Problem in the way the game uses pc resources.

[Cpl Steiner]

Never mind, I think I've answered my own question. I found a setting in RiverTuner that allows you to see a graph that shows a 0 if OpenGL Hardware Acceleration is not being used, and a 1 if it is being used. When running CM:SF, it showed a 1, which went back to 0 when I came out of CM:SF. In the attached image, it's not very clear but it's the second graph down, which shows a hump where I was playing CM:SF.

I guess that proves it's using my hardware but I'm still surprised that the core temperature is hardly affected (shown in the image as the uppermost graph, which is flat throughout).

[Cpl Steiner]

I thought I'd add that the last few games I've played have run pretty smoothly, even if the frame-rate is lowish compared to other games. They have certainly been playable anyway. It seems it is just the "Objective Pooh" battle that really kills my machine, as it does with a lot of other people. I'm not saying every scenario other than Pooh is fine but I am having a lot of fun with them.

Just thought I should clarify my position in case I came over as being someone for whom the game is unplayable after 1.10.

[SlapHappy]

I'm not familiar with this Pooh Battle (Grin) but I have had some experience with the fan-made City Ruins which is a system eater. In the case of this one it's fairly evident why it is as soon as the map pops up. It's my personal choice for a good FPS challenge.

Since utilizing Rivatuner in the last few days, I've verified that OpenGL acceleration is taking place, my 8800GT is running at it's normal 600 MHZ Render and 1500-1600 MHZ Shader and one of my four cores is topping out at 100% (2.4 GHZ). From this I can pretty much determine that one of two things would have to take place: Improve the power range by overclocking or replace hardware with a more powerful GPU and/or CPU to see an improvement from my 8-17 FPS worst case scenario. My thinking is that it is impractical to have to limit or "cherry-pick" best case map views to be able to keep the FPS count higher because it limits the way you have to play the game.

Since overclocking can sometimes be a limited venture because of hardware and heat limtations, I wonder if it would be possible to go in the other direction and underclock the CPU to see what the relationship is between CPU cycles and changes in framerate. If the relationship were linear, one could take a series of sample points using fixed tests data to determine exactly what the relationship is for GHZ/FPS.

[jezza]

I am having similar problems but it seems to slow down after the 60 minute mark,

I have a: Dual Core 2.13 GHZ

Geforce 7900 GS

2 Gig RAM

And 9/10 I am getting out of memory messages and crashes, even when loading up the following mission after pooh and that is with a reload - 2 turns in wego and then loading to the next misson.

It certainly is frustrating and getting to the point of walking away from the PC while I wait for the 1 minute turn to finish and wash the dishes.

[bodkin]

'Pooh' was slowing down toward the end but the last 40mins of the following mission 'Milk Run' were a complete slideshow during the action phase. The replay phase and command phase were fine but when I pressed the red button it was unwatchable. If I saved and exited out of CMSF:M and reloaded the save it would be smooth for 3-4 turns.

Core 2 Duo 6600 @ 2.4

7900 GS

3 GB RAM

[slug88]

'Pooh' was slowing down toward the end but the last 40mins of the following mission 'Milk Run' were a complete slideshow during the action phase. The replay phase and command phase were fine but when I pressed the red button it was unwatchable. If I saved and exited out of CMSF:M and reloaded the save it would be smooth for 3-4 turns.

Core 2 Duo 6600 @ 2.4

7900 GS

3 GB RAM

Same exact story for me on that mission.

Core 2 Duo 6750 @ 3.2

8800 GTS 320mb

4GB

[Melnibone]

P4 3.2

XP SP3

2 GB RAM

8800 GT 512MB (178.13 drivers)

Similar problem on Pooh and Milk Run as you guys. Terrible slow down and several "Out of Memory" crashes. Never had any issues as bad as this in earlier versions of the game. This version is the first it has ever crashed for me. Reducing settings lower has no effect in reducing the problems. very frustrating. Anybody looking into this?

[Chainsaw]

Count me in on the list of those who have this problem

P4 3.3Ghz Dualcore

Vista SP1

4GB RAM

Nvidia GTX280

[Jak170]

I also have this problem for battles that have huge numbers of units. I have a

Vista SP1

1.00 GB RAM

Intell Core 2Duo Processor T7100 1.80GHz

I have not yet had an out of memory crash but I notice that the computer uses 100% of one driver and almost none of the other.

Is this problem going to be fixed?

[Cougar_DK]

Malm and I played some LAN Saturday, and my pc ran into serious troubles after playing 45+ mins. The game slowed down to a crawl and the soldiers started to look funny like very low res with pointy hats. CPU 0 stayed at 100% and the other at 0%. My RAM was at the time of the crash at 75% used, and I starts about 50% used from a fresh start of CMSF. When I quit CMSF it returns to normal.

Is this some kind of memory leak in the main mem or maybe my graphic card is running serious low on mem...?

My dxdiag: http://www.twins4ever.dk/DxDiag/DxDiag.txt

[Drusus]

For me the problem went completely away after switching off antialiasing and reducing the resolution. I don't know which one it was that did the trick... Ofcourse, I am using 5900 series graphics card so my problem might be completely different.

[handihoc]

Any chance of an update on this issue, Steve? I really want to get back to the campaign. Have you identified/fixed it for 1.11? Release date for 1.11??

[ThePhantom]

I have this problem as well. My Sense of Urgency scenario begins to slow and turns into a slide show. I have to save and then reload the game to continue. It happens every time. I do believe it is a virtual memory issue. The game begins to play on the virtual memory of your machine and creates a "Thrashing" issue. I looked up page thrashing and here is what It is:

Because accessing the disk is so much slower than accessing RAM, the operating system tries to keep as much of the virtual memory as possible in RAM. If you’re running a large enough program (or several small programs at once), there might not be enough RAM to hold all the memory used by the programs, so some of it must be moved out of RAM and onto disk (this action is called “paging out”).

The operating system tries to guess which areas of memory aren’t likely to be used for a while (usually based on how the memory has been used in the past). If it guesses wrong, or if your programs are accessing lots of memory in lots of places, many page faults will occur in order to read in the pages that were paged out. Because all of RAM is being used, for each page read in to be accessed, another page must be paged out. This can lead to more page faults, because now a different page of memory has been moved to disk.

The problem of many page faults occurring in a short time, called “page thrashing,” can drastically cut the performance of a system. Programs that frequently access many widely separated locations in memory are more likely to cause page thrashing on a system. So is running many small programs that all continue to run even when you are not actively using them. To reduce page thrashing, you can run fewer programs simultaneously. Or you can try changing the way a large program works to maximize the capability of the operating system to guess which pages won’t be needed. You can achieve this effect by caching values or changing lookup algorithms in large data structures, or sometimes by changing to a memory allocation library which provides an implementation of malloc() that allocates memory more efficiently. Finally, you might consider adding more RAM to the system to reduce the need to page out (geekinterview.com).

I've read others have 3 or 4 gig memory and I have 4 gig on my rig... It can't be not enough RAM. Something in the source code is accessing virtual memory and it becomes a serious memory hog.

[handihoc]

Good find, Phantom. Let's hope it helps.

And welcome back, too!

[Drusus]

All of the computers memory is virtual memory, also the RAM part of it. The concept virtual memory is an operating system thing. The program thinks that is has access to large continuous parts of memory. In the background the OS remaps the addresses to non-continuous areas of memory, but the program doesn't know anything about this.

So, the program just accesses memory, which happens to be virtual memory. If it tries to use too much memory, the OS will page out some of the program's used memory to hard dist. If the program tries to access that memory, then it must be first read from hard dist to memory. Reading an address from HD takes about million clock cycles, while normal memory takes about 100 clock cycles.

I don't think the problem is swapping out _main memory_. Then there would be continuous HD activity, but I don't see any.

I do think that it is a trashing issue, but the memory being constantly moved back and forth is actually graphics card memory. This is just a feeling, I don't have anything to back this claim...

[Battlefront.com]

We are still looking into it. I doubt it has to do with a lack of RAM or the Core2 Duo family of chips. People seem to have plenty of RAM (2+ GB is fine) and it appears people without Core2s are having similar problems.

Steve

[handihoc]

We are still looking into it. it appears people without Core2s are having similar problems.

Steve

That may be so, and I'm no tech expert, but surely the fact that Core2s are (at least in my and many other cases) only using one cpu has to be a factor? I'm currently playing Bioshock, a very cpu and graphics hungry beast indeed, and it runs perfectly, maxed out, with both cpus sharing the workload pretty evenly and rarely exceeding 75% of capacity.

[Battlefront.com]

The fact that CM doesn't use more than one CPU isn't a factor here because people with the same, or even slower systems, are not having major slowdowns when playing the same scenarios. The most likely cause is, as usual, something with the video cards. The larger scenarios tend to require a lot more VRAM. If there is something wrong with the way the driver handles memory management, which is consistent with the symptoms, then there will definitely be massive slow downs. The whole point of having VRAM is to not do swapping either to disk or, as in the old days, slower system RAM. Anything that fudges that up will be noticeable.

The current theory is that the smaller scenarios are not enough to trigger the problem. The memory management issue is likely still there, it's just that it isn't getting overwhelmed.

Steve

[Echo]

I get out of memory error with CTD. Windows diagnostics says its a problem with Nvidia graphics drivers.

Running on Intel quad-core/ 4G Ram/ Vista 32bit/ geforce9800gtx/ latest certified nvidia driver (180.xxx)

[Battlefront.com]

It does seem to be limited to nVidia cards. A quick Google check reminded me that nVidia having a similar problem back in the summer of 2007.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t31109.html

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/07/31/nvidia-still-working-on-8800-texture-slowdowns

These problems affected us back then. Perhaps they are back in some form with the latest drivers?

Steve

[gdigga]

I have the same problem, Nvidia 8600gt. After about an hour, even on small maps, my game becomes a slideshow and I crash out. Sometimes it even reboots my machine!

[ThePhantom]

I have an Nvidia 8500 GT. I haven't had my system crash or anything. However, large scenarios turn into slide shows as the game progresses. I just save, then restart the Shock Force application and play on.

[pute01]

Before I start complaining I must state that I have absolutely loved the CM series since CMBO. I was at first disappointed that the new CMx2 was launched with modern warfare but I totally love the new series SF as well.

Having given acclaim I also have to give criticsims.

As I see there are basically two problems With CMx2 CMSF (1) massive memory leakage (I have to save every game turn otherwise the game turns in to a slide show).

and (2) a total inability of the game to use modern graphics cards (I've got a new Radeon 2X 2gb, fat lot of good that does me ).

These stements are supported by a lot of posts so I' won't get into them in detail.

However, I find these issues so serious that I can't understand how Battlefront can be contemplating launching the new Overlord game before fixing these glaring problems in a otherwise good game.

What worries me even more is that the game is more than a year old and into patch 1.10 with seemingly no solution in the immediate future. I even wonder if Battlefront sees these issues as a problem? Given their feedback in this post I would have to say we will have to wait in vain for solutions to these problems. Or worse still the new engine can't be modified to fix these issues.

[Woodmeister]

I'm having the same problem, but only since installing the 1.10 "Plain Jane" patch a few days ago. I'm on the Paradox version on a medium spec rig with dual core and a Nvidia card.

On regular sized scenarios, the game starts out fast and gradually slows down over successive WEGO turns. I usually stick it out for around thirty turns until things are getting unworkable. I then save, quit, and reload. This is a minor nuisance and hasn't put me off playing the game.

I tried playing one of the larger standalone scenarios called Defending The Far Flank. This has a Stryker company in defence against a battalion of Republican Guard, with more and more Syrian reinforcements pouring in as the battle progresses. The battle runs fast for the first five turns, and slowly for another five. After that, saving and reloading doesn't seem to help. The WEGO turn graphics turn into a slideshow, forcing me to watch the replay to see what happened. This worsens as the battle progresses, even if I save and reload.

In the replay, bullets, shells, missiles and explosion graphics are shown at a high framerate. Soldiers and vehicles are slideshow animated. Javelin missiles work normally for the first few turns, and then become increasingly inaccurate. After the first few turns, the missiles fly normally, but don't curve down to hit the top armour of their target, they just fly harmlessly overhead. As the battle progresses, they start ploughing into the ground in front of the firing unit, a few missiles occasionally hit, but the rate drops more and more over time. Eventually, the missile hovers motionless in the air in front of the firing unit for a few seconds, before suddenly nosediving into the ground. Saving and reloading does not help, even if I restart my machine. My MGS and TOW Strykers are unaffected, as are the Syrian T72s and supporting ATGM teams.

The scenario remains playable, I watch the replays to see what is happening and carry on playing. Despite the slowdown, the game never grinds to a halt or crashes. The only problem is I'm facing hordes of Syrian armour and my Javelins keep missing!

I never had any trouble before the 1.10 patch. I couldn't help but notice that the patch release notes mention improved performance and changes to the way Javelins work. This seems like too much of a coincidence to me...

[Battlefront.com]

pute01,

What worries me even more is that the game is more than a year old and into patch 1.10 with seemingly no solution in the immediate future. I even wonder if Battlefront sees these issues as a problem? Given their feedback in this post I would have to say we will have to wait in vain for solutions to these problems. Or worse still the new engine can't be modified to fix these issues.

You need to reread this thread very carefully and pay particular attention to my answers, because your statement is about as far from reality as it can possibly get. If you can point me to a statement I've made here that gives you cause for doubting that we're working on the problem NOW, please indicate it so I can clarify. Not that there's any point in doing so after I make my next post

Steve