I'm sorry if these issues are already known, but I only got my beta yesterday and I'm experiencing some slight performance issues on my first game and I thought I should do my part for the beta testing process.
1. FPS drop. I should start by mentioning I have an Nvidia 9600GT card with latest drivers, running at 1920x1080. It's a decent card, it does its job in games far more prettier than FE. While in 3D mode I usually get around 25-30FPS, as indicated by Fraps, but while looking at an Imperium zone, with many walls, many trees, 1-2 cities, I experience a FPS drop down to 12FPS which is very noticeable and annoying. The FPS is of course worst when at maximum zoom out (the level before switching to cloth map). I keep the cloth map zoom change level to default. I was able to gain 5 more FPS by disabling outlines. Antialiasing does not seem to affect FPS when switched between 0 and 2. In cloth map I get a constant 60FPS. Disabling Shadows, Particle effects or Pedestrians has no effect on FPS either.
2. Clunky switch between 3D and cloth map. When either zooming in from cloth to 3D or zooming out from 3D to cloth, there isn't a fluid transition, but rather feels like a stop-motion transition and I find myself zoomed in or zoomed out more than I wanted because of this. This issue was also reported by Keith Turner in his preview of Fallen Enchantress on Space Sector. EDIT: After further testing I can say that this issue is caused by antialiasing. When set to 0 the transition is visibly smoother and more fluid. When set to 2 however, it is very clunky, as described.
I didn't think a debug.err was needed for these issues. If anyone has any suggestions, or if more details are needed please say so.
EDIT: Without opening another thread, I should also mention health bars during combat do not update correctly to reflect the actual health of the unit.
EDIT: The Knights of Asok camp building seems to be missing. It shows when not constructed, but when under construction it disappears and doesn't appear even when finished. Its icon does show on the cloth map and it does spawn units. But it's not visible nor selectable in 3D view.
FWIW, on an Intel i7 Q840 & dual ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870s, running in a 1280x1024 window, I'm seeing between 20 and 40 FPS, depending on where I'm looking on the map and how zoomed in I am.
I get 60FPS on the options screen
Edit: Forgot to mention that's with shadows and outlines turned off, pedestrians on, and AA off.
Gtx 560 (oc'ed by manufacturer), 4gb ram, win7, intel e6750 (2x2.6 with 4mb cache, 2 threads only) and its all good until I build up cities. Seeing just 3 of them on my map is performance killer. Im sticking to cloth map for half of the time, and use 3d view sometimes.
As bbr91 mentioned- just having more map uncovered drops down fps. Im wondering if I will be able to play with fully undiscovered map
So it seems all video cards, Nvidia, AMD-ATI or Intel, low-, mid- or high-end are affected. And the more map is explored, the more the FPS drops. This leads me to believe it's an engine optimization problem. Let's just hope it gets fixed soon after release and that people won't bash the game for it.
EDIT: Disabling the Terrain Information Window will improve FPS when moving around the map, both 3D and cloth, as there's no need for the engine to read and display terrain information constantly. Since by now we all know how rivers, forests, swamps and roads affect movement, disabling this is a viable idea.
I've been experiencing massive FPS drops since the very beginning. I'm not sure the crowds will react happily to heavy FPS drops, no matter how legitimate the cause: people will assume that a powerful PC + GPU combo should be enough to handle a strategy game.
Maybe it could be made clearer which settings to adjust in order to mitigate the problem, since being forced to cloth-map only is un-cool (despite the cloth map being cute!)
I agree. I mean even just using the cloth map i still only pull about 50fps....and to have to turn off options just to get this playable is not my first choice. Alot of us should max this game and still have room to spare as far as fps goes....im gonna hope it gets corrected. until then there is gw2 and torchlight 2
I just installed newest drivers 308 - had 301 earlier if im correct. Much smoother experience after system restart.
306.23 are the latest (including beta), and I have those already.
How much smoother is your experience?
Yes sorry 306.23 I can say at least 30% so far. Still testing. I think we will have to wait for engine update as performance is quite incosistent.
I think i may have a decent suggestion for the dev team, and if this exists and i over looked it apologize. I think we need a way to disable the water/ocean animations. They are constantly in effect and are eating my fps! Do you think you could in the future you can make it a check box to enable/disable ocean animations?
I don't think rivers and seas are that much of a FPS killer, since I get FPS drops even when there's no water in sight. You might as well use the cloth map if you want no water animations. Now I'm not saying having an option like this is bad, no, options are always always good, but maybe there's something that can be done in this time that would improve FPS more dramatically. Like engine optimizations, which will be good for everyone.
there are huge fps drops also when menus are open. for example when choosing what to build on the town screen....fps goes down to about 25.
But only in mid to late game. Changing between research trees is also laggy then. But when starting a new game, everything runs smooth.
Anyway I found the number 4 view point to be way friendlier to FPS in 3D mode, and to offer a better strategic perspective in the cloth map.
nah at start of game, i go down to 25ish fps......close the menu...back to about 45. late game is horrible to, but so is the start. i like to zoom in and out, up and down, side to side with pure speed......it aint pretty right now
There's some progress on this front.
If you have fraps or some other program that measure frame rate, try this:
Load it up and then hit Ctrl-X which hides the UI.
It appears that the systems affected are having a problem with the UI library.
Ok. I've figured it out.
It's the overlay.
Try this:
go to your main game directory
rename sdnxloverlay.dll to something else
then try the game.
Just tried it. FPS is exactly the same. It's just that the old ugly fonts are back.
EDIT: Also, CTRL+X doesn't do anything.
To use crtl+x you need to have run the game with -cheat
Ah, didn't know it required the cheat command.
So it you'd run it like this /cheat
It's -cheat. I ran the game with and without SDNXLOverlay.dll and when disabling the interface I get maybe one more FPS in low FPS areas, that is to say from 17 to 18. I use the same savegame from when I made this thread to compare results, it was .952 I think.
Maybe your solution will help others, like jgiombet who says he gets 25 FPS even when starting a new game. While my FPS drops from an initial 60 as I explore more of the map. It might be different problems.
SWTOR really, What server your playing on?
You got it frog dood!!!! renaming the .dll file completely solved my issue. now everything is running at 60fps constant, w/ vsync forced on my system. all town overlay menus are also not dropping my fps to nearly unplayable levels!!! so i can confirm this works on main screens, town screens, cloth map. considering i was at the start of the game pulling 43fps and opening up town screen goin down to about 25fps, right at the very start and now its completely fixed, well i gotta say im very happy. so here is my setup now:
beginning of game, 1920X1080, 4x AA, outlines enabled, particles and most importantly ......PEEPS in the towns! --------> 60fps! good work, its much appreciated!
who knows how they will be late game, but thats late game and is acceptable to me.....clearly this made a huge difference
Finishing up for the night.
Quickly:
It's the font system the overlay provides that's slowing it down for me and a few others. We're working on that tomorrow.
The other thing that slows things down for some people is the way some video cards (nVidia) handle batching. We'll be working on that as well.
Great investigating! Knowing the root cause is always so much better to address the symptoms. Best wishes on the best way to get it all fixed.
I'm very glad you found the root problems Brad. You made jgiombet a happy child I hope you guys can solve both problems before 1.0 comes out, as they might affect more people than indicated by this thread.
Your persistence as a developer (more so as a CEO ) is rare, and greatly appreciated by us.
You guys are awesome.
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