Performance Concerns: Older machine

Nobody is entirely sure how well the game runs at the moment because there are some performance enhancements coming with the Day 0 patch that we don't have yet.

Well I'm not looking for specifics, just a general sense about how it might run on a machine similar to mine. Broad benchmarks? Any beta testers out there who might have an idea who played the game.

Well my experience would be that the game won't run well on that kind of comp, unless you just use the cloth map, then it's fine. I've got a machine pretty similar, maybe a bit better, and I get under 10 fps late game with all video options as low as they can be set. But like it was said, let's wait for the next couple of patches before judging! (I like playing even with the cloth map btw)

You might have issues if you only have 2GB of ram. I'm not completely sure, but I think vista eats up most of that on its own, and the minimum system requirements say you should have at least 1 GB free.

Some folks are getting rock-bottom frame rates even with just a single town onscreen.  I'm hoping the Day 0 patch improves things.

Yeah, that sounds familiar 10 fps is the max for me with towns on screen, a big city will drag it to around 3-4. But like I said, I'm hopeful and the cloth map isn't bad ! They'll work on it I'm sure.  

Can someone describe to me the difference between the "cloth map" and the alternative? I haven't bought the game so I'm not sure what that is.

The cloth map is just that - a cloth map (if you've seen a Tolkien map, you'll know what it looks like), with icons representing cities and resources (they are quite pretty) and little models representing units. The game is totally playable like that, but it is harder to appreciate exactly what you are looking at, at least at first. The cloth map is normally only used when you zoom out loads, but you can set it to be on all the time.

On performance: Ocasionally even my desktop beast (i7 920, HD5870, 9GB RAM), will slow to a crawl later in the game. I have hopes that the patches will fix this, as lets be honest, this game really shouldn't be as demanding as Crysis maxed out.

OK, but what is the alternative? If you're zoomed *in* and looking at the map, what do you see if you have Cloth Map on all the time?

Nothing. You see the same cloth map if you have cloth map-only on.

If you've turned cloth-map only playing off, you'll see this when zoomed in. https://www.elementalgame.com/media It's really quite pretty. I'm personally not much of a fan of the cloth-map graphics - slightly bland and hard to distuingish features. Also dislike how the units remain 3D in somewhat awkward way. Normal mode is beautiful though. Stunning, actually. Perfectly stylized for my tastes.

Cloth map looks like a board game with figurines or something It looks like that no matter how far you've zoomed if the game is set to use only it.

That really isn't true.  With the service packs Vista is only slightly above average on resource usage.

Not as good as 7 obviously, but perfectly usable.

I'm playing on a much crappier machine.  I'm sticking with the cloth map, but even then it's still a struggle. 

I have to say I'm shocked multi-core folks are having problems

Makes me wonder how I'm getting good performance with a single core CPU.

It really is curious. I hope to upgrade this machine (or get a totally new one) and hearing that multi-core folks are struggling is a bit worrying.

I'm only struggling on the biggest maps with ridiculous numbers of units (looking at the debug.err, often well over 1500 units and sometimes over 100 citites), and looking at the number of memory leaks, it isn't surprising. I'm sure the 0-day patch will fix it. 

I've got a Core i7 920 w/ a 4850 and 6 gigs of RAM and until the memory maxes out from the leak/garbage collection issue/whatever it is it works perfectly

I get much better performance setting the affinity to one CPU. When I went back and set the game to all 4 cores performance tanked. I would bet you will be just fine with a single core CPU.

I'm running fine (so far) on a single core p4 and one of the best agp cards i could afford.