Thewood1

How do we know this? This is what I am getting at. The rest of it sounds like IL2 has some and DCS has some.

Yeah, maybe he'll step in and straighten us right out.

And of course the usual question for BFC is when? Its a rhetorical question. I know no one will say.

This man should change his name to "The Truth".

Can you explain some of the details here. I play both and don't see any real detail differences. In fact, I would say for WW2, the damage models in IL2 are more detailed. Not necessarily more realistic, but more detailed. Genuinely curious when I hear people compare flight sims.

I'm beginning to suspect Defender issues might be related to privacy settings.

OK, so you are replying to two people in your post. How was I supposed to separate that? "Ah. I have not bought a retail desktop since...1989? Been building my own since then, so their practices are something I totally forgot about. Thanks" So that was for me. But the first line wasn't. Not clear to me, but must be missing something.

Graviteam has 3D maps like CM and and has 3D units like 3M. But it also has larger maps on average and has deformable terrain. This in real-time. CM has the option of wego to help the processing. Steel Beasts, similar to Graviteam games, has much larger maps and typical unit counts. Yet both games can generate a LOS map or display. Both games trace LOS from individual soldiers. Both games trace LOS from individual spotting locations on AFVs. Both games have dealt with grass and soldier posture. So we can dispense with the refrain that it can't be done because of the 3D nature of CM. Yes, its complex. And yes other games do it. It might be something else other than just the 3D environment that makes it impossible. I don't know a thing about that. But its not the 3D nature of the game unless something is wrong with how it was implemented. A couple last thoughts. Steel Beasts has been out for over 20 years and Graviteam is around 10. So people knew how to do it way back in the old days too. On similar-sized scenarios, I get 30-40 fps in CMBS, 60 in Steel Beasts, and 40-50 in a Graviteam game.

Triple post

Why would I need a tutorial on uninstalling "bloatware"? Also, both of my sons have built desktops recently and both had intel GPU chipsets on their MSI motherboards. The motherboards had video plugs built into the I/O shields that connected to the HDMI port. They also had GFX/RTX GPUs in the PCI slots with their own HDMI, etc. connectors. The main difference from a laptop is the HDMI connectors are dedicated to each separate GPU.

Not really true. If buy your desktop retail, you are as likely to get all that stuff loaded on as well. My son just bought a Dell desktop and had to do the usual uninstalls. My new gigabyte laptop had nothing except windows and the overclocking tool.

Open up nVidia control panel. You will have to go to the 3D settings and you can set default GPU from the drop down. If you only have the nVidia GPU, you won't see any other option. That means you can eliminate this as an issue. When I get a new laptop, its the process I have to go through every time. It has nothing to do with Win10. If you feel brave, can create a custom profile for each application or game and choose the GPU for each. For some reason, the CM games always default to the Intel GPU that is part of the Intel chipset. If you have a laptop, you most likely have both GPUs. If its a desktop, its depends on how the system was built. You can also google how to set your default chipset.

Have been following your issue. Might I suggest resetting or lowering your privacy settings temporarily. I ran into an issue with another game with a heavy DRM and couldn't get it to work. After screwing around with it a couple months, I finally checked my privacy settings. Lowering them seemed to fix it.

Really? Isn't that kind of what we've all been alluding to?

Its not a Win10 US thing. I have a one month old Win10 with a 2080 Super all up to date windows and nVidia drivers. Make sure you don't have a second Intel GPU trying to drive CM. The symptoms you describe is what I get when I forget to force the nVidia GPU as the primary GPU.

Did you just disable all anti-virus? Just to see if it works. I have had at least eight recent laptops with windows 10. No issues CM, other than constantly having to get to install licenses. All used defender.

A number PC games have issues with certain localization. I know CMO by Matrix had a number of issues with non-US keyboards characters.

Defender is automatically disabled. I think any 3rd party security for personal PC is a waste of time and money. And will lead to problems in the end.

btw, this is a pretty unsubtle "blame the customer" approach I have seen more than once here. Damn those customers for asking for things

Then the whole strategy of "a single game engine" that isn't "a single game engine" is a broken as the day it was first revealed. This is the first laptop where I haven't immediately installed all the CM games. Steel Beasts and the Graviteam games are doing for me now. It makes me sad.

My question...why wouldn't you be able to run it?

Part of the issue isn't the bugs per se. Its the length of time to get patches out to fix bugs. BFC has gone into the mode of mostly not releasing fixes unless its with a new module. That means you can wait easily a year or more to get something significant fixed. No one would taking about these issues if we got some kind of quarterly patch to clean up stuff that gets found.

I suspect our two suppositions are related. CM does what it does because its built on an old foundation when PCs had below 2Gb of usable RAM and limited GPUs or none at all.

It is OpenGL. But CM uses an old library. BFC has stated as much. The version of the OpenGL library they are using is very old and is barely supported by GPU makers. If you notice, no one plays CM with Intel GPUs. And even with AMD and nVidia, you sometimes have to do a dance with older versions of drivers. I think the reasoning behind not upgrading CM to the more modern OpenGL libraries and Vulkan was continuing Mac support and the work needed to take update the code that dates back to CM1. Another factor was supporting legacy hardware that some of their customers continued to use. I'm not saying CM2 is completely optimized. I am just putting together the various messages BFC has given over the years for poor CM performance on modern hardware. I have a six year old lenovo laptop that runs CM2 better than anything since. Thats just an example. If you want another gamer with a similar, but slightly better, issue, look at X-Plane. I have been flying XP for almost twenty years. When i7s started coming out, players began noticing that performance seemed to have plateaued or regressed. Laminar Systems was using OpenGL libraries that were old and not updating to newer ones. Again, OpenGL was used to support Macs, which the dev loved. Laminar started a project two years ago to get off of OpenGL and on to Vulkan/Metal. Vulkan was supposedly the "new" OpenGL. Guess what? Its two years on and its still not complete. But the betas were a massive improvement in performance. Now the issue is if Vulcan will be fully supported by Apple. Its been kind of a mess. But one that could have been avoided, just like CM. When the project started, customers were screaming for them to go to DirectX. But, again, a dev wanted that 1-2% of the PC gaming market. And again, the players are paying the price.

I have always found its buildings and trees that are the killer. I have an i9-10750 and a RTX 2080 Super Mobile. I get the exact same FPS as on an i7-8750 and GTX 1050. And that is on slightly lower than high settings for both. I get a new laptop every year and get zero improvement in performance in CM. A comparable game that doesn't take real advantage of modern PC architectures is Steel Beasts. The i7-8750 is at 30 fps at middle graphics settings and the new i9-10750 gets 60 at max settings on the same scenarios. That shows me that investing in better systems has some impact on Steel Beasts, and no impact on CM. The only real difference from an architecture perspective between the two games is CM is on OpenGL and SB is DirectX. That decision to stay on OpenGL, when even in 2007 it was obvious that it was a deadend, continues to haunt the CM game. But BFC REALLY wanted the 1-2% Mac gamer market and us PC players are suffering for it.