Cyclic drop in FPS during battles

[Sir Crapalot]

Hello

I have encountered a really annoying problem that takes the fun out of the game.

During battles the FPS drops from an average of 60 to an average of 14FPS about when my main character gets near the enemy troops. But after 30-50 secs, it suddenly jumps up to 60fps again and remains there for about 5-10 secs, but then it drops again to about 14fps and remains there for about 30-50 secs, after which it goes up again for 5-10 secs, and so on.

The fps goes up and down like this, in the above mentioned intervals during the entire battle, no matter how many enemies are left or in what kind of terrain the battle takes place in. I had just started the game and my party consisted of only my main char, with enemies ranging from 24-80 (looters, or looters + sea raiders, or looters+ looters) in the battles. Also, this occurs only during battles, and not in cities or on the map.

System
OS: Win xp sp3
CPu: P4, 3,4 Ghz
RAM: 1GB Ddr2
Nvdia Geforce 6800 256Mb
Sound blaster audigy 2ZS

My troubleshooting so far
I haven't played the game since the release of 1.03, but decided to have another run after implementing some of Magelords tweaks. At first i had everything maxed out, including unlimited amount of corpses and ragdolls. No AA though. This is the way i played last time and i  had 285 troops as max troops per battle, thanks to the battlesize changer. The FPS drop, was at that time proportional to the amount of troops in my characters POV. And it would start to be notable at around 150 troops on the field. But as they would die off the FPS would rise again. But now it goes up and down, like clockwork.

I then lowered the graphics to minimum, removed shadows and ragdolls,well all the eyecandy. Still had the exact same problem. The FPS would go up and down in the exact same intervals. The only difference was a slightly higher lower average FPS, round 17.

I then tried a vanilla version of the game with the lowest possible settings. Exactly the same problem as with the tweaks. Up and down.



I have the latest drivers for graphics and sound, and i have not encountered this problem when playing other games or running apps. The only major difference between now and last time i played are all the win updates in between, including the sp3.

Thanks in advance for any ideas, because I'm totally stuck now.

 

[Archonsod]

Try disabling sound variation in the game options, also check the performance with sound acceleration turned off on the soundcard (dxdiag > sound, move the slider to none)

Is this occurring in a saved game or same problem from a new game?

 

[Sir Crapalot]

Thank you for your answer.

I tried your suggestion with the sound but unfortunately it didn't solve the problem.
At first i removed only the sound variation in the game options,and tried out. No difference. Then i turned off the sound accelerator. Kinda glad that it didn't work out either because it would have been a huge tradeoff, since the sound got really crappy.

The problem is happening both in a saved game, although really early-game save though, but also when starting fresh.

The plan now is to defrag the hardrive, and if that doesn't help, remove the sp3. Hopefully that's where the problem is. But if you have any other ideas I'll give'em a try.

 

[Archonsod]

Check the drivers running in dxdiag. Service Packs have a rather bad habit of replacing your perfectly happy drivers with whatever the latest WHQL certified drivers are, SP3 could have replaced the drivers. Might also try reinstalling Direct X since they have a tendency to muck about with that too.

 

[Sir Crapalot]

I think I've found the problem.

When i was about to reinstall the sound drivers, the comp kept telling me that the soundcard was not properly installed. So i decided to move it to another pci slot, so that the comp could find it. That's when i saw that the fan to the vga-card had melted. It looked like some christmas ornament, hanging there by a thread.

Well, i replaced the fan, and managed to get the sound working again, and voila, it seems to be working. No more drops. And when you think about it, its seems quite logical that overheating would produce this kind of variation in fps. When the card got too hot it need some time to cool down. And since it would be saturated with input it would adapt the cyclic behavior. That's why the seemingly identical intervals.

I'm gonna do some extensive testing now , just to be sure. If everything works out properly I'll post an update on the status in a day or 2.

Thank you for your help.

 

[FieldMarshal]

I have this exact same problem, but i am sure it is not heat since all my other games like crysis, UT3, Dirt works perfectly. I was wondering if it has anything to do with Directx since i am using vista.

 

[Sir Crapalot]

I haven't had any issues of that kind since i've put in the new fan. Now the FPS are proprtional to the amount of troops on screen.
But I was tampering with the sounddrivers at that point though, had removed them and reinstalled them aproximately at the same time as i put in the fan. But i didn't do anything with the dirctx.

But as i mentioned before my game runs smoothly now. So in my case it seems to have been the vga-fan.

 

[FieldMarshal]

I am wondering if it could be SLI, some of my older games run smoother with SLI off, for example act of war had the same problem with random FPS drops and inconsistencies but when i turned off SLI it would work. Maybe M&B is the same way, i have to test this as soon as i get home. I also have a quad core, and i am not sure if that could be a issue.

 

[HaDeZ]

Im not sure if this will help you or not but its a few secs to see if it helps or not.

I also have a quad extreme edition, and sli 8600 GT's and 4 gigs of DDR2 Ram and couldnt figure out why M&B played like crap.

What i did was this, disable sli and ran off one card and set my affinity to run off one core, since then everything has gone great.

 

[FieldMarshal]

I have a Quad core, 4 gigs of DDR3 Ram, and two 9800gtx on SLI, by turning SLI on and off didn't really make any difference, since the game isn't graphically demanding. I know my system should easily handle 500 troops on the battlefield, but i don't even set it that high, my troop limit is 300. Maybe it is the Quad Core, i am going to try what you said and run it off one core.

 

[Rob de Hard]

Mine does exactly the same thing.

Although I fixed it by:

1. Turned ragdolls to 3 not unlimited
2. Turned grass density to 50%
3. Using the game's AA and AF options and disabling or ticking 'let application manage' in the GPU software control panel
4. Turning shadows to low quality
5. Setting AA to 2x not 4x in the pre game setup

I also had the force single threading ticked by accident which didn't help.

The ragdolls made the single biggest difference, that physics code really bottlenecks the CPU and its CPU not GPU that's working hard with 400 men on the battlefield tbh.