Poor performance

Hi,
as you all likely already assumed from the title, I suffer from poor performance while playing Sins. I browsed this forum a bit and found numerous people who - at a first glance - seemed to have the same or similar issue, but further readings revealed that they often had poor rigs (notebooks e.g.) too or were complaining that the performance during large fleet battles droped considerably.

I have neither of those. The game severely drops down when fleets of 20 vs. 30 ships engange each other. Judging from all the forum talk here I assume that this is relatively small for a Sins battle. It doesn't matter whether I play with only one AI or six or any other number.

My rig looks like this:
C2D E6600
2GB RAM
GeForce 8800GTX
SB Audigy 2
WinXP

I even overclocked my CPU to 3.4 Ghz for a test run but to no avail, nor did it help to turn down details during battles. My ingame settings are all at max with a resolution of 1680x1050 and 2xAA on, but as I previously mentioned turning down details doesn't help. Even with everything on low and no AA the game still doesn't run as fast as I would assume it to be. My frames drop below 10/sec.

The only thing I haven't tried yet is to lower the resolution, but honestly, my PC should handle this easily. Hell, even Supreme Commander runs better with a comparable amount of units roaming over the map....

Drivers are all up2date excluding BETA drivers. Sins is up2date too (v1.03).


Any ideas? Or is Sins supposed to run so poorly?


Regards


*EDIT*
Might be worth to mention too: When these performance drops occur Sins disables particle effects and such. I often don't see any gun or very little gun fire, no shields, explosions, etc. Not always, but happens but always when my frames go down.
Besides that the audio effects are disabled partially at times. I've a whole fleet battling then but only hear sounds of a few ships. This audio thing got notably less with v1.03 though iirc.
3,242 views 5 replies
Reply #1 Top
No it shouldnt, and it sounds really weird as lower end PCs are running it just fine.

So heres a few ideas which you might have tried but here goes :)

Directx update

Try disabling the anti virus program your using or other programs. Could be that they are working in the background while the game runs.
Reply #2 Top
Thanks for the tips Multianna, but I don't have any programs running in the background. I try to keep my OS as slim as possible when it boots. Your proposed DX update won't hurt though. Worth a try. :)
Reply #3 Top
your welcome :)

Im a user of a 8800GTX myself and it runs the game quiet well, so yours should too hehe.

Lets me know if it works or not, else we must try something else :)
Reply #4 Top
else we must try something else
End of quote


Not sure if clubbing baby seals or sacrificing goats to appease pagan gods will work  :SURPRISED: 

More seriously, I'm running it on an 8800GTX as well and that doesn't happen. I know there's some issues with particles having insanely long lifetimes (which helps cause the disappearing particles issue) and I think IC finally managed to narrow it down after someone stumbled on the particle lifetime thing - so it's quite possible when that's fixed your performance will increase as well.
Reply #5 Top
Ok, I've downloaded and installed the march release of DirectX and played Sins a while afterwards. Unfortunately it hasn't helped, still poor performance when battles with 50 or more ships in total are being fought. :-/


I think I'll just wait for the next patch and the final RC from NVidias current BETA driver. When they have hit the floor you'll get an update from me...



btw: May I ask what your estimated average frame rate per second is on medium maps midgame? At best when zoomed in to battles.





P.S.:

I could capture the disappearing graphics-effects thing I mentioned above on video. If there is interest I'll encode and upload it, but I guess you know or at least can imagine how it looks like. :P