GPU no, CPU yes, believe it or not even very recent cpus drop under 60 with enough units on screen, to give a comparison point, that R5 3550H is a quad core chip with SMT, so not an 8 core (not that core count matters in aoe2) about equal to like 2012 2013 intel cpus in single core speed (the one that actually matters for aoe2 and most other games), i can assure you that GPU runs at 30% capacity at best with aoe2 even in best case scenario with that CPU, and as @FloosWorld pointed out the low number on the benchmark shouldāve been a clear indicator of the CPU not being able to handle 6 or 8 player team games well, especially if anything is open in the background, i think it could be clarified by devs that the score you get is basically a single core CPU benchmark
as for how i know more recentish chips like to drop under 60 with extreme load, iām using a laptop myself, but far more recent one with i7 12650H 16GB DDR4 and an RTX 3070ti laptop variant, the cpuās IPC being very close to latest and greatest pretty much carries aoe games, if you think aoe2 performs poorly on your system, try aoe3 DE with a team game so you can appreciate how its impressive it handles this at all given its ancient by current standards in terms of architecture
This crash, freeze, lag, stutter, eat 15-20 gb of ram and is unplayable in online match complaings are well known here for this game !!
If you read posts compalining, it doesnt matter what the computer the person has or the set ups. it just happens.
There is no fix to it ! insider and ātechā people will come up with āit is your GPU/ CPUā ā¦ āit is your systemāā¦ āit is your internetā but they will not come up with a fix to it.
If the fix is to get a tower ( because game doesnt work in laptops either), avoid AMD produtsā¦ cabled internetā¦ AI GPU/CPU style they should come up with a statement and stop ignoring customers!
In my view I think company and developers invested too much resources and personal to created AOE3/4 and they forgot about this version. Now they have a gamne that doesnt work here and the other that FAILED the market.
so the fix for this issue is just to throw away this laptop! buy a tower with the last generation GPU/CPU so I can play 1x1 with 200 pop online with friends?
Because if we try to play online with teams 4x4 with 400 player like we used to for the past 20 years. it will lag at some point for me or some other players will lag or freeze.
Thatsā¦ not quite true lol
actually decided to run some tests with 8 AI players on a ludicris map size with 500 pop, results were about what iād expect (12 fps at worst point with occasional freeze), thing is, no hardware will fix this, youād need 8x current single thread cpu performance (using my i7 12650H as reference here, roughly desktop i5 12600) to run this smoothly, and rewriting aoe2 into multithreading would probably screw with the gameās atm very stable inner workings so not really an option
I seem to remember one of the cool features about AoE2:DE at launch was that other playersā slow computers wouldnāt affect your gameplay experience. This was an enhancement to fix past latency issues that were experienced in CE and HD. Am I misremembering?
Where is that info published? Itās certainly not in the game anywhere Iāve seen. Is there an official chart from the devs somewhere? If not, there should be.
The benchmark score has always been some random number that means nothing to the average user. In the game, it is just says whether you can play multiplayer or not. A litmus test, in other words. There is nothing saying whether the score is āhighā, ālowā, āaverageāā¦ nothing saying āif you have 900, donāt play w/ population over 200 or against more than 1 enemyā, or āif your score is 1300, the sky is the limit.ā
Having some official chart on what the score translates to would be great, so we can adjust our gameplay experience, accordingly, and to help avoid out-of-syncs depending on what the lowest score is in a group of players.
Back in the day, we didnāt even know what the top score you could get was. Does anyone really know 4-5 years later? In 2020, there were anecdotal rumors of someone (AlexM) got a 1600 score, which then someone claimed was a lie and that 1400 was the top score. Iād assume the devs know, so a published official chart or would be great
youāre not misremembering, they did thankfully get rid of peer to peer issues of the old system
as for this, i havenāt really seen any system reach 1300 yet of all examples over the years, idk what the actual cap would be as a result, in fact iād argue there is no cap, just that you can only really do so much with 1 cpu core doing all the work
also i should mention the ludicris map game took 15 gigs of ram at all times
True, I wish it would use multi-threading, if itās not doing that. Ahh, didnāt know that about Ludicrous, yikes
I wonder, if you can play single-player skirmish games with big maps and multiple enemies no problem, why does playing multiplayer games with friends all the sudden have issues ā if you both have really good internet connections.
I criticised your use of the word highend in a situation where itās just wrong and I criticised the way you communicate your issues.
The fact that the game doesnāt perform that well in 4v4 despite the hardware meeting recommended specs means that either the recommended specs are misleading and/or that the game should be more optimised.
But the game is not unplayable online on a highend computer.
This is not a shouting match. Just adding more exclamation marks doesnāt make you right.
if weāre honest recommended ram should be 16 gigs based on ludicrous test itself, thats a lot of memory use, as for why i say its the cpu, gpu never crossed 40% in 2 hours of that match running, had all hardware monitoring on to see what was happening
specifically the msi afterburner overlay with all the relevant info
and that 40% is running the game at 4K resolution, so iām hitting the gpu harder than most people would and still canāt saturate it
It is ingame. If your score is below 1k, the game says something like āYou can now play ranked 1v1 gamesā or similar.
Oh, nice! Iād still like an official reference chart in the game, or at the very least at the official website. This way, I can ask friends what score they got and adjust our lobby however is necessary to have a smooth game.
As it stands, since Iāve always (thankfully) had a fairly high score, I didnāt even know that messaging existed for lower scores, and didnāt know the matches I set up in the lobby could be superseding their PC capabilities.
Iām the one who always creates the lobby. Seems like I should be the one āin the knowā on everyoneās scores. In fact, the lobby screen should probably show me everyoneās scores, too ā or at least tell me what the lowest score is (with a link to the official capabilities reference chart Iām asking for)
One other thought in all this is that Iāve often thought my PC was maybe taking on most of the weight of the computations involved in our MP gamesā¦ in which case my high benchmark score could accommodate a lot and make up for any shortcomings in teammate PCs. As time goes on and this thread happens, though, Iām guessing thatās not how it works. My guess is that if I make a 3v3 Large map, each individual PC playing better be able to handle that on their own. (I.e., My PC doesnāt take the brunt or any disproportional share of the necessary processing, even though Iām creating the lobby/hosting the game.)
pretty much spot on after doing my own observations
Thanks for corroborating, KG19991380. I maybe should have asked this sooner in the forums (years ago) so we could see if devs could officially clarify for us. Itās been a mystery all along, so the best we can do is our own testing. Or I could have tried Google searches, but I just prefer to live here in this official forum bubble, I guess
just for anyone still thinking aoe2 isnāt performing well, hereās what poor performance actually looks like, no disrespect to the game in question, its just a cold hard truth that shouldnāt be ignored
when this is how aoe2 runs, then the complaining should start
Iāve probably seen 16 FPS in AoE2:DE when those weird out-of-sync lags start happening. Itās not prettyā¦and it usually never recovers to solid framerate again until it kicks us and we have to re-launch the saved out-of-sync file
I actually found the corresponding strings in the gameās language files:
- IDS_MATCHMAKING_BENCHMARK_NOTIFY_NOT_RUN ā* To participate in ranked matchmaking, you need to pass the benchmark with a score of %.0lf points for 1v1 matches, or %.0lf points for other match types.ā
- IDS_MATCHMAKING_BENCHMARK_NOTIFY_NOT_MET ā* Your current performance score of %.0lf points restricts you from all ranked matches.ā
- IDS_MATCHMAKING_BENCHMARK_NOTIFY_1V1_ONLY ā* Your current performance score of %.0lf points restricts you to 1v1 matches.ā
%.0lf is the placeholder used for the actual value the game will show you.
This game has %.0lf clarity with its benchmark scoring system 