Computer chokes on buildings

[Warren Peace]

I am playing CMAK on a dell inspiron 8100 with a geforce 2go 32Mb graphics card. I have noticed that whenever maps have a lot of buildings my graphic card really chokes. Does this have more to do with the amount of graphic RAM, or just the speed of the card?

WARREN

[Andrew Kulin]

I'd say that your card does sound a little bit underpowered to me in this day and age - can Dell upgrade your card as it sounds like you are running on a notebook which may or may not allow for upgrades.

One other thing to keep in mind is that heavy damage (i.e., lots of shell-holes really slows down graphic refresh rates - even on killer cards you'll see a performance hit)

You may also want to tone down your game resolution (delete the "Combat Mission AK Prefs" file (or BB or BO for Barbarrosa, Beyond Overlord)in the game directory and you'll be given option to reset screen reolution next time you power up the game). Until recently I was running a 32 MB Geforce 1 and anything higher han 800X600 (72HZ) was choppy on my system.

[Schrullenhaft]

The above answer pretty much covers everything. Your performance problem is a combination of factors with your videocard. The GPU and the amount/speed of memory both have a part to play in the choppiness. Unfortunately, as noted above, you can't upgrade the video on a laptop.

City-scapes in CM have a lot of textures to load up and control once the user starts panning around the map. Since there's a desire for variety in the building appearances, this requires a number of large textures to be loaded, which eats up video memory and eventually 'memory bandwidth' on the card as all of these textures get repositioned with the movement on the screen.