1. I was expecting a big battle like at least 40 vs 40 with no lag, but I could only get 15+fps with horrible graphic now. I am so disappointed with CA

My spec

I-5 4670K@4.2
GTX 780
16Gz Ram
Windows 8.1

[stevehoos]

I paid a lots of my saving to build a decent PC just for playing Rome 2, as I love big battle. I could tell the performance has been getting worse and worse since patch7. Now even the worst in Patch 8.1. I was expecting a big battle like at least 40 vs 40 with no lag, but I could only get 15+fps with horrible graphic now. I am so disappointed with CA

My spec

I-5 4670K@4.2
GTX 780
16Gz Ram
Windows 8.1

Me too man, got a new video card for my custom built system and this game runs worse than Shogun 2 with my old video card. I agree about the graphics as well.

[Spinescens]

Howdy gents, a noob question. How do I take a screeny of the benchmark results? Or the graphic options? I have it all written down on paper but I didn't want to make a large post. I am on the lower end of the hardware spectrum and I would like to help out alQamar. I also noticed I had to downgrade the texture setting after the last patch or 2, otherwise it would downgrade my graphics. That is really bloody annoying.

[lawandorder82]

Im just saying that I really like my desktop and how it handles the graphics of rome two

[Jester]

the performance got a tad better somewhere between patch 3-7 for me, but now after the latest update it got worse again. i'm playing with mixed settings of extreme, ultra and high.

however, i cant be bothered to do some extensive testing anymore like in the first weeks. i'm just chekcing out a few custom battles after every new patch, then i got usually sick and shut it down again. i dont even know why i'm still doing this, i should just uninstall the game once and for all

[Dynamo11]

Performance got better for me between Patch 3-6 on Phenom II 955 and 2x5770s but then took a nosedive between Patch 7-8.1. I have no idea what happened, but I was getting 30FPS benchmark previously on Extreme settings preset only for it to go down to 18FPS. Again no idea why, so CA to me STILL hasn't fixed the performance issues.
I can run Shogun 2 on all high settings at a good 50FPS average btw for reference

Howdy gents, a noob question. How do I take a screeny of the benchmark results? Or the graphic options? I have it all written down on paper but I didn't want to make a large post. I am on the lower end of the hardware spectrum and I would like to help out alQamar. I also noticed I had to downgrade the texture setting after the last patch or 2, otherwise it would downgrade my graphics. That is really bloody annoying.

Press F12 in-game, and Steam will take a screenshot.

[Jester]

^ yea, Shogun2 runs like a dream for me too. maxed out PLUS AA! plus better lightning effects in night battles, it looks amazing. how did they managed to mess all this up? : /

[Spinescens]

I still have Empire, Shogun 2, and Rome 2 installed on my hdd. And Shogun 2 runs very well. So does Empire. Thanks Dynamo11 for replying but the screenshots (f12) wont work out of actual gameplay for some reason . In game no problemo, but for the settings and benchmark screens it wont work. Am I missing something obvious here or do I need a separate program? All I wanted to say in the first place is that I have an i7 920 overclocked to 3.6, 2xGTX 460's (977mb) in SLI (which is obviously only using one annoyingly), and in the benchmark its 33.6. Everything is at HIGH/ON, v-sync turned off, Shader model 5, texture quality (medium - used to be high before the new patches), Unit size ultra, and Vegetation alpha - off. DRA - greyed out for obvious reasons, and UVM - off. 1680 x 1050 120hz, 6gb ram, 64 bit Vista. If I can help anymore let me know.

[RedFox]

An i7-920 overclocked from 2.67GHz -> 3.6GHz (1.34x increase) should be a pretty high-end CPU, matching i7-2920XM according to PassMark CPU performance list. GTX 460 isn't a pushover either, especially with SLI.

If only someone had time to experiment with the graphics options. Usually textures are very GPU bottlenecked. However, unit size should directly show the CPU overhead of the game. If someone could set texture settings to lowest and then measure FPS in a large battle several times with all the different unit sizes (min to max), we could make some conclusions.

[Legatus_Aemilius]

The major bottleneck in this game is whatever script they are using to run the AI and pathfinding. I notice that in large battles,especially siege battles, that when you command a huge group of units to move from A to B that there is a 5 second 'pause' while it computes everything on the CPU. They really need to trim that portion of their code,or offload the computations somehow to the graphics card-which has plenty of computational power to spare, on high graphics it uses less than 50% of my gpu's potential.

I have a low-tier rig with a AMD FX-8320(8 core), a 7200 rpm hdd, and a MSI AMD R9 270x(overclocked) with 2 gb vram - so it could just be me.