Emporer Battle For Dune performance

[bladernr]

Emperor Battle For Dune has finally landed here in Australia. I have played it for about 16 hours straight and I'm knocking on the door of the Harkonnens at the moment. But there is one major disappointment for me and that's the games performance. I have a 1.4Ghz Athalon with a Ge-Force 3 and 512Meg of Memory and have yet to see a game that requires it. Well guess what? I have - and it's Emperor. Now I understand the graphics are 'scalable' but honestly when the going gets busy the game STOPS. It doesn't merely slow down - it becomes a slideshow. This is with everything turned on except shadows at 32-Bit colour. I am just about to dummy down the graphics but I'm a little miffed that I have to considering the specs of my system. Curiously the slowdown is sporadic and every now and then the whole game will speed back up and mayhem ensues. Does this indicate a massive memory leak?

Hopefully a patch will address this issue because if a game has a scalable engine then surely as it's being tested in QA they would have picked up on this fact (i.e run the game on both sides of the performance spectrum)? Anyway that's my rant. I've noticed a couple of reviews (iGN and Gamespot) both comment on the poor performance of the game when it gets busy. What are your experiences with the speed of the game (Particularly the final mission playing House Atraides)?

Long Live The Fighters!

[prismtank]

WESTWOOD GAMES DON'T LIKE AMDS

I have a PIV 1.5, 764 SRDAM, Cable, DVD 16x, A new CD drive 40x, APG 3D graphics card, Cable modem, with a 80 GB and 20 GB drives.

I don't have that much of a problem except I have a AGP card which isn't too fast with dune.

It runs perfect with my PIII 600, 320 SDRAM, 40x, AGP, Cable, 10 GB. Studders sometimes when new songs are loading and slows, not stops when there are alot of units.

[bladernr]

Interesting. Having said Westwood games don't like AMD's can you point me in the direction where I can read a little bit about it? It's certainly news to me. I own just about every Westwood game written and I have no problems with them at all. Yes Emperor is Westwood's first effort into the realms of 3D but surely it wouldn't favour a particular CPU? If that was the case I would assume the game favours MMX rather than 3Dnow! instructions? Whatever the problem is the last mission and basically any scenario which involves a large number of units makes it unplayable even on a low graphics setting which I think is utterly ridiculous considering the power of my system. For now I'm walking away from it until Westwood address these performance issues. Definitely not up to Westowood's usual impeccable standard by a longshot.

[Guest treb]

Hey guy's I have also got a top range athlon system & the game slows to a crawl when plenty of activity. I will also wait until a patch is released to hopefully cure the problem. I updated to ver 1.06 through the updater program but this only caused more serious problems, crashes, freezing etc.....

Hope westwood will improve this game or find decent coders for its 3d. Try looking to a game called warzone 2100 to see what can be achieved.

[Gobalopper]

What type of video card do you have? Have you tried turning down the graphics level?

[prismtank]

TS, RA2, and EMP have problems with AMDs, they have some type of programing incorporated into all RTS that have been semi-3d or 3d that don't co-operate with AMDs

[Guest Tirinal]

Odd. I have a 750 mhz computer with 200 memory and a crap video card. Game works great set on highest detail setting, except during the very beginning when everything loads.

[peseverance]

Heres one:

500mhz, GeForce256 32mb DDR, 256RAM

Runs good under minimal setting but i'm on 800x600 with 32-bit and high textures... Until it gets to last mission Atreidis (I just got there) there is slows to 1fps as soon as that freakin' timer starts. Otherwise its all good except for the 2-5 minute loading :)

[Guest Childboy]

Mine's Pentium III 500mhz @ 550mhz

384Mb RAM, S3 Diamond Viper V770 ultra

It runs perfect with 800x600 on 32bit with everything @ Hi cept shadows

[cyclonus]

Mines a p3 600 128 ram, and a onboard video card, and it works like a dream.

[Guest Quantus]

I have an AMD 1.4G processor, 256m of ram and a GF2 (32M version) and I have the graphics maxed out at 1024x768 (including 32bit color). The game runs great on my machine and I have yet to see a slow down with masses of units. And the comment about Westwood code not liking AMD processors, that's just plan crap. I have never seen this documented and it would be stupid for a company to favor a particular processor. And if that is the case then why don't tons of people with AMD processors complain? I have an AMD, my brother has an AMD and I know serveral other people with similar systems, and none of them have problems. PrismTank, you must either be an Intel lover or you just read some incorrect information. Emperor will work just fine on AMD systems. It might be that people have driver issues, irq issues, tons of apps in the task bar, etc. Give up on the Intel crusade, it is bogus!

-Q

[Guest HeavyFlea]

500 mhz Celeron

192 meg Ram

Voodoo 5500 (PCI only)

4x4x12 cdr

Windows ME

Install was fine. With the Voodoo, I added -C to the command line to disable texture compression.

I will get slow downs at times when there's lots of units. The game seems to run the same for me whether I'm at full details 1024x768 or med details at 800x600. (always no shadows)

[Guest Quantus]

Oh, one other thing PrismTank....you comment "...they have some type of programing incorporated into all RTS that have been semi-3d or 3d that don't co-operate with AMDs". This just show that you don't understand computers very well. 3D graphics are handled by a graphics card and have little to do with the processor type. The graphics card does the 3D rendering, NOT the processor!

-Q

[cyclonus]

lol

[Guest Draken]

Well this game dosent like win2k..

Going to get SP2 and see if that helps..

[cyclonus]

Funny thing though, when Westwood invited the webmaster to play the game, the OS for the network was win2k... and they reported no problems... Thank god for ME.

[Guest Draken]

Well SP2 made alot of diff!!

Well any game runs great when the makers of it is showing it to the press..

Cos thay have made sure that just that config is the best for the game..

[cyclonus]

Lol true, but if they could do it, then we know theres a way. Heres the hard part- how?

[Guest Hadrian]

I'm on a PII 350, 256 megs of ram, Geforce 2 MX, the game runs great! I only tuned down the terrain option because I don't care for fancy ground(woopee, ground).

-Hadrian

[Guest me 2]

Especially on the final campaign levels, the game slows to a crawl every minute or so when the enemy sends their attack on me...

I'm on PIII 600/ 256 SDRAM/ 32MB Diamond Viper V770 Ultra with a SB Live! sound card...I've already set it to the lowest possible settings and i have tried turning the sound card off in my hardware profiles but to no avail... :(

[Guest Al-Qadim]

WE've found that turning off the in-game music will speed performance up incredibly.. though on our 1ghz athalons we've had no slowdowns.

[Guest Tainted]

Well mines better than all of yours ! ;)