nx02nx02

Join Date 05/2005

Performance issues HELP

I am having some serious performance issues with the game even with the latest patch it runs like crap. if their is a few fleets on screen of 4 ships each, so say 15 or 20 ships total it drops down to 1 FPS. But it doesnt seem to be my fleets causing it, its the A.I.s fleets. I was curious so i built about 50 of my own ships, to see, no slowdown at all but a few AI fleets make the game a slideshow.

Any ideas?
Also, I dont know if it's related but the videos in the game stutter, all of them, and the animations of the ships blowing up go really slow, like 2 FPS.

OK my fleets are causing the slowdown as well. Only when their onscreen though. System specs.

Geforce 4 ti4200 128mb 81.98 drivers
athlon xp 2400+
Windows xp
512 ddr ram
direct x9c
western digital 80 gig hard drive
msi mobo with latest via 4 in 1 drivers

Sorry if double post. the first one didnt seem to show up.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2423

I'd suggest getting 1.0X which has some new video settings and disabling most of them until you get the performance you're looking for.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2423

And if I had to guess, I bet it's the anti-aliasing. Turn that feature off and I bet it'll be much faster.

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I was just gona say, turn off the AA, it reallly isnt needed for this game and should give a very nice preformance boost

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Ok, Thanks for the suggestions. AA is off. and I tried the video settings int the new patch. I turned everything to lowest and restarted the game hoping for the best but it's still the same performance wise.

I am running the game on lowest possible settings and getting maybe 5 FPS at most when there is say 5 or so fleets onscreen, if I move the screen over to the corner of the map where there is no ships or anything it's perfectly smooth.

Something has to be seriously wrong, I just dont get it? all my other games play fine on this computer.

These specific ships im referring to are really simple too, low polygon ships, like the fighters that you start with, or other low polygon ones.

Any other ideas?

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Very odd... my computer has a 2100+ XP processor, but about 700MB of RAM and a 256MB video card. I've never had any problems :/

Any other settings in the display settings? Maybe anisotropic filtering

I've turned them on sometimes to make things look pretty, but then everything runs pretty appalingly (double p? double l? Argh, curse my spelling).

That's the only suggestion I can make

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I have done some further experiments and found some very interesting results.

I started a game on the smallest map with 2 A.I. civs and rare stars rare planets.

1024 X 768 resolution

No AA or AF
Lowest detail settings, no textures or anything.
At first it's smooth.
I then built about 30 medium hull ships and parked them all outside earth. = total slideshow maybe 5-10 FPS

You can tell that it's the polygons themselves causing the slowdown, theres no aa or af or textures or lighting or anything else there to cause it.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2423

Yea, but the thing is, the game runs on Geforce 2 level cards. A Geforce 4 should be fine.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2423

Try this - check your Geforce video settings outside the game in display settings. See if you have set them to override something that's in game.

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Ok I checked the display settings outside the game to make sure aa is set to off, af set to off v-sync is application controlled. performance is on quality.

I also tried the game on my other computer and it does the same thing, as soon as theres 20 - 40 ships on screen it's a slideshow. I couldn't tell you the exact framerate because I am just guessing by eye but I would say less than 10. Maybe 5 or 10.

Other computer:

Windows XP
AMD Athlon XP2000+
Visontek Geforce 3 TI200 81.98
MSI K7N2 DDR mobo
512 PC2100
Maxtor 80 GIG hard drive

Do both of these computers have something in common that is causing the slowdown?

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what driver version are ya running

also do ya have norton or an antivirus going on in the background?

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The game runs slow on my Dell 8600 laptop with a GeForce FX Go5200 too... running 78.11 drivers. Unfortunately Dell hasn't put out any new GeForce FX Go drivers... and the ones from Nvidia's site doesnt' work.

Any suggestions?

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for the videc cards im using 81.98's and no antivirus or anything running in background.

Just bare windows really. WIth about 18 processes running.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2423

Yea I'm kind of clueless what the issue could be. Try chagning the setting in your video card to performance instead of quality and see what happens.

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I could be wrong but I dont think it's antivirus or anything like that causing the problem, I dont think it's any external program or anything in the background. The game runs fine, unless I have ships on the screen, even on the biggest maps with 9 other races it plays smooth until the ships start showing up on screen

Heres an example, I could build 100's of ships and park them all in one corner of the map, if I focus the camera there I will be lucky to get 1 FPS but, if I move the camera to the other side of the map, where those ships are not drawn onscreen it's perfectly smooth.

But it dont take 100's it only takes about 20-40 to slow it down.

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Just tried that didn't help.

Perhaps a Geforce 4 just isn't good enough?

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I have the same problem here. My system is a Athlon 1800+, Geforce TI4200 (128mb) and 1 Gb of RAM. I'm playing a small galaxy, and when I zoom out so that I see a good part of the map, with not very much going on (maybe 20-30 ships and 10 starbases on the screen), I'm down to about 2-3 fps. (Latest drivers, DirectX, no other programs etc.) When I'm in icon mode, it is much smoother, so I'm playing now with a low icon mode threshold. Of course, that's not as much fun as seeing all the nice stuff....

I tried some of the visual options, but they didn't change much. Yes, I restarted

Question from a developer: Does the 3D engine use some sort of level-of-detail adjustment? From what I see, it could be simply too many polygons from the rather detailed models, bogging the video card down. I guess LOD wouldn't be trivial, as it can't be precomputed for the custom ships, but if it enables more people to play the game, it might be worth it...

It would be nice (if the engine permits) to have a polygon count display that could be enabled for debugging. And maybe a fps counter, then we would get some hard numbers to compare.

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