I don't personally write engine code but I've done some rather low-level work and this sounds much more like a hard-crash due to an overflow or something on a buffer/array rather than a performance limitation directly. When working on code that needs to run as fast as possible that might be acceptable in exchange for considerable speed increases and the "2048" number does not correlate with someone just using too small of a data type. Now obviously, I can't actually know directly what's happening, but when you're programming an engine you're typically using rather "dangerous" methods and trying to maximize the throughput, and you will be doing buttloads of math on matrices. In your CPU you have several layers of cache, higher levels being faster but smaller. They're most likely doing some kind of 2048x2048 matrix multiplication for something related to the entities (E.G pathfinding), the smaller the matrix, generally the more efficient especially if you can fit loaded rows of it into the smaller but faster levels of cache. You can look it up online but for example 4096x4096 (the next size up) is generally benchmarking >3x slower. So they could for example implement something where it scales the size based on the number of entities, but then you would get factors of worse performance from whatever this is possibly to the point of it being unplayable and they might've just said 2048 is more than we'll ever need so might as well just keep it simple and who knows how much of the code is based on this assumption. Solution could also for example be find some way that doesn't require a direct increase based on the number but that's a lot more work than just changing a couple of numbers and also might add overhead for lower end systems. I'm just guessing of course since I don't have access to the code but I suspect it's not as simple as just "increase number" without other detrimental effects especially with regards to performance, could even be Taleworlds didn't write whatever is crashing but benchmarked it and came to the same conclusion anyways. Would love a Taleworlds engineer who worked on the engine to enlighten us though.
