Game Performance Observations

[Maltrease]

Not a complaint just an observation I found interesting.

My home machine is a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4, 1.5G of RAM.

I had a Radeon 9800 card, battles were quick, zooming map, turn time… everything was good.

Radeon 9800 card died and I replaced it with an old Nvidea card Geoforce 2 something. Dominions was barely playable even after turning down all the graphics options and turning off the animated background. Scrolling the map was incredibly slow... like 1 second delay between input and update. Battles only playable with background turned off... all fine makes sense.

However this is where it gets interesting. The time it took to actually compile a new turn was insanely slow. I would create a 2 player game both humans and it would take 20 seconds to render a new turn (even if I both players didn't do anything). I could read every message (spreading dominions, battles, lost, etc..) that showed up while the turn was being generated.

Yesterday my 6800GT replacement card came in and everything is very fast again. Turn generations (when nothing is happening) are instant.

So I understand why the graphically things would slow down, but not why the turn generation would slow down. Perhaps this observation can lead to some performance improvements if the turn generation is making use of some graphic functions unnecessarily.

[Gandalf Parker]

Excellent info. Thanks for posting it.

[NTJedi]

Maltrease said:
So I understand why the graphically things would slow down, but not why the turn generation would slow down. Perhaps this observation can lead to some performance improvements if the turn generation is making use of some graphic functions unnecessarily.

So anyone hosting a server would want to drop graphics to a minimum... especially if it's a very big map. Good information.

[Gandalf Parker]

Or run it in text mode which definetly seems to make a difference.

[ceremony]

Maltrease said:
I had a Radeon 9800 card, battles were quick, zooming map, turn time… everything was good.

Radeon 9800 card died and I replaced it with an old Nvidea card Geoforce 2 something. Dominions was barely playable even after turning down all the graphics options and turning off the animated background.

The slowdown is not due to your graphics card, but due to the fact that you were probably using an outdated OpenGL driver when you switched from an ATI to Nvidia card. I had exactly the same problem (including turn generation slowdowns) when I made the same switch you did, and downloading the latest video drivers restored my performance to essentially the same as the ATI card. I suspect the turn generation "slowdown" is simply due to the graphics in the turn generation screen, with the text fade-in and fade-out effect.

Dominions runs essentially the same for me from a graphics performance standpoint on a 3.2 GHz machine with a Radeon X1600 and on a 1.8 GHz machine with a GeForce 3. However, the time it takes to generate a turn is much different. So I don't think the graphics and turn generation have anything to do with one another.

[Maltrease]

Ceremony, you are probably correct. The drivers were 2004 something that XP already had loaded. I tried to update them but I had to roll them back after my color was reduced to 4-bit. Anyways... interesting another person had the results.

[Agrajag]

If hosting works faster in text mode than it does normaly, then we sure do have a problem.
I tried messing around with Dom3 a bit on an older computer (1.6 GHZ, 191MB, Geforce 4 MX 420), but it worked unbearably slow, so I gave up

EDIT: Hehe, I'm a Captain now

[Cainehill]

Agrajag said:
If hosting works faster in text mode than it does normaly, then we sure do have a problem.
I tried messing around with Dom3 a bit on an older computer (1.6 GHZ, 191MB, Geforce 4 MX 420), but it worked unbearably slow, so I gave up

People have already posted that hosting times got much faster when graphics were turned down, so I'd say we _have_ a problem. I also posted the probable cause of it.

[PDF]

Yep, I've just upgraded my old Radeon9600 for a GeForce6600, and woosh turns process 3 times faster !
Funny that "batch" processing uses GPU, is that some tech break into a new form of hyperthreading ?