Captain Hook Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Was reading a thread where folks with monster machines were experiencing tremendous delays in turn calculation. I need a new laptop but cant afford the mega-expensive Dells with 64MB graphics. Can only afford a 1.2Mhz processor with a no-name 16MB card for about $800 less. But based on the referenced thread, doesn't look like 16 Mb is going to cut it. Anybody playing the demo on a 16 Mb card? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grisha Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Slowdown? Not here. I have a AMD XP 1900+ with 512Mb DDRAM, and a GEForce3 vidcard. I'm doing fine. In fact, it seems that CMBB scrolls across the 3D environment less haltingly than in CMBO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AUSSIEJEFF Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by Captain Hook: Was reading a thread where folks with monster machines were experiencing tremendous delays in turn calculation. I need a new laptop but cant afford the mega-expensive Dells with 64MB graphics. Can only afford a 1.2Mhz processor with a no-name 16MB card for about $800 less. But based on the referenced thread, doesn't look like 16 Mb is going to cut it. Anybody playing the demo on a 16 Mb card?Well, I've got a 2.2ghz P4 Northwood with 512 meg DDR ram and and I can tell you the Yelnia Stare demo scenario calculates slower than I might have hoped for in default setup and mighteeee sloooow on my PC with the Axis forces upped 100% for a return assault. And that is on a very small map. I'm wondering how long a large battle is going to take per turn calculation, especially in a big city with lots of doodads etc.. .... FYI Grisha the maps scroll just fine - fast and smooth as a rat with only a GEForce 2 GTS pro 32mb vid card. It's the calc times that are a bit of a worry for me too... Aussiejeff [ September 06, 2002, 07:54 PM: Message edited by: AussieJeff ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sidewinder Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 I run the cmbb demo on an 8mb card...runs fine. Don't think the graphics card has much to do with turn calculation but i suppose it could Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StellarRat Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 I'm running 1.2 gig Athlon, Win 2000, 784 megs DDR 2100 and a Geforce 3 Ti200. Calculates just fine for me. No delays that are vexing... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AUSSIEJEFF Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by StellarRat: I'm running 1.2 gig Athlon, Win 2000, 784 megs DDR 2100 and a Geforce 3 Ti200. Calculates just fine for me. No delays that are vexing...Interestink. Load the Yelnia Stare Demo and play as Russkies. For first move, select all units and plot move command to far end of map. Hit "GO" button twice. Get stopwatch ready for third move. Hit "GO" button for turn 3 and time the calc. My reasonably fast PC took all of 25 seconds!! If all units are set to target something, that blows out to well over a minute. And on a small map. AJ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K_Tiger Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 I have fewer problems with the calculation, but under 1152x864 (my standard desktop resolution, the game itself is slow like a Mineroller... XP 1600 256ddr Kiro II I must admit, i cant change the resolution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shatter Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by AussieJeff: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by StellarRat: I'm running 1.2 gig Athlon, Win 2000, 784 megs DDR 2100 and a Geforce 3 Ti200. Calculates just fine for me. No delays that are vexing...Interestink. Load the Yelnia Stare Demo and play as Russkies. For first move, select all units and plot move command to far end of map. Hit "GO" button twice. Get stopwatch ready for third move. Hit "GO" button for turn 3 and time the calc. My reasonably fast PC took all of 25 seconds!! If all units are set to target something, that blows out to well over a minute. And on a small map. AJ</font> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cameroon Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Graphics cards won't do anything for the turn calculation, obviously. I'm sorry, I don't see why people are alarmed. CMBB adds a lot of complexity to an already complex game so of course it will be slower to calculate turns. My machine, a lowly 350mhz G3, gets through Yelnia just fine. There's 4 companies of infantry plus 6 tanks on that small map and I don't notice anything particularly "alarming" about the turn calculations. I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes, maybe I'd feel the same if my CMBO turns took 15 seconds to calculate and were now taking over a minute. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shatter Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by Cameroon: Graphics cards won't do anything for the turn calculation, obviously. If this is to meant toward me, yes I understand obviously, that graphics cards don't speed up caculation times. That is not at all my reasoning for getting a new vid card. I got some extra dough now and its just time for new vid card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cameroon Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by Shatter: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Cameroon: Graphics cards won't do anything for the turn calculation, obviously. If this is to meant toward me, yes I understand obviously, that graphics cards don't speed up caculation times. That is not at all my reasoning for getting a new vid card. I got some extra dough now and its just time for new vid card. </font> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OGSF Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 My view is that the reason the turns take a few moments to calculate is because there is so much good stuff crammed into this game. I was thrilled to discover CM:BO about two and a half years ago, and very pleased with the improvements I've seen so far in CM:BB. I would not want features removed to speed up the turn calculation. If it takes a minute or more to calculate a turn, oh well! Beats shoving cardboard markers around a hex-grid board! The time to calculate turns is a symptom of how brilliant this game is. There is no other game out there to replace it. I have a 1.7GHz processor, 256MB DDR RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 This speed perception thing is kinda odd. A few testers, with much faster systems, experienced slower times crunching turns than others. Not all motherboards are created alike, nor are all subsystems necessarily on a par. This is nothing new for computer systems. I remmeber the first Pentium Pro systems that came out and the most expensive and "fastest" system out there was actually *slower* than a cheaper system with a less fast version of the Pro. My only advice is that when buying a computer check out the profesional test lab reports. If number crunching and data transportation is important to you, the extra research is well worth it. For the record, Charles has a 450 MHz G4 and I have a 400 MHz G4. Neither of us find the crunch times to be much slower than CMBO's. The G4 is, however, a far better number cruncher than PC based chips, so it is probably equal to roughly a 800 MHz Pentium, which is on the low end of the recommended system requirements. The big things that slow down crunch times: 1. LOTS of units shooting at each other on the same turn. 2. LOTS of new movement orders, especially vehicle movement orders. 3. LOTS of units. Map size really isn't an issue, rather how many units are actively engaged at one time. A small map with a lot of units and few LOS restrictions (like Yelnia Stare) will be slower than a huge map with the same units and more restrictive terrain. Also, the first couple of turns tend to be the slowest because of reason #2 above. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Papa Khann Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 I've got a lowly 700MHz Athlon Thunderbird w/512MB RAM and I barely notice any difference in crunching times between the CM:BB demo and CM:BO. Like everything else, impatience is all relative. Even though my rig never takes more than 20 seconds or so to crunch even the busiest of turns for Yelnia Stare (only 5 - 10 seconds each for the first few turns), I still find myself sitting there wondering why the horse won't run faster. Go figure. Papa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shatter Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Wow see guys I get somethings right every now and again. Thanks for the heads up Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Panzer Boxb Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Well, just a test between my two systems. Both are dualies but as the CM engine isn't written to take advantage of that the results are based upon a single chip calculating. My PC is using the AMD Athlon MP 1900+ which runs at 1.6GHz. The other is a Apple PowerMac G4 1GHz system. The Mac crunches the turns at approximately twice as fast as the AMD box. Doing some rough tests to approximate the number of units engaging in a given turn between the scenarios in CMBB and a custom setup in CMBO yields about a 15-30% difference in total time to process a turn. This range is not very accurate as it is hard to align the number of units, etc. in each case. This would be something of interest for when the game is released. P.S.-The engine rewrite is going to be multi-threaded, right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Papa Khann Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by AussieJeff: Interestink. Load the Yelnia Stare Demo and play as Russkies. For first move, select all units and plot move command to far end of map. Hit "GO" button twice. Get stopwatch ready for third move. Hit "GO" button for turn 3 and time the calc. My reasonably fast PC took all of 25 seconds!! If all units are set to target something, that blows out to well over a minute. And on a small map.AJ, I tried your test on my 700 MHz Athlon Thunderbird w/512MB (non-DDR) RAM. I got a result of 27 seconds. As Steve said, all PCs are not created equal, etc. But I would have expected your rig to do much better than mine. Are you running any other programs in the background? I tried your test a second time with a browser and my email program running in the background, and without running a memory optimizer first (which is my normal routine before firing up a game) and my result changed to 34 seconds. Papa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by Panzer Boxb: The Mac crunches the turns at approximately twice as fast as the AMD box.Heh, heh. That's what we've been telling you all along. Now aren't you glad you switched? BTW, comparing the two games, it does seem to me that BB is slightly more time consuming to calculate on my G4 733 than BO, but not enough so far as to be annoying. Trying to play BO on my 604e 200, now that was slow. But who cared? Gave me a chance to take a deep breath between turns. Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tools4fools Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 I don't notice much difference compared to BO as well. But then my old P 400 was a bit slow crunching BO turns as well... Marcus **** Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Hook Posted September 7, 2002 Author Share Posted September 7, 2002 I started this post because I was reading Barleyman's comment that the CMBB demo ran quite slow. His specs were 1GHZ Athlon, Radon 64MB card. A laptop with a 64MB card sets you back $1800+. Can't blow that much no matter how much I love to play CMBB. So is there no significant difference in turn calculation/drawing big maps in a 64MB card vs. a 16MB card? That seems to be the consensus if I read the posts right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grisha Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 AussieJeff, I'm currently playing Yelna against a human opponent and I'm not seeing any vast increase in processing time. Don't know what to say. Strange. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Captain Hook, There will be (or SHOULD be) a vast difference in framerate between the two cards you mentioned, but no difference in turn crunch time. However, laptops are notoroiously bad at processing video data and therefore it is possible that the difference between the two cards on a PC would be more pronounced than on a laptop. The other possible improvement that a greater than 16MB card offers is assurance that there won't be texture downsampling (lower quality) in wildly VRAM consuming scenarios. I have a 16MB card and never experienced problems with normal QBs and scenarios, but it is (in theory) quite possible to swamp a 16MB or even a 32MB card by including tons of unique units. Such a scenario would be totally unrealistic to the extreme, but that doesn't mean it might not be fun Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gyrene Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by Panzer Boxb: Well, just a test between my two systems. Both are dualies but as the CM engine isn't written to take advantage of that the results are based upon a single chip calculating. My PC is using the AMD Athlon MP 1900+ which runs at 1.6GHz. The other is a Apple PowerMac G4 1GHz system. The Mac crunches the turns at approximately twice as fast as the AMD box. Doing some rough tests to approximate the number of units engaging in a given turn between the scenarios in CMBB and a custom setup in CMBO yields about a 15-30% difference in total time to process a turn. This range is not very accurate as it is hard to align the number of units, etc. in each case. This would be something of interest for when the game is released. P.S.-The engine rewrite is going to be multi-threaded, right? And how does CMBB look on your Cinema Display? Gyrene Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Panzer Boxb Posted September 7, 2002 Share Posted September 7, 2002 Originally posted by Gyrene: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Panzer Boxb: Well, just a test between my two systems. Both are dualies but as the CM engine isn't written to take advantage of that the results are based upon a single chip calculating. My PC is using the AMD Athlon MP 1900+ which runs at 1.6GHz. The other is a Apple PowerMac G4 1GHz system. The Mac crunches the turns at approximately twice as fast as the AMD box. Doing some rough tests to approximate the number of units engaging in a given turn between the scenarios in CMBB and a custom setup in CMBO yields about a 15-30% difference in total time to process a turn. This range is not very accurate as it is hard to align the number of units, etc. in each case. This would be something of interest for when the game is released. P.S.-The engine rewrite is going to be multi-threaded, right? And how does CMBB look on your Cinema Display? Gyrene</font> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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