Performance Issue Questions

[Epaminondas]

Hello, all. I have some performance issue questions that I hope some kind soul can answer before I buy the game. I have thus far only been playing the demo, because I am transitioning between computers. In particular, my current computer has a broken DVD-CD drive (in addition to being extremely old), so I could not have played the game even if I had ordered the CD.

Right now I am inclined to buy the CD when I buy a new computer, but I wonder whether certain performance issues I am experiencing have to do with my current computer and hence will improve with a new computer, or whether they are characteristic of the game and hence will not dramatically improve.

For your information: My current computer is 4 years old, and the specs are something like 1.5g Pentium chip, 524 MB memory (I think), and an extremely old Nvidia card that was very old even when I got the computer. I am looking to upgrade to a computer along the lines of 2.66 chip, 1048 MB memory, and a low end graphics card.

Anyways, here are the two major problems:

1. Extreme lag between turns. The turn lag is rather severe even on the turn 30s, with only 6-8 factions on a large map. I can imagine the game being unplayable at later turns or more players unless the situation improves with an upgraded computer.

2. Extreme lag when a large number of units are involved on the battle screen. Things basically turn to a crawl when there are, say, over 2-300 units, in particular when a lot of mages are casting spells that have a lot of graphics effects. (Incidentally, is there a way to speed up how fast mages cast projectile spells in general?)

Again, I realize that my computer is old, so this is not a complaint thread at all. I am just wondering if I should expect a dramatic game performance when and if I get an upgraded computer.

Thanks.

[Arralen]

If you could provide a little bit more details, what
- "extreme lag between turns" is .. . Turn generation in a game like you mentioned can easily take over a minute. Does it take considerably longer on your PC?

- "an extremely old nvidia card" is?

- the driver versions are your PC runs with?

If you're are not sure about the technical details, run "dxdiag" from the command prompt/DOS box and save the results into a text file, zip it up and attach it to your next post here!

[Arralen]

Ran a little speed test:

The very same Dom3 directory, copied to both
A) AMD Athlon64 3000+ with 1GB DDR333 and nVidia 6600GT (128MB), and
C) Celeron 1500, 512MB SDRAM, nVidia Fx5200 (128MB)

Both running W2k, but different graphics driver versions.
Both systems where freshly rebooted, and as W2k does not do any prefechting like XP does, not caching effects should have been involved.

Game was Late Age, all nations (18), turn 4->5, with everyone having 2-4 provinces. Dominions was run at 1024x768 with light effects on, fade and animated backgrounds off, medium filter and lowest tree quality. Battle details medium, no grass drawn.

Turn generation times are not strictily comparable, as the random events naturally differed between the 2 runs, and I didn't do a statistically relevant amount of test runs to get a "mean processing time" ... But this should give you at least a rough estimate how fast Dom3 should run:

A - startup <3s, game turn ~14s
C - startup <4.5s, game turn 39s (with 2 more random events for the player)

[CharonJr]

With a good PC your turns (at least up to turn 40) should take less than 5 seconds, so yes, there is a large improvement with a new PC.

I have a Intel E6600 Dual Core with 2GB and a X1900XT here and can't complain about the speed of the turn generation at all.

But random map generation still takes some time

CharonJr

PS: Turn generation speed was taken from a fairly small map (100 provinces with just 6 AIs).

[Arralen]

But you can play Dom3 on a Celeron-1500 just fine - in fact I have done a good part of the beta testing on that machine, and didn't have any troubles at all.

[PDF]

Epaminondas,
I don't know what turn processing time is unbearable for you, but it should be in the 30 sec-1 min range. With a 1.5GHz processor you shouldn't expect super performances..

About battle screen I had also very slow framerates with my old Radeon9600 card (on a AMD XP2400) when graphics options where set to medium+ (the framerate was correct - 20 or so fps- on smaller battles). Now with a GF6600 I don't have any slowdown anymore even when spells fly by scores.

So set the graphics options at the minimum and you should have acceptable speed (and frankly it's not *that* worse graphics-wise)

[thejeff]

Actually I ran some tests comparing turn time hosting with graphics in test mode.

Athlon 1.8G 1G Ram running Linux
Early Era, all nations Large random map.

By turn 10-12, regular turn generation time was up around 1 minute.

I copied the save and generated the turn 5 times using the GUI and 5 times in text mode. The text mode had a slight advantage, but nothing significant.
Now if your video card is already thrashing just drawing the background animation, then that may bring the whole system to a crawl, but it doesn't look like there's anything specific to updating the graphics slowing turns down.

GUI tests:
1:00
1:22
1:16
1:23
1:36
Average: 1:19.4

Text tests:
1:08
1:11
1:13
1:20
1:35
Average: 1:17.4

[mathusalem]

I'am a Imac 24" with an core2duo at 2,13Ghz, 2go of ram and a 7600GT.

And I find the game is slow in huge map with a lot of battles !

Dom3 is an Universal Binaries for mac ? Maybe not, but it will great if developper are able to compile it for MacIntel in a patch.

[reverend]

Note that graphic performance always was ludicrously slow on ATI cards in comparison to NVidia.

On my 2.6ghz, 1gig RAM with an X800XT I have 9fps when running 'High Detail'.

Thankfully, fps aren't really that important in Dominions.

[curtadams]

One reason for variance is that a successful Ermor really slows things down.