Game Version:
- Build: 36906
- Platform: Steam
- Operating System: Windows 10
Issue:
Game has a choppy framerate and seems sluggish, even in “Normal” game speed. (Possibly due to dual-monitor test?) When I move villagers, their animation is choppy and healthbars are choppy/flickery. It’s never been like this before. I even look at past video captures I made and it has always been buttery smooth. My vid card, CPU, and RAM are more than enough.
- Benchmark test today got 1048.6, which is quite low for me. On Jan 14th and Feb 29th (two separate occasions a month apart) I got 1286.2 each time.
I feel like this first started happening when I tried enabling dual monitor gameplay for the first time on Monday using [SHIFT] + [ALT] + [ENTER]. It got very choppy during that test, and I feel it’s been choppy ever since, even though I promptly disabled it after that one test. The choppiness with single monitor isn’t as choppy as it was with dual-monitor, but is still quite noticeable, atypical, and makes the game a lot less fun to play. (I don’t even know why it got choppy with dual monitors in the first place.)
- Maybe it’s just a coincidence that I noticed it being choppy after the test? If it was choppy before that, maybe I didn’t realize because I played a string of games in ‘Fast’ mode before, when I always play “Normal” speed, and thought any choppiness was a result of that. (I remember having a fleeting though about that, but can’t remember if that was before or after the dual-screen test.) So, it is quite possible the patch has caused the issue.
Navigating menus is also noticeably slower and laggy now. Even going from one tab in the Options menu to another can result in a slight delay, and even a flicker of a black screen between tab clicks sometimes.
I wonder if trying the dual monitors test screwed things up? I even see weird bars across top and bottom of main menu now, too, which I feel is related; as I don’t recall the menu ever looking like this:
Reproduction Steps:
Not sure how to reproduce the problem, but if it’s related to dual monitors, you can try what I tried…
- I normally play on my 1920 x 1200 monitor with the setting as 1920 x 1200 in-game… so play games and get a feel for what it’s normal performance/framerate is like while on this single monitor
- Have on-hand a 1920 x 1200 monitor and a 1920 x 1080 monitor
- In Windows Display Settings, change 1920 x 1200 monitor resolution to 1920 x 1080 instead (I’m pretty sure I had to do this step so the game would see I had two monitors with same resolution)
- Set in-game resolution to 1920 x 1080
- Start a game
- Enter dual screen mode by hitting [SHIFT] + [ALT] + [ENTER] (you may need to specify “Windowed” mode in game options first?)
- Notice the game is immediately laggy, hopefully
- Quit the game
- Get out of dual-screen mode (i.e,. hit [SHIFT] + [ALT] + [ENTER] again)
- Reset your Windows Display Settings and in-game resolution back to what they were for your 1920 x 1200 monitor; and make sure you’re in full-screen mode again
- Play another game and see if it is laggier than normal on your single-screen 1920 x 1200 typical setup
It should be showing my RTX 2070 here on the Display tab of ‘dxdiag’, not Intel UHD Graphics 630. I did try to update the Intel CPU driver the other day; not sure why it would take over my Display device 
I guess around the same time as the AoE issues, though, too, I changed my BIOS to enable an HDMI port on the back of my PC. (Which triggered Intel to want to update my driver.) Perhaps that HDMI port doesn’t pump out the RTX 2070 juice, but instead uses my motherboard/CPU for its output, which would be lame. Its location is higher up on the back of my PC than my vid card; but I figured it would still connect to the graphics card somehow. Perhaps not.
