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.