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Help: Really bad FPS Problem


lax

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Ok so I just bought TOW2: Kursk 1943. Really love the concept and i couldnt wait to play. I am using a pretty good gaming computer and I run much more graphic intensive games so i thought it would not be a problem.

I played the first campaign mission and i was getting a steady 40 fps. Then all of a sudden as soon as shots started firing my fps dropped really badly to about 13.

Then once the battle REALLY started heating up it dropped to about 2-3 fps. Completely unplayable. My only thought is its something about CPU. Maybe all the shots being fired are somehow slowing it down? I really want to play this game but its impossible until i get some help.

Thanks

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Your hunch is probably correct. The firing involves LOS and LOF checks and other calculations and this seems to slow down the TOW2 series quite a bit. The most common workaround is to run the game at 'half speed' and see how much that may help you. It's not ideal, but it appears to be the closest thing to a workaround for people who suffer large framerate drops in game.

One other user mentioned that Process Lasso can "help smooth things out", though I don't know how much of a help the program will be for you.

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One answer which I have found if you are happy to involve yourself in smaller scale battles but using all the maps and all the variety of units is to use the excellent "Simple Editor" to create a wide variety of smaller scale encounters.

I find these battles where you have time to focus on your units , their tactics and combat in much more detail are very absorbing and rewarding----of course if you are only drawn to the larger scale battles this adaptation is not for you,but otherwise give this option a whirl--it will certainly solve or help your slowdown issues without having to use "Slow motion" solutions.

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I recently brought Kursk on gamersgate for a silly price of around £3. My system is three years old, a dual core AMD 3GHz, 4 Gig Ram, XP 32bit, Nividia 8800 GT. Not a poor system, but is a bit long in the tooth at the moment.

Kursk plays awful on max settings. I had to turn off ambient occlusions, high sky detail, no shadows and low water. Also, messed with Nvidia control panel settings, and now I can play the game and deal with low FPS; its not as bad as it was, now playable and if it really slows down then I go to half speed.

I am thinking that a 64bit OS is required, and reading these posts seems to confirm that. I dread also what TOW 3 will play like if they don't fix these issues. Not everyone has top of the range, high powered systems.

Other than that, I am enjoying the game, and the Caen expansion is really cool.

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I'm sure an x64 OS may help, but it can't make a huge difference. I struggle to run ToW in a 'suitable' way, considering my specifications, but hey-ho.

Intel Core i7 930 D0 @3.8Ghz

Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R (Rev.1)

6GB DDR3 Corsair PC12800 @ 1600Mhz

MSI 1GB GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone OC

Windows 7 64-Bit

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Your system is pretty high powered, and yet you say you still struggle to run it? What on earth were the devs developing the game on??

I appreciate that there are a load of things going on, each soldier is individually modelled so when the battles get intense then there would be a high load on the CPU, as well as all the armour penetration info etc (which is really neat BTW). Its not a graphic problem (when you pause the game then it is smooth as silk), but rather a CPU problem. Oh well.

Still a good game though regardless.

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That's the oddity of it all, Kev. Even with my CPU affinity set to a two cores, as advised my forum members and 1C developers alike (just to prevent the quad-core freezing/crashing issue), the game is hardly pushing 50% of my CPU usage, fluctuating around the mid-forties (using my coy-eye there). Likewise, the game is only utilising 3.52GB of my 6GB of RAM (bearing in mind I have Photoshop CS5 running in the background here to collect screen-dumps).

This, in turn, would suggest that there is a bottleneck that lies elsewhere. Perhaps my GPU just can't keep up with my CPU? That doesn't seem to be the case as, like my CPU, GPU usage is around the 50% mark (see below for both cases).

tow2k2.jpg

This is while running the game at the maximum graphical and audio settings, during the first mission of the German 'Operation Citadel' campaign. I'm getting ~20FPS when viewing from this angle, dipping down to ~16FPS when things get a little busy.

tow2k1.jpg

This doesn't pose as great a problem as it does in First Person Shooters, for obvious reasons. Millisecond reaction times are not key here. But, I was kinda hoping that a system like mine would be able to run the game smoothly. It isn't game breaking, but it does make my experience unpleasant and, generally, unenjoyable. I probably won't be buying ToW3:Korea as a result.

Regarding your question, ToW is built on the IL-2 engine (of flight-simulator fame). Admittedly, they are dealing with very different things (an open sky is much more efficient to render than a massive battlefield), but I didn't think the engine would struggle this much when tasked with an RTS scenario.

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Its a shame that this is the case. Its a good game, and if there is no real solution to the lag and FPS issues, then TOW3 also is off my radar. Funny you should mention the quad core thing; I was actually looking at replacing my CPU for a quad core one this morning thinking that this might solve the problem.

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It won't help your ToW issues, I can tell you that. Enabling all the cores gives me no tangible increase in performance.

However, if you happen to play other games, like I do (e.g. Armed Assault 2), it may be worth the investment. Multi-core optimised games are finally starting to arrive but ToW 'aint one.

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I'm getting between 32 - 70 fps in that very same scenario. Previously I was getting 15 - 40 fps untill I OC-ed my cpu and set driver settings to application-controled and turned off occlusion/hdr (didn't like it anyway).

i7 920 3.6Ghz

gtx 480

12 GB mem

Btw just got the Zalman 3000F GPU cooler and wow what a difference.

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Yeah, performance does take a little leap with HDR/HBAO are disabled. But, that's not the point I'm making.

The issue I have or, at least, I find slightly confusing, is that the game isn't fully utilising the components of my computer (and I suspect the case is exactly the same for you). I wouldn't take issue with this if the game had acceptable performance... but it doesn't.

Disabling the special effects does improve things, as you said BigJ26, it just seems a shame that I have to compensate for what seems to be an odd and unoptimised engine.

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Charlie, I ran some diagnostics and like you, I noticed that the game uses around 2Gig of RAM and also utilises around 50% of CPU power - its not maxed out at all for my system specs. I use process lassoo as well. My CPU is overclocked; from 2.6GHz to 3GHz, dual core AMD 5000+. Its plenty fast enough, although I am running a 32 bit OS, which I believe may affect performance.

As I stated on an earlier post to these forums, I turned off ambient occlusions, low sky, low water, no shadows, kept on HDR, and high for effects and model details. In Nvidia control panel I forced 2x AA as someone had pointed out on another thread. Ok, it still lags when there are things happening, when it gets kinda hot etc, and if it is too much then I go to half speed; also seems to add more stability too with this speed, as experienced less CTD's using this method. But it is still far from perfect.

It seems that it is difficult to pin these 'issues' directly to CPU - especially if higher powered, quad core 3GHz+ systems are struggling. I would love to buy ToW3, the campaign element looks interesting, but if it plays as bad, or maybe worse as Kursk then I shall pass. Sorry.

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