What's up with Elemental's performance?

Frogboy has said that the CPU power is very important to gamespeed. If you have a slower CPU then it'll be a bit slower. Also, ensure nothing is running in the background and that your graphics settings are lower.

That sounds like a memory leak, not performance issues. 

Runs bad on my 250GTS too, while games such as Anno 1404 runs silky smooth, looks insanely good, and have real-time ai-craziness going on with hundreds of citizens going about their daily business.

I understand what they are trying to do with this engine though, basically limitless detail for when computers catch up, but it could sure use some optimization. For instance, is it really neccessary that i can see the tiny tiny daggers laying on the table in the Market improvement, while zoomed out so far that the cloth map almost kicks in?
I think thats the biggest thing, some of the buildings ingame have their LOD settings messed up (blame the dude making them), rendering stuff you cant see that far away anyway.

Lookin in the editor, you can pretty much change every object's level of "pop-in". I did on some of my tiles and it was hardly noticeable ingame. So i just find it wierd that the vanilla objects didnt even bother with the LOD, could prolly improve preformance by alot.

I think its typical pc stuff due to all the various hardware configs. My copy runs flawlessly at 1920x1080 max everything so I dunno. Though mine is defiantly not a low end rig either, I would say just under enthusiast class machine maybe...or close to it.

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I agree with you since all three of my comps play it like crap after 200 turns!

I've got a intel i7 (8 cores at 3.2Ghz each) 6GB RAM, and using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295, Win 7 Ultimate (64), and I keep running into an error box saying my memory is full.  Playing on a Large map with only 8 cities atm, so what gives?  Is there a memory leak that didnt get fixed with the newest patch?

Try deactivating Anisotropic Filtering if you haven't already. It drains a lot of power.

Are you getting to mid/late game and/or exposing most/all of the map?

The game slows down bigtime for me and in my most recent game I chased one of the AIs all over most of the contient to finish him off (had to negotiate non-aggression pacts with numerous AIs to fully track him down, he spawned a ridiculous number of cities).  It seemed like performance degraded as the map got exposed.

Anyways, the game got super chunky, slow, and barely playable.  I was zooming out to cloth map to move my army and getting kinda pissed.

I have Win7 64bit, Quad core, 6G of RAM, and an ATI 5770 (1G) with all the latest drivers that crushes most games mercilessly, for hours on end, lotsa games way more demanding than Elemental should ever be.

I think I read where Froggie said there's a memory leak that's ATI's fault but I think it's BS since I have zero problems with other games and play them for hours on end alt+tabbing in/out all the time (WoW, Civ IV, and many others).  I can't reliably alt+tab GalCiv2 either and it often suffers late game degradation, so I kinda think this is a Stardock problem.

There is a memory leak, yeah. I even have problems with that and performance and I'm on a similar i7 with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon 5870.

I'm sure engine tuning for performance is on the list somewhere.

it's a memory leak, and a rather large one. takes up 6 gb of ram/swap after about an hour of play, and eventually crashes with an out of memory error for me

pheom II

4870 here

I haven't had any crashes, but the game is really choppy as the turns progress.  Not abnormal, but a little frustrating for a game that was touted as being able to run on netbooks

As a 32bit program, Elemental can only use up to 2GB regardless how much RAM you have.

Please direct performance discussions to the main thread on the subject here.

don't know what to tell you, ram slowly fills up, swap utilization starts and eventually the game will crash with a out of memory error somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. playing the game is possible, just have to quit and restart it every 45 minutes, or else it gets unplayable due to choppiness.

Is it possible to add "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" in the header of the exe to allow the game to use more then 2gb?

As per the info here

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

I'm going to test this out and see if there are any problems with elemental.exe

I know that, but I also know that Windows was telling me I had 7GB of RAM in use. Then I closed Elemental and had 2GB of RAM in use. It was eating up a tremendous amount of VM space.

Its same here, the game starts chugging more and more the longer you play and the mem do fills up.

i7 860

ATi 5870HD

4 GB RAM

On my system (P 2.6 Ghz, two cores, 4 GB RAM, GTS 250, W7 x64) the game slows down progressively the longer I play. Note that "the longer I play" doesn't necessarily mean "turns". Just playing a little and then letting it sit for a while will result in sluggish behaviour. Units on the screen "skip" when moving. Restarting the game fixes this temporarily. Looks definitely like a memory leak. (Patches have been coming in quickly with lots if improvements, so I'm hopeful that this will be addressed soon, too.)

same here amd 64 4x 4gb ram

Yes, I think LOD is a bit missed up at the moment.

after patch 1.06 it goes well for me

[1.05]

I have made a gigantic map, and after about 400 turns everything was very slow. existing and returning to the game helped.

At some point, the game crashed using 1.3 GB of ram.

I think theres more than one issue,  so theres more than one reason for the game to run slow at some moment. One thing is clear: this is not a game that want to be smooth.

He also said he had the game running at 60fps on his little notebook (that have WEAK CPUs), which I now think must be BS because I sure can't get that on my Laptop with 2GHz.

so perfermance is still bad with the latest patch?

Ok I've been running Elemental now (over 7 hours) with the "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" header and it works just fine and I got about 10-15 more FPS out of it.

Basically this command tells a 32-bit program it can use up to 3gb of memory instead of just 2gb.

This all originated from a fix with supremecommander and was later done for Empire total war.

I use the old program that was meant for Empire (I didn't make it- look at the readme that comes with it for those details).

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O0J0FL8Q

alternative site - http://rapidshare.com/files/415500390/3GB_enabler_for_Empire.rar 

Now here's how you can use this program to give Elemental.exe the new header. 

1- Unrar the files anywhere you like (doesn't have to be in elemental folder).

2- Take your elemental.exe (make a backup just in case) and put that in folder you unzipped the files to

3- Rename elemental.exe to Empire.exe (just rename it empire if you don't see the exe), the program is checking for empire.exe to patch

4- Run the startme.  Now press A for add and it will add the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE to the Eemental.exe

5- Rename empire.exe back to Elemental and place elemental back into the elemental folder

6-Run the game as normal except now it can use up to 3gb instead of 2gb

I use this program and trick on a ton of other exes including Galciv2 and sword of the stars exes so it's pretty compatible with lots of exes.  It doesn't change any code, it's basically telling windows to allow the program to use more memory.  This won't get rid of the memory leak though but it does increase performance.

NOTE:  You will only see a performance increase if you have more then 3gbs of ram obviously

I really don't understand why the game wasn't shipped with the Large Address Aware flag as a default >_>