Setting a few things straight regarding performance (on my side)

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.

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Have played about with settings too.

CPU: i7-8700K (4.9GHz all core OC)
GPU: GTX 1080 8GB
RAM: 16GB 4133MHz
Monitor 4096x2160 60Hz

Running the benchmark has my system using 9GB of RAM, with steam and windows defender running in the background. This stays the same regardless of resolution/quality settings/zoom etc… One CPU core is pegged at 100%, GPU stays at about 60% utilisation. In my case the CPU is the limiting factor - it is the only part of my system at 100%

WIth the UHD DLC all my RAM is used as well as huge amounts of pagefile and this affects loading time as well as frame time. the single core that is loaded also stops running at 100% utilisation. I’m looking at upgrading to 32GB RAM which will help with UHD, but it is not an urgent thing for me at least.

I know the minimum specs state 4GB RAM, but i just don’t see it working. 8GB in my case will still lead to frequent pagefile access, maybe killing performance in the benchmark.

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I play AoE DE on my Lenovo T430, i5 3230m, 6gb RAM, without a dedicated video card, and it runs great, practically smoothly. This new release (AoE2 DE) I think uses the same graphic engine as the previous release (AoE DE) barely run corretly, very lagy :frowning_face: Even on my father’s PC that has a slightly better processor than mine (i7 3770, 8GB RAM and dedicated 1GB video), it looks so bad. Think of the poor too :frowning_face:

Actually, I’m really impressed with the peformance after release. Now all they need to do is sort out the server issues and then all that’s left is matchmaking improvements and balance changes in the future!

Usually a high-end CPU has a lower per-core perfomance. In some cases it is possible to use faster individual cores in modern CPUs.
BUT AGAIN! PROBLEM WITH A SINGLETHREADING AND LAZINESS OF DEVS. Its should not a be problem of a players!

An update as I tested on my in what should be my somewhat better PC:

-CPU: Xeon X5675 overclocked to 4.0Ghz baseclock
-GPU: GTX 1070
-RAM: 14GB of RAM, which I believe due the unrecommended configuration (3x2GB triple channel plus a single stick of 8GB RAM) is running in single channel 1800Mhz.

It runs the Joanna campaign roughly the same, between 80-100FPS. It scored lower on the benchmark though, with also roughly 4 frames lower FPS.

What I found strange is that it used more RAM (10+ GB) than my other PC with 8GB has. Also CPU single core performance wasn’t really stressed at all. Maybe a bottleneck posed itself on the RAM speed, which is a bit lower.

However, this PC was infact able to run the UHD package, although at low 15-18FPS in the benchmark and weirdly enough no performance drop in the Joanna campaign.

@anon97374290 Single thread performance has a lot do with the hampering on overall performance, but it is far from the whole story. Again, my Xeon X5675 has better single core performance due it being overclocked that high to the point it surpassed the more recent i5-6500 in that department with a healthy margin. Yet it scored less well despite also having a lot more RAM at its disposal.

It feels like the flow of data from cpu to ram to gpu can cause a bottleneck.

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