Performance Issue Questions

[Arralen]

If you could provide a little bit more details, what
- "extreme lag between turns" is .. . Turn generation in a game like you mentioned can easily take over a minute. Does it take considerably longer on your PC?

- "an extremely old nvidia card" is?

- the driver versions are your PC runs with?

If you're are not sure about the technical details, run "dxdiag" from the command prompt/DOS box and save the results into a text file, zip it up and attach it to your next post here!

[Arralen]

Ran a little speed test:

The very same Dom3 directory, copied to both
A) AMD Athlon64 3000+ with 1GB DDR333 and nVidia 6600GT (128MB), and
C) Celeron 1500, 512MB SDRAM, nVidia Fx5200 (128MB)

Both running W2k, but different graphics driver versions.
Both systems where freshly rebooted, and as W2k does not do any prefechting like XP does, not caching effects should have been involved.

Game was Late Age, all nations (18), turn 4->5, with everyone having 2-4 provinces. Dominions was run at 1024x768 with light effects on, fade and animated backgrounds off, medium filter and lowest tree quality. Battle details medium, no grass drawn.

Turn generation times are not strictily comparable, as the random events naturally differed between the 2 runs, and I didn't do a statistically relevant amount of test runs to get a "mean processing time" ... But this should give you at least a rough estimate how fast Dom3 should run:

A - startup <3s, game turn ~14s
C - startup <4.5s, game turn 39s (with 2 more random events for the player)

[CharonJr]

With a good PC your turns (at least up to turn 40) should take less than 5 seconds, so yes, there is a large improvement with a new PC.

I have a Intel E6600 Dual Core with 2GB and a X1900XT here and can't complain about the speed of the turn generation at all.

But random map generation still takes some time

CharonJr

PS: Turn generation speed was taken from a fairly small map (100 provinces with just 6 AIs).

[Arralen]

But you can play Dom3 on a Celeron-1500 just fine - in fact I have done a good part of the beta testing on that machine, and didn't have any troubles at all.

[Epaminondas]

Arralen said:
If you could provide a little bit more details, what
- "extreme lag between turns" is .. . Turn generation in a game like you mentioned can easily take over a minute. Does it take considerably longer on your PC?

- "an extremely old nvidia card" is?

- the driver versions are your PC runs with?

If you're are not sure about the technical details, run "dxdiag" from the command prompt/DOS box and save the results into a text file, zip it up and attach it to your next post here!

Arralen,

Extreme lag is something like 2-3 minutes on a large map with about 10 players at around turn 40.

I am not sure if giving you the specs of my old computer is helpful because 1) it's slow even compared to its supposed specification due to several virus attacks; and 2) I am about to order a new computer from Dell.

Now, given that the following specifications for the computer I am contemplating ordering, should I expect considerable improvement in performance in Dom III? For instance, what kind of turn generation time frame am I looking at with, say, the same 10 player large map game at around turn 40 that took my old comptuer 2-3 minutes?

Processor: Pentium® D Processor 820 with Dual Core Technology (2.80GHz, 800FSB)

Memory: 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs

Video Card: 256MB nVidia Geforce 7300LE TurboCach

Thanks in advance!