Game Performance Observations

[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The slowdown is not due to your graphics card, but due to the fact that you were probably using an outdated OpenGL driver when you switched from an ATI to Nvidia card.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.