Tactical battles even slow my computer down after i exit E:WoM. Any hardware savvy people want to help?

from Elemental Forums

I wanted to know if anyone else is experiencing what I am. I'm playing Beta 3B and things still run a little bit slow for me, but for the most part are ok. Beta 3A was much worse in speed like it was for a lot of you. However in Beta 3B if I start a tactical combat the combat runs VERY VERY VERY slowly. And coming out of it so does the game. Or the combat will run fast, then coming back to the game the game runs increadibly slow. Upon exiting the game it takes on average 2 minutes 30 seconds for my comp to run at a normal speed for using other programs like an internet browser, email program, other game, etc.

As well map/game creation runs a lot slower than 3A, even right after booting up my computer. The more things I used while my computer is on and then close(or leave open, but i close them all to try to trun E:WoM well) the slower E:WoM is to run. I can restart my computer again and again, but it is irritating to do after every E:WoM session of play

I'm wondering if this could be my computer? A comparison could be Mount&Blade:Warband. Upon exiting it takes my compuer a minute to start running at its normal speed. And it only starts to do this a minute after I attempt to load another program. I plan to buy a new computer in the near future, but in the mean time does anyone know what is causing this?(I do regular virus checks, spyware checks, defrags, and ran a disk clean up yesterday).

My comps speccs:

Windows XP
Processor:
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 2.2 GHz
Graphics card:
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
Sound card:
Creative SB X-Fi
1 GB Ram
189 GB hard drive

 

elemental
1,503 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Running slow can be a sign of memory leaks, especially if you hear lots of disk activity.  Program bugs cause it to misplace memory, so it uses disk instead, slooooowly.

I think it is pretty normal for Elemental to leave your computer slow for a while after it exits.  Only about a minute with me, but my comp is a bit faster and has 3x more memory.  Not sure if that is also because of a memory leak or something else, but I have seen the same with other games that were known to have memory leaks (in that case also lots of disk activity after exiting, so again, hearing disk noise is a clue).

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Lord, reply 1
Running slow can be a sign of memory leaks, especially if you hear lots of disk activity.  Program bugs cause it to misplace memory, so it uses disk instead, slooooowly.

I think it is pretty normal for Elemental to leave your computer slow for a while after it exits.  Only about a minute with me, but my comp is a bit faster and has 3x more memory.  Not sure if that is also because of a memory leak or something else, but I have seen the same with other games that were known to have memory leaks (in that case also lots of disk activity after exiting, so again, hearing disk noise is a clue).
End of Lord's quote

My computer's fairly quiet regardless of things like that so I do not hear a lot of disk noise. Alas. My guess too is its memory leaks.

Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

If you have two monitors, fire up Task Manager and put it on monitor 2 before you play. On the Processes Tab you can see what Elemental is doing CPU and memory wise. (If you have a logitech G15, a keyboard app called LCD Miscellany is useful for that too.)

Take a look at Elementals CPU and memory usage, and see how long it takes after you exit the game for the process to actually close. Just because the game isn't visible doesn't mean it's not still running. From there we can diagnose further.

From what you describe it doesn't sound like a memory leak to me. It sounds like tactical battles are loading more "stuff" into RAM and that you don't have enough so Windows is swapping out other stuff to make room for Elemental. Your computer is slow afterwards due to Windows swapping things back in. Back when I had a system with 1GB of RAM I saw the same kind of behaviour if I was playing a larger game (and tactical battles no doubt made Elemental larger then it was memory wise).

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tridus, reply 3
If you have two monitors, fire up Task Manager and put it on monitor 2 before you play. On the Processes Tab you can see what Elemental is doing CPU and memory wise. (If you have a logitech G15, a keyboard app called LCD Miscellany is useful for that too.)

Take a look at Elementals CPU and memory usage, and see how long it takes after you exit the game for the process to actually close. Just because the game isn't visible doesn't mean it's not still running. From there we can diagnose further.

From what you describe it doesn't sound like a memory leak to me. It sounds like tactical battles are loading more "stuff" into RAM and that you don't have enough so Windows is swapping out other stuff to make room for Elemental. Your computer is slow afterwards due to Windows swapping things back in. Back when I had a system with 1GB of RAM I saw the same kind of behaviour if I was playing a larger game (and tactical battles no doubt made Elemental larger then it was memory wise).
End of Tridus's quote

For the last part of that, not enough ram, is there something i can remedy the situation with that isn't adding more ram?

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting TheBirthdayParty, reply 4

For the last part of that, not enough ram, is there something i can remedy the situation with that isn't adding more ram?
End of TheBirthdayParty's quote

If you have other stuff running, close it. That's about it. You do have enough RAM to run the game, but not with a lot of leeway so it's making room. The release version of the game should also be better optimized and will use less RAM.