Promised performance increases observed - with Patch 16.1 - updated 05.02.2015

[Zeraphinos]

Hello community ,

after patch 9 got released , i gave rome another chance . But right after the first siege , i faced some sort of bug bcs i dont believe its my hardware fault . On siege with walls , my picture nearly freezes when my man reach with their ladders the wall .
Siege became nearly unplayable for me . Can someone help me how i can fix it . As soon as my men are inside the wall everything is normal .

[stevehoos]

Hello community ,

after patch 9 got released , i gave rome another chance . But right after the first siege , i faced some sort of bug bcs i dont believe its my hardware fault . On siege with walls , my picture nearly freezes when my man reach with their ladders the wall .
Siege became nearly unplayable for me . Can someone help me how i can fix it . As soon as my men are inside the wall everything is normal .

Welcome to the 2%. Did NASA approve your comp specs?

[alQamar]

Hello community ,

after patch 9 got released , i gave rome another chance . But right after the first siege , i faced some sort of bug bcs i dont believe its my hardware fault . On siege with walls , my picture nearly freezes when my man reach with their ladders the wall .
Siege became nearly unplayable for me . Can someone help me how i can fix it . As soon as my men are inside the wall everything is normal .

Well Zera, this is not a tech help thread. Could you please repost it in the tech subforums? More likely you will get help on totalwar.com. At least I never saw anyone of CA Staff replying on tech issues here on TWC.

[alQamar]

I am currently analyzing the log files Shogon made with patch 8.1 and 9

Based on the results of patch 8.1 I can already say the following:
the rumour that a GTX Titan or other high end card are not used at max seems disprove.
The Titan GPU ran at max speed and the GPU usage was between 98-99 %, so same as my "lame" 670 GTX. The most interesting thing is that even on maxed out settings Rome 2 will not allocate more than 2 GB VRAM on the same resolution, so if playing on extreme preset and a 1080p resolution VRAM is not a bottleneck. This was unclear for me till today. So without proper Antialiasing or multi-screen solutions any card with more than 2GB VRAM is a waste for Rome 2. My theory that he swaps textures to the harddisk as he possibly run out of VRAM is also false. The swapfile allocation is similar as with a 2GB VRAM card. To be honest it is beyond my horizon of knowledge why they use so much swap file, if not for buffering textures.

Technically I cannot understand why a Titan with much more horsepower created a same usage / load fingerprint as a 670 GTX so again it seems that the engine is the bottleneck itself. Moreover the CPU load, as proven former is not a bottleneck aswell in the benchmark. It was between 36-86% across all cores. Also against some stories never one core is fully loaded and limiting the speed. Please find detailed results here (work in progress), to avoid getting this thread to technical.

Remarks:
It is noticeable that the CPU requirements, or better said the CPU load in patch 9 is noticeable lowered. This comply with the patch notes.

Remarks about Shogons rig and patch 9
However same as on my rig, the performance decreased noticeable too. It is not the big gap of -11 % as on the 670 GTX but at least patch 9 is -4,5 % slower on this great system.

[shogon]

I'll get those official patch 9 runs some time today to you al in both 1080p and 3240x1920. Just been playing the game as usual and sometimes I want to think the latest patch did have an impact on battle performance. I still have to limit my unit sizes to Large though (instead of Ultra size with 400 man Cohorts), when the units in battle collide with each other I start getting slideshow like performance even while getting over 70 fps. Where things just seem to skip like an old 1930's movie camera. Or something like that, bad analogy I know.

Also, when it comes to vram I've heard that it is different per card. The reason why we may use similar amounts of VRAM is because were are both using Kepler chips, even though I may have 4GBs more on my card, it is only slightly different under the hood so to say then your 670 is. I may be mistaken as it's been a while since I read up on stuff like that, but this game isn't like BF4 where adjusting settings dramatically increases vram amounts, then again my max vram usage on high settings in 1920p was around 1.3 GBs I think, and on max my vram was over 3 GBs.

I can also possibly try and test my system on my 27" 60 Hz 1440p monitor if you want, so we have the 1080p, 1440p, and 1920p results with the latest patch. I could also try this on my 2nd system if needed so it can relate better with others people then my 6 core main rig. 2nd rig consists of a 4820k @ 4.0, 8GBs 2400 MHz memory, same SSD as my main build, and a GTX 690.

[Captain Arrrgh!]

Double bonus! Sped up my game AND it's annoying those with 'capable' hardware! It's like Christmas all over again.

[TheLastRonin]

Double bonus! Sped up my game AND it's annoying those with 'capable' hardware! It's like Christmas all over again.

It's very churlish to be smug about something that negatively effects a certain group of people and yet positively effects you.

[Super7700]

It's very churlish to be smug about something that negatively effects a certain group of people and yet positively effects you.

I would hardly call it a negative effect. A 2-4 fps difference is barely noticeable, especially if you're playing above 40 fps. If it had dropped from 40 to 30, then I would agree. Anyway from what I've heard the performance increase is much more noticeable in the battles then in the benchmark. By the way I've got a GTX770 which I believe counts as capable hardware.

[Leonidas II]

Guys , I have thought a while about the whole situation , and I would really appreciate it , if somebody could change his actual graphics card for an old one and benchmark the game at the same settings again.
I have the insidious presumption , that there could be some interesting results.Just let's think backwards , testing older hardware , not forwards , testing newer hardware.
Otherwise I don't see a way to further discover the performance issues.
AlQamar tries and tries to find the solution , but after every patch there is a new surprise , something odd happens, nothing is predictable.
So if sombody could do that , it would help me and others a lot.

[Mr.Freud]

I registered back in August 2013 for one reason - I wanted to find out what performance optimization improvements CA will make for Rome 2. I started asking questions and quickly realized that questions about performance were never answered and were always avoided and even suppressed by forum modders (in official forums).
So for me that was clear - they were hiding something about it. I was called conspirator theorist and lier.
And then came Sept. 3rd. Even though I felt that that would be that way, I still felt bad, because some part of my brain still had been believing in better scenario.
And then I knew that not just they released poorly optimized game - they were unable to fix it not because it was broken - but because it was unfixable. They've known it since the day they started developing Rome 2 on this ancient, retarded(by modern standards) engine. You know what they call optimization? Reducing LODs and draw distances - is optimization CA way. Optimization is not broken - it's just the limit of the engine. And engine limits not only performance but also it limits AI behavior.
And one more thing - are you sure that next game will be based on new engine? I'm not.
So we can start thousands of these threads every day, but it won't make any difference. It's like asking North Korea to stop being North Korea as we know it today. I've been a fan of TW games for many years already, but now, when I see this new face of CA I just wish that they go bankrupt and sell the franchise to someone else.
They won't fix the performance - it's unfixable. They won't change core gameplay mechanics (latests "politics guide" is just a spit in fans faces), they won't add features that we've always loved in TW - in fact people like Radious are the reason I still try to play and enjoy the game.
I wasn't surprised at all when I found out that they were making new Aliens game. We have to accept the fact that this new CA doesn't see game building as an art anymore - and it doesn't matter if SEGA is the reason. CA treats us like North Korea threats it's people.

[alQamar]

Anyway from what I've heard the performance increase is much more noticeable in the battles then in the benchmark.

Thats what I fairly stated also.

I would hardly call it a negative effect. A 2-4 fps difference is barely noticeable, especially if you're playing above 40 fps. If it had dropped from 40 to 30, then I would agree

I knew it would be hard to promote the idea of the game is degenerating since release in particular the benchmark. -14% isn't something I could apprechiate while the patch logs reads like Rome 2 would double performance with those patches compared to release. This is why I created this thread. I am really sick about the ambivalent situation of performance increases and the benchmark situation on the other hand. If they would have improved the engine we clearly would see this in the benchmark.

What they did instead is removing content for the sake of higher framerates namely:

- revised LOD (have a look on the tree problem zaript is youtubing about).
- removed ghost units when holding space bar
- removing pila throwing (less particles to compute)

etc.


I hope this thread leads to real improvements in the game, in hope we all could see this game running at similar performance Shogun 2 had.
I am not complaining about 3-4 fps missing but about the principle the game is getting slower technically, while we got served patch logs stating noticeable performance increases for several times now.
And the most painful question is why the lower settings have "improved" a bit and not all settings?

By the way I've got a GTX770 which I believe counts as capable hardware.

Of course.

[Boombat General]

When Patch 9 went to beta i noticed a very big increase in performance, but the subsequent hotfix reversed it, and now I'm back to previous levels of performance (ie, awful).

I made a thread over on the official forums and an admin said he would get in touch with the devs to see what the deal was. He said it might take a while for a reply but if i don't here anything this week i'll be sure to give the thread a bump.

here's the link if anyone's interested: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...ag-enclosed%29

[Sagat]

^ yea same exact here, I was getting around 50 fps on campaign map when 9 beta came, and now with the newest hotfixes it's back to what it was before around 25-30fps which is not smooth at all.... battle map performance is tolerable around 40fps when in normal sized battles, although nowhere near Shogun 2 level of smooth and maxed out at 60fps

no matter what setting I use, I get the same framerates it's absolutely crazy, and it's not like I even play at some crazy resolution, it's only 1080p for frigs sake

I liquid cooled both my i7 3930k and my R9 290X, with a top of the line $350 X79 motherboard, 32 gigs ram...... my PC swallows and spits out everything I throw at it except Rome 2 and another unoptimized piece of that is Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag

[alQamar]

Sad to hear Sagat. Thanks for yur support offsite TWC Boombat, have you got any replies from the support staff?

I am willing to proceed my "crusade" about the unhonourable technical aspects of the game till the last blood in my veins spilled */drama mode off*

or at least till the last torch in Rome 2 has been ceased */sarcasm mode off*

or the very much most unlikely case CA will finally fix these issues without adjusting LODs and stuff.
You could bet I am here to have a look what patch "X" will bring to us in this certain aspect.

[shogon]

Sorry Al, I haven't been able to do any benchmarks because mining has taken over for me in the past weeks. Maybe in a few days or something I'll have a PC that I can game on, but mining just seems more fun to me then trying to play a game that merely consumes time. I do hope they improve the game though, no way should my game look like crap running 3240x1920 at high frames with messed up textures and ruined performance.

[tarloch]

1680 x 1050 on evga 780 ti SC and frame rates are constantly dropping to 14-15 fps during siege battles no matter what settings i try

[alQamar]

Hi everyone, I've good news about the game. After some people reported "fixes" in conjunction with the new DLC content I re-ran the benchmarks again and IN FACT CA managed to fix things in the game, willingly or unwillingly but at least secretly.

I retested the latest driver from NVIDIA (334.89 final) which announced +5% performance for 700er series (I have a 670GTX). Against that it partly decreased performance again on lower settings.


these issues are still reproducible:
- poppings texture (more than usual now also on armor tiles not only on faces and limbs)
- higher framerates along all settings > updated in the OP.

these issues have been fixed or adjusted:
- units will no longer stuck or run into each other (except on ultra unit size)

Remarks: I excluded patch 2 and 3 for maxed out and extreme settings because CA confirmed me that the max FPS are considerably lower because they introduced "godrays" effects after patch 3




sidenote: meanwhile on totalwar.com I've heard there are several threads being closed about SLI support complains, of course legit because they are duplicate but also with the same reason:

CA is aware of the issue of SLI / Crossfire is not supported currently and working on it. Please be more patient.

[Mr.Freud]

Hi AlQamar. Waiting for your new results with patch 10. Hope they did something big for performance

[alQamar]

I will do them tonight, even I'd better learn for Friday.

If anyone could do the following. Running the benchmark with patch 9.1 and 10 beta with same settings it would be very helpful to see the benchmark result screenies.
I will do maxed out to high as usual, and PrussianPrince told me to do this with extreme preset and also crosstesting the older nvidia driver 322 and the new with patch 9.1 and 10.
I am really excited how the things will turn out this time

[alQamar]

Oh dear this seem to be an epic session. not only patch 10 beta released today but also an newer driver from nvidia 335.23

so my to do list lists: testing patch 9.1 and 10 beta with current driver then testing it with 335.23 for both again.