[Guide] Optimising single-player performance - Stuttering? Got 8gb RAM? This might help

[Tutui]

I just upgraded from 8GB ddr3 to 16 gb ddr3 last night.
With 8gb: Custom battle was not freezing, but (200 bots) some stuttering and annoying.
Campaign: World map would sometimes stutter when holding rmb and looking around or when party started to move. Battles(in campaign) were unplayable(even with as few as 20 bots). Stuttery mess. Could not fight at all. Sieges...forget it.
Loading screens took one minute, sometimes more. Exiting from the game took 3 minutes and desktop froze for an additional two minutes. System restart required.

With 16gb: Custom battles are smooth.
Campaign: World map is very fluid now. Only have a little microfreeze every once in a while(like when loading back to map after town menu-probably due more to my HDD and fragmented to hell drive).
Battles are 1000% better and actually playable. It works smooth and no problems. It is enjoyable now.
Loading screens move faster. Exiting from game is immediate now. Desktop is immediately responsive. No system restart needed.

It seems in my case the ram fixed the game for me, at least for now. I didn't get a chance to play all that long, so I don't know if the slow memory leak will emerge as session play time increases, but I will find out in the coming days.
I changed nothing else except upgraded ram from 8 to 16 gb. Its a pretty old system that I was hoping I didn't have to replace in order to run game properly.
i7 [email protected]
gtx 950 2gb
HDD 1tb
win 7-64
16gb ddr3

The game are more optimized too....but you are right, from 8 to 16 makes a huge difference.

 

[Kalkz]

Hi all i have another solution for you

Besides the windows page file i had another problem
1-Check your windows ram MHZ using speccy https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy
2-check if your ram is running on low MHZ
3-in my case it was running like 3xxx
4-head over your BIOS settings and look for XMP - DOCP - EOCP or in my case it was DIMM
5-raise your MHZ but make sure your ram supports it as well
6-results i got after raising it and checking speccy went to 7999 MHZ

 

[pRaX]

Oof... not sure if I'd personally recommend installing all that bloatware.

 

[kalarhan]

Oof... not sure if I'd personally recommend installing all that bloatware.

specially if you can just open your BIOS and check things there directly. Plus you should first check what your RAM type is and what your board can handle, as a generic advice like above doesnt apply/work.

 

[Kalkz]

1.3 beta made it much worse

 

[Nokturnel]

1.3 beta made it much worse

I swear every patch has lol. If anything since I picked up the game the performance has only gotten worse. I can still play just fine, but far as stuttering goes it definitely hasn't gotten better. I don't even have a RAM problem, got 16gigs.

 

[Agroplode]

I used this guide when i first started to play Bannerlord but when I or some patch changed graphic settings, the frame limiter and v-sync resets too. They are by default 200 and V-Sync off. And this caused massive freeze in battles for me, I set the frame limiter to 120 and the V-Sync to Half and the load on my CPU and GPU went down to normal from 99%-100%. Since a few days ago, I am playing with 60 fps frame limit and V-Sync on Half.
I can now play 1000 man battles and my CPU is an old i5 4430 but I got 16GB Ram and a MSI GTX 970

 

[buick820]

Damn, razer cortex actually helped a lot. I always thought it was just another piece of bloatware and never really used it

 

[caledoni]

So after getting a RAM upgrade (to 16gb) I found that my CPU was now my chokepoint so I looked into trying to get what I could out of it. This thread helped me a lot before and despite lots of fantastic optimization done by TW since April, It's nice for those of us not running top end systems to get what we can out of the settings. Thus I thought I'd share what I've done. This will mostly be for people who are using a laptop.

I have an ASUS ROG G751JL. It's a laptop with i7-4720 @ 2.6GHz and GeForce GTX 965M 2gb

It's a laptop and my main issue was stuttering and overheating (max temps over 90deg) in battles

The main thing I found that helped was using Throttlestop to reduce core max when all 4 are running. Most throttlestop guides will tell you to increase this but I found reducing it lowered my temperatures by ~5deg across the board and actually improved performance. As I'm using throttlestop I am also undervolting by around -75mv to the CPU core and Cache. I am undervolting the GPU by a smaller amount but The GPU overheating has not been a problem for me so I havn't bothered with it too much.

Be warned that experimenting can cause a lot of stability issues. My sound drivers are causing me issues now and last night Steam actually failed to recognise the game and I had to redownload. There was also a lot of crashes and 'Blue Screen of Deaths'. These issues seem to have been when trying to undervolt too much or utilizing higher speeds on all cores and getting an even higher temps as a result. To avoid this I would recommend choosing a conservative undervolt start point (-70mv). Also worth backing up your game files incase you have the issues I did.

Finally I downloaded 'NotebookFan Control' so that the fan on my laptop is better utilized.

I also tried using task manager to disable the hyperthreading cores but Bannerlord seems to utilize these well as it resulted in a big loss in performance.

So I am pretty much running on 'high' settings now and have done testing in 500v500 custom battles. I will hit 80-85deg when I am right in the chaos but temps in the 70's are more the norm now.

If anyone else has any other tips then they are appreciated. hope this helps someone

 

[Oedip]

My specs for reference:
Asus P5Q-Pro
Intel Q9550 OC'd @ 3.6ghz
8gb DDR2 800mhz RAM
GTX 1050 Ti 4gb
Unknown 11-year-old SATA HDD
Corsair 120gb SSD

my previous motherboard, keeped alive for 12 years. You're not just a men, you're a god : to succeed to play Bannerlord with that is something unbelievable !