How can this game be so heavy?

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Santeri

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My PC can run games that you'd think are heavier than M&B just fine.... But I get an average FPS of below 20 in this game.... I have all the graphics settings set as low as possible, except DirectX 9 instead of 7 (does that make a difference?). Especially the castle sieges are almost impossible to play with a fun amount of soldiers... :sad: Are there some settings that I may have set all wrong to make it so laggy?

Specs:
2,4 gHz Pentium IV
~1200 Mb RAM
Ati Radeon 9550, 128 mb
 
It runs way better looking games than M&B way better.... Jedi Knight 3 : JA, Dungeons&Dragons Online.....etc.
Despite the crappy graphics, M&B is still quite demanding for your graphics card? Don't get me wrong, I love the game. This just puzzles me. :shock:
 
Well, Jedi Academy runs on the Quake 3 engine, so it can't be that demanding, as for D&D online, well, it's a MMORPG, so it's graphics are made to cater to a huge audience, hence it doesn't (can't) demand on your GPU.
Now, M&B is not super optimized, granted, but taking the scope of the action, the engine does require some resources. It does infact require a lot of the CPU, for AI and variable processing, but it does take some GPU horsepower as well, since the game will be rendering many units and lots of terrain all at once, and believe me, the units in M&B are more detailed and appear in larger numbers than the ones in JA and D&D:O.

One thing however, that I don't like in M&B, and the reason why I don't play it more often, is that after a playing session, the game leaves it's mark, as in, the computer gets considerably slower, as if the game had not cleaned the memory it used and the system finds the RAM cluttered by M&B resources. This is something I don't particularly like, because I sometimes like to relax for half an hour by playing something, and I'm not to be bothered in restarting my PC everytime I play.
 
Santeri said:
Despite the crappy graphics, M&B is still quite demanding for your graphics card?
Crappy graphics?  You high?

Maybe... if you're comparing it to the games out there with what might be referred to as "best graphics on the market"....

But labeling this game as having "crappy graphics" is hardly just.  I think the game has rather good graphics.

Yea, you crank the graphics down to minimum (as you stated)... and I would think they might look "crappy", but with a modern video card with everything turned up all the way full (default textures mind you), the game looks Very nice indeed.

Your problem is your video card cannot process the poly's this game renders. 

A) You're in very large outdoor settings, with a lot of foilage...  a LOT in some cases.
B) ~50 mobs on the screen at once, double that if they are all on horse...    THAT ALONE is probably more polygons than the games you mentioned render on the screen at once.

Plus, the CPU comes into play
- YOUR cpu has to run the AI for every mob on the screen - at once - on top of everything else going on.

Your CPU and video card are WAY outdated.

Modern video cards are about 30 times more powerful that a 9550.

A modern CPU running at 2.4GHz is probably twice as powerful as your P4 at same clock speed.  I know a C2D is.

However, it's not likely a new video card would work in your current system.  Not even low end cards.  So you're only option would be to get a new computer outright.

Just my .02
 
Agent707 said:
A modern CPU running at 2.4GHz is probably twice as powerful as your P4 at same clock speed.  I know a C2D is.

I would estimate 2,4 times on a dual core on about 2,4 MHz. Lets face it, x86 was suppose to die several years ago....


Thread starter:
Build a new computer, use AMD for CPU(the tripplecore is just a small tad slower than the famed i7).
Get a proper GPU, avoid geforce 9600 and below(dated). Se if you can get your hands on a Radeon 5670(or was it 5770?).
Go for DDR2 memory, DDR3 is marginally faster.
SSD is still to expensive, unless you get a 20-30 gig disk for your OS.
 
I'm not one of them "Crysis-kids", as I like to call them, who'll declare a game ****ty because its graphics aren't top of the line. I was just comparing, and yeah the game does look crappy when the settings, all except screen resolution, are as low as possible. I'm no expert, so I don't really know what exactly this game demands from the PC. Thanks for the advice! Really cleared stuff up. Seems I'll be needing a new PC then to fully enjoy this game.  :razz:

By the way, could the small amount of free space on my hard drive be making it worse? Only like 700 mb's left at the moment.

Thanks
 
Santeri said:
By the way, could the small amount of free space on my hard drive be making it worse? Only like 700 mb's left at the moment.

Thanks

if you only have 700 mb left then that is cause for alarm. If you running vista, your pc would crash.  :mrgreen: but yes afcourse having so low hd space would make any decent pc very slow. try freeing some disk space and do a defrag that should speed thinks up.
 
RalliX said:
Your graphics card, it sucks. 128MB isn't enough for any decent game.

I have a 9250

I have 756mb of ram and a 2gig single core, it runs everything except anti aliasing on full, with an estimated performance of 122% and about 30fps. (1024x860 odd resolution)
 
Using DX7 will help if you can't afford a new computer, but if you think the DX9 graphics are "crappy"...

But it probably won't help a lot, your CPU is letting you down just as much as your GPU. You will need a new computer if you really wanna hoist up the number of bots. You haven't experienced M&B until you've had 300+ person battles!
 
Damn dude, I fell sorry for your suckish video card. I got a one gig ATI Readon 4350 HD from BESTBUY.com for only $62.04. It might be something for you to look into. I am assumeing you have a desktop, not a laptop.
 
Santeri said:
My PC can run games that you'd think are heavier than M&B just fine.... But I get an average FPS of below 20 in this game.... I have all the graphics settings set as low as possible, except DirectX 9 instead of 7 (does that make a difference?). Especially the castle sieges are almost impossible to play with a fun amount of soldiers... :sad: Are there some settings that I may have set all wrong to make it so laggy?

Specs:
2,4 gHz Pentium IV
~1200 Mb RAM
Ati Radeon 9550, 128 mb
i thing you can update your pc for latest game, really, also for other popular games
 
Looking over this thread again I would say the CPU is the bottleneck.
M&B is troublesome in a way on how its done, since the heavy load is caused by the units AI. Which is AI bound. GPU is not really increasing the performance, except massive amount of rendering power(which is frankly not needed).
 
As some people have already stated, (I dunno how many, I skimmed through it.) D-7 makes tons of difference. If you can ignore crappy graphics and focus on gameplay, at least.

Not that I personally had that problem, I have an ATI graphics card, and a strong computer, but a person I know had that problem and D-7 fixed it.

And it turns out that that person is ten times better then me at the game....

Erm, yeah.  :mrgreen:
 
This game needs a lot of RAM and a good graphics card. So many units doing all kinds of things at the same time takes a toll on your graphics card and your memory. Its nice with a good processor too, but as long as you have more than 4GHz combined in processors (quad 2,4GHz = 2,4*4 = 9,6GHz) you should be ok. If you want to run this game with graphics enchancement and with a decent Battle sizer setting, you need mainly a lot of memory (4GB is enugh I think) and atleast 512 MB graphics card, 1024MB would be best.
 
Diavolo said:
This game needs a lot of RAM and a good graphics card. So many units doing all kinds of things at the same time takes a toll on your graphics card and your memory. Its nice with a good processor too, but as long as you have more than 4GHz combined in processors (quad 2,4GHz = 2,4*4 = 9,6GHz) you should be ok. If you want to run this game with graphics enchancement and with a decent Battle sizer setting, you need mainly a lot of memory (4GB is enugh I think) and atleast 512 MB graphics card, 1024MB would be best.

Quad cores do not work this way.

Their effectiveness depends on how the game is programmed...

From memory I think M&B only utilizes two cores, and the second one is not used much. Could be mistaking this for another game but I think that's right.
 
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