Alright, so I have been critical about the performance quite a few people were experiencing. I got the impression performance remained the same as it was during the final days of beta testing.
And for many people that is still true. I decided based on that to hold out on purchasing the game. However, I also felt instead of just complaining, I should try to help out with the performance. So I did purchase the game today.
The result? My framerate doubled compared to the beta. I am getting anywhere between 80-100 FPS in the (French) campaign right now. The benchmark also increased to a 30 FPS on average (1130 points). Knowing the benchmark is a bit of a worse case scenario, I think that is acceptable. This is done on 1080p ultra settings; I have not yet had the chance to try out the UHD package. I will update the post once I was able to.
I have to put some context to those numbers, as the performance is still rather confusing. To do that, let me pull up my specs on this PC:
-CPU: i5-6500 (3.2ghz normal/ 3.6ghz turbo)
-GPU: GTX 1060 6GB
-8GB DDR4 2400Mhz, but the motherboard only allows for 2133Mhz. I am planning on doubling the amount of RAM btw.
So these specs are rather average compared to many who have much lower FPS, including another PC of mine which has a better CPU, GPU and more RAM (but maybe crucially at a lower speed). I will benchmark that other PC as well once I am able to.
I’ll still be critical about the game for those who have low performance for their hardware. It should not be happening that systems way better than mine have worse performance. Given I have truth to be told very acceptable performance, atleast in the campaign and I personally don’t care about online play, there is certainly the potential for this game to run butter smooth for anyone and probably actually do that under the official spec requirements.
I also wish to extend a helping hand to the developers. Anything I can do to help that results others are being helped, will be done gladly and with a smile. I think you developed a fantastic game, not only in 1999, but also now 2019. It speaks volumes that a 20 year old game is still having a very thriving community.
This topic will be further updated according to information gathered.
EDIT: The game is difficult to play with UHD turned on. There are extensive load times involved. However, once a save game is loaded, it suprisingly gives the exact same FPS. It could not however handle the benchmark test. I think this has to do with a very steep ram requirement, and the fact I am playing the game off a HDD.