Low FPS - Should I have this on my system?

Hello!

MB:W Has usually performed very well on my computer, though not perfectly on larger battles with 200ish unit battles. Recently I've started playing again and I've noticed my frame rates seem to be very low when there are 100-200 units fighting on the field. It drops as low as 15 fps, which is very frustrating considering how much I've spent on my machine. I play with most graphics on full and Anti-A on x4. On custom mods the fps can get as low as 15 on battles with less than a 100 units on the field, depending on what I am facing on my screen view. My PC specs are as below:

Vista 64 bit
Intel Core i7 CPU 920 2.67Ghz (Quad)
2 x GeForce GTS 250 512mb DDR3
6GB RAM


Surely this system can handle MB on mid-high graphics and max units on the field?

I have tried the rgl_config render_buffer_size fix. It is currently set to 500, but this seems to have made no difference. I've searched high and low for answers and tried a lot of suggestions for fixes, but alas, no fix yet.

Also, does MB:W make use of SLi?

Many thanks in advance,

Tim

(If you need more details please let me know!)

If you have at least a 720p monitor, Anti-aliasing is pretty much useless.  There is a difference, but not enough to make up for the way it can tax a system.
If you don't already know, Anti-aliasing basically removes the 'jaggies' on screen rendering everything smoother.  However, on an HD screen, there isn't much of a difference.  It also puts a huge tax on your hardware, especially when rendering 200 units.  This is because it is applying anti-aliasing to everything, not just to individual pixels.  (I think )
Either way, though, I think M&B uses processing power and graphics power poorly, leading to low performance even on high end systems.

Thanks for the response. I'm up for blaming M&B, because Mafia II works exceptionally well even on full graphics so I can't work out why M&B would give me any trouble with its lower end graphics.

It's very frustrating though, because this is my favourite game and to have this annoying low fps really grinds me.

I'm pretty sure taking AA off hasn't made much of a difference to my gameplay, but I'll try some more extensive testing.

Any other theories would be great too

Consider ticking OFF 'load texture by demand' in video options (M&B:Warband launcher), decreasing AA to 2X (or removing AA) and getting a better video card, preferably 470/480 series if you are fond of Nvidia. Your graphic card output is absolutely hilarious compared to your CPU, and is a major bottleneck of the entire system! Considering texture buffer tweak, look how much memory does your current GFX have, and divide it by half ... if that gets you bugs or degraded performance compared to standard buffer value (=15, I believe), than halve it once again ... if that brings no results again, then simply revert it to stock settings. I've a feeling texture buffer affects stuff only when you tick 'load texture by demand' option ON (as the game seems to load all textures of the models on the battlefield with it turned off, irrespective of the texture buffer).

I guess you're using a 64-bit system, consider searching for 3GB+ memory workaround, extra memory to work with never hurts. Other than that major slowdown of the game (sudden FPS drop, stutters) is caused by AI & pathfinding, game gets choppy often irrespective of your graphic output the very moment many soldiers hack at each other simultaneously ... when they just move and don't fight yet FPS is vastly higher and stutters are gone. With this kind of thing only high-clocked CPU and good memory bandwidth can help, apart from future patches ... take notice that WB is primarily a single-core application, consider OCing your i7 a top priority ... if you can get stable clocks and temperature at @3.6Ghz (it's good enough to hang below 65-70C processor temp during full load in stress test, especially on a stock cooler!), that'll be good enough (you'll hit a 'wall' when it doesn't really increase performance much, around 4Ghz with Hyper-Threading or 4.2Ghz w/o HT). Last thing to check, is whether you gain a performance drop or increase, when you run the game in single-core mode (again, M&B launcher options!).

Get your highest resolution and remove the AA,its pretty useless for me.

Achilla - Thanks for the reply. I didn't realise my video cards were so far behind the rest of the system. I suppose having two of them doesn't do much for MB? I'm not really sure how to go about overclocking safely, but I'll look into it. Thanks.

Okay so I'm on the same graphics level as before, but I'm playing the Blood and Steel mod now. For some reason my FPS has shot right up even when there is a couple of hundred units on the map. Usually around 40-60fps, maybe dropping to 20 when all the units clash and shoot.

The mod I was mainly playing before was Knights of the Last Battle. It seemed as though I got the lowest FPS when ranged units were all firing.

You have a quad core, mount and blade only uses one of them. A shame I know but I think there was a tutorial on a way to get it to use all of them. And if you have vista then your RAM is greatly lowered.

A shame I know but I think there was a tutorial on a way to get it to use all of them

Is that tutorial on the forums here or elsewhere?  Do you have a link to share? 

braydog92 said:

A shame I know but I think there was a tutorial on a way to get it to use all of them

Is that tutorial on the forums here or elsewhere?  Do you have a link to share? 

Click to expand...

Hm...  Anything that turns a single-threaded application into a multithreaded one is pretty advanced software!!!!

I got some weird drops in FPS also recently.  I thought it might be caused by some update my M$ on Win7 x64, but...  Maybe not...

Anyway my video card is a Radeon 4870 1gb and I normally have no trouble running the game at high/very high and 4xAA @ 1680x1050, meaning 90+ FPS in battles, but recently I had dips down to below 10 FPS a couple times.  And all my system temps were well within acceptable ranges.

I have no idea because I have a single core processor but doesn't warband make use of multiple cores? Why else is there a "force single threading" option in the configuration if that's all it's capable of in the first place?