Is my PC that bad for AoE IV? (Bad performance ingame)

Hello! Mi nickname is Fit Conquistador, nice to meet you on the forums, first time.

I have a PC that I think it should run the game better. The game puts the graphic options at mid-low. And even then the game camera movement is not smooth. At high is unplayable. The setup is this:

  • Windows 10 64 bits
  • CPU: Intel Core i7 7700 @3.6 GHz
  • RAM: 32 GB 1066 MHz
  • Motherboard: Gygabyte H170M-D3H-CF
  • Nvidia GTX 960 4095MB

I remind you the settings for AoE IV via Steam screenshot:

Is this enough to run it smoothly and I have an external problem? Or is it not enough?

If not, what would be the main improvements here to do to have it smoothly on high?

Thanks a lot!

i HAVE the same problem…

with a gtx 1660
and ryzen 5 3600x

@ImpactedDaisy43 GPU limited. Wait for patches or driver updates. I rather have a rock solid 60 fps on this game if I had to compromise something it would be graphics quality for sure. Although this changes for the campaigns.

Right now the game is suffering some huge performance dips when moving the camera around. Sadly not good time to buy a new GPU.

@iAmLoOkTom the GTX 1660 is supposed to do a lot better, are you sure not having another issues?

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Your CPU is below recommended spec (the 7700K is 4-core, not 6-core), your GPU is also below recommended spec (the 970 is a lot better than the 960), and your RAM, while 32GB, is really slow. I think 1066MHz is the baseline for DDR3?

So sure, you should be able to run the game. But “mid-low” sounds right for your hardware.

There is a known issue with panning the camera, so yeah, hopefully something gets done about that. But everything else seems as-expected for the hardware you have.

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i did a lot of test
another games run fine.
i did a lot of changes and now I can play with medium low
but if u think about that is still bad!
i really want a new update to solve that

Game seems mostly using heavily one core only, dunno whats with those recommended specs, they seem kinda off

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Im using an i7 3770k. Your cpu is fine. Your gpu is the limiting factor here. Im using a titan x (900 series) and it really pushes this card at 1440p with graphics on max settings. Im getting about 70fps

There is an article being passed around that talks about the game relying overly on a certain number of threads. It’s being a bit misinterpreted, heh. Multicore architecture !== multithreading, though obviously there can be overlap.

Regardless, the game says it needs 6 cores for recommended. Doesn’t mean you can’t make up for it with other hardware, but this isn’t happening for the OP either with their 960.

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Digital Foundry recently made a technical review on the game where they mention some oddities in how the game utilizes the CPU amongst other things: Age of Empires 4 DF Tech Review: A Great Game With Technical Issues To Address - YouTube

Check it out! :]

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Corecount doesn’t matter since the game only uses one single thread for now.

GPU doesn’t matter that much since RTSs are CPU driven.
960 should be enough to play the game on low easily.

The RAM is not slow… It’s DDR4 not just R4 meaning he has 2133MHz logically not physically.
2 instructions per clock…

@ImpactDaisy43
Otherwise everyone was wroting about the issue already.
Bad optimization and problems in FPS when you pan the camera.

Any more specific info of how bad these issues are?
Can’t imagine it’s much worse than just a frame inconsistency on scrolling.

  1. The game uses more than one thread.
  2. You can’t generalise about what RTS’ bottleneck on. Most popular RTS games are pretty old now - from a time when most games were CPU-driven. The fact is the recommended specs list a 960.

That said, absolutely the player should be able to play the game on low. But that’s what they’re complaining about - that the game is being set to “mid-low” and slows down a lot when set to high (graphics). My point is they’re not going to get better performance on that hardware - that’s all (barring the known issue a lot of people are having with panning).

Could be. Most software correctly reports DDR speed though, which is why I assumed it was literally baseline DDR3.

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No it doesn’t.
It’s completely dependend on one big priority core, meaning even if the loads try to get shared on others, they are all waiting for the first core to do a certain task first.

I can absolutely generalize that, cause RTSs are alot of models, ragdoll and physics workload.
Even modern RTS such as SC2 and CoH2, Iron Harvest, are all CPU dependend cause you have alot of models on the screen at the same time (big shots/top down view) and with it alot of animations and positions and physics for each individual one to drawcall in an absolutely terrible pipeline utilization in this case here. (Dx12 is already there, use its’ pipelining properly).
That’s CPU workload and this is why RTS games are naturally CPU limited.

It’s not cause these games are “old”.
It has a harder workload for the cpu than a low vision/low model games such as shooters in which they rather put the workload on visual effects in close ups (CoD/TimbRaider/FarCry).
Doesn’t mean that from time to time a title can’t be CPU intensive, but due to the type of the workload it’s overall less CPU intensive in nature.

It could not be, it is.
2133 ddr4 ram exists, 1066 is no ram spec by any standard except for really really really old laptop or ddr2/3 merging standards on old phenom platforms e.g.
I assume he used CPU-Z which does read it in DR.
Beside windows task manager I don’t know of any “most” tools to read out RAM specs.

Sure that’s GPU stuff mostly.
My whole point beeing is that there is still alot of optimization to be done, so he shouldn’t feel like he’s the only one with issues.
I’ve got a 3060ti and a 3900x and my fps tanks hard to on camera paning as well.

That’s not how it works, no.

I’d rather not get into the rest of it because it’s not really relevant to the OP’s problems. Like you said, the camera panning issue is probably what they’re seeing. But their hardware is definitely also a factor.

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