Low Frame Rate when Many Units on the Screen

Age of Empires III: DE III - Report a Bug
1

Low frame rate was an issue from the day of release.

I have high performance PC with I7-11700KF CPU (16 Cores), 32GB Ram, and RTX 3080 video card.

When playing single player skirmish with a few more AI’s the game always slows down to 5-10 frame rates per second when there are around 200 units on the screen.

I tried to lower the graphic set up to the lowest level but that didn’t help a bit.

This means that the performance issue is with CPU performance.

Comparing AOE3 DE to AOE3 Legacy, AOE3 Legacy performs with no lag even with 300 units on the screen.

How is that possible?
AOE3 Legacy is using only one core.

Doesn’t AOE3 DE using multiple cores?
If it does, then why does it performs so poorly compared to AOE3 Legacy?

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2

its due to one of the new updates.

And its not a CPU problem as far as I can tell though cause CPU usage never really goes above like 20%

3

As I already said, lowering the graphic settings to the lowest level doesn’t help at all.

This means that the game doesn’t use the CPU properly.

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4

There is a deduction that the inefficient AI‘s mass units path finding algorithm causes late game laggy.

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5

The AI‘s mass units path finding algorithm seems to be the same as in AOE3 Legacy.

However, AOE3 Legacy allowed only 50 units to be in the same group.
AOE3 DE expanded that limit to 95.

Since the game is always moving a group of units in formation, that group limit increase would definitely requires more resources which explains the increase in lag.

I never understood the need to move a group of units in formation.
Most of time it doesn’t make sense.

My suggestion is to change it and allow group of units to move individually and not as a group.
The developers can then add a special “Move Group in Formation” key (e.g. Right click + F) similar to “Attack Move”.

Still, even with a 50 group limit AOE3 Legacy performs better with a single CPU core.
How is that?

One thing is obvious, AOE3 DE is not using multiple CPU cores to their max capacity.
Doing so should improve performance.

2 Likes
6

I mean there is an ancient bug surrounding melee defense mode that can actively cause desync and even causes offline games to actually stop with the new unit selection limit, so its definitely not optimised

7

You’re saying this as if it were simple to do, while in reality this would be extremely difficult to achieve. It would probably take years to rework the code in such a way.

Core usage is basically the same between legacy/DE, and even before release the devs openly said game will remain dependent on strong single-core performance. I wouldn’t expect this to change.

8

good question my friend … now we need a aswer devs :smiley:

9

single-core cpu is not enough to handle 200+ units fighting.

Other RTS games utilize multi-core so this is the only way to solve the lag when large armies engage in fighting.

10

Hello everyone, I’d like to ask if the issue still persists after the latest hotfix. If it does, it’d help us out if you sent screenshots and videos of this happening with a FPS counter visible! Thanks in advance! :+1:

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11

Played a couple rounds tonight and it seems to have fixed it for me. Thanks!

12

The issue has been resolved partially by the hot fix.

However, when playing 4 vs 4 via skirmish and there is a large battle of 300+ units, then the frame rate drops down to 10-20 FPS.

That should be easy to re-create via the scenario editor.

1 Like
13

This is definitely a issue still, I have a i5-12600KF and 12GB RTX 3060, running the game at 4K max settings my GPU is only running at about 35%; same with my CPU, it show 8 of my 10 cores parked. This still not optimized for multi core CPUs?

14

No, that’s not going to happen.

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15

Who knows, maybe they gonna rewrite many parts of the engine to support multi core for AOM and then we will also recieve a huge update for that.

/copium
/hopium

1 Like