what hardware give best performance for the game

[gladiator]

I have been playing combat mission since its first emergance with beyond normandy and i have always wondered what takes my pc so long to calculate each turn? is it the video memory being used, the power of the graphics card, or processor and main memory?

i have noticed that even though i have upped my cpu to amd2600xp and a gig of ram the rendering still takes as long. is it the textures on the models or is it the number of models or the size of the battlefield.

i quite often have battles with just 20 or so tanks a side but as soon as infantry arrive the rendering time from one turn to the next increases.

basicly i just want to cut down waiting time between turns and am willing to spend money to do it!

what is the best set up to get the quickest game.

[Zitadelle]

If money is really no concern, for the best hardware for playing Combat Mission, I would probably recommend this for a setup:

High Performance Computer Hardware

I think with this setup, you will see lightning fast turn processing and the 3D modelling that this rig supports is incredible (having personally seen some images...).

[Firefly]

Originally posted by gladiator:

i quite often have battles with just 20 or so tanks a side but as soon as infantry arrive the rendering time from one turn to the next increases.

It's normally the other way round, play an infantry only battle via PBEM and see how small the movie turns are.

Also I don't think many people here would think 'just 20 tanks per side' amounts to a small battle .

[Redwolf]

I think you have your terms confused.

The things from "turn to turn" are not "rendering", it is the combat computation (the blue bar in the bottom) and if you play the AI the computer player thinking (the center blue bar). For this, a faster CPU helps. More than 512 MB are most probably useless.

"Rendering" applies to the drawing of the graphics screen when you "fly" over the map and things graphically move. If you have trouble there a better graphics card helps.

[gladiator]

thanks chaps but the question still stands

what causes the slow down?

too many units or the resolution?

poor cpu?

is the combat computation against computer ai slowed up by the number of units it has to work on or by the textures on them?

is a single soldier as complex for the computer to work on as say a single tank?

what are sensible limitations when making a scenario via the editer when playing only against

the computer ia

maybe over a hundred tanks per side is to much?

[phil stanbridge]

You want an FX53 with 1GB memory - and a powerful VGA card.

[guachi]

LOS calculations take lots of horsepower. Lots of units moving doesn't help, either.

As far as I know, turn calculation is CPU dependent. Perhaps very math involved, which may give an advantage to AMD CPUs (I think they have better FPU capabilities)

Examples -

Eritrean PBEM scenario shipped with game. French v Italians. Small map, 2 tankettes, bunches of infantry. Biggest file - 365K

1500 pt QB, 5-6 vehicles per side, limited contact so far. Biggest file 560K

Spaghetti Western, small ME, on disk scenario - 6+ behicles per side, small map,reasonable amount of action. Biggest file 755K

Attack on Niebawa Fort PBEM - bunches of armor, medium map, LOTS of action. Biggest file about 1700K.

None of these turns took more than 30 seconds to generate.

Now, on my old AMD K6-2-350MHz a HUGE point battle involving bunches of tanks on open terrain (I was testing stuff) took about 45 minutes to compute a turn.

Jason