Client performance / frame rate
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 2:28 am
A few people have posted with machine specs and saying the client runs really slowly. In 0.9.0 you can now tick an option on the Options screen to display the frame rate, so we can now get decent measurable speeds. So thought it would be interesting for folks to check what frame rate they get and post the results and their machine specs here.
After creating a game and going into the map screen, hit Patrol for both your starting units. The greying out of the map to show where units can/cannot move slows the client down somewhat so you want to take measurements without this. Simiarly, pick a spell to research or set your research slider on the Magic screen to zero, to get rid of the book icon from the next turn button. Then scroll around the map and see what frame rates you get. Frame rate can vary slightly depending what portion of the map you're looking at (depending on how many mines/cities/units you can currently see).
What I got on my 3 PCs was:
Model: Clevo D470W
CPU: 3.06 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with hyper-threading
Motherboard: N/A (laptop)
Graphics: 64 MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9000
RAM: 1 GB
Desktop resolution: 1920 x 1200 x 32 bit
Operating system: Windows XP 32 bit
MoM IME client frame rate with 0.9.0: 33-37 fps (drops to 30-35 fps if I switch to 16 bit colours)
Model: Custom built
CPU: 1.8 GHz AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
Graphics: 512 MB NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX Overclocked
RAM: 768 MB
Desktop resolution: 1920 x 1200 x 32 bit
Operating system: Windows 2000 32 bit (now moved to Windows XP 64 bit - frame rate is exactly the same whether I run in a 32 bit O/S or run in WoW64 in a 64 bit O/S)
MoM IME client frame rate with 0.9.0: 27-30 fps (drops to 24-27 fps if I switch to 16 bit colours)
Model: Dell Dimension 8100
CPU: 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4
Motherboard: Whatever it came with :) The motherboard isn't listed on the spec sheet
Graphics: 64 MB NVidia GeForce 2 Ultra
RAM: 512 MB
Desktop resolution: 1152 x 864 x 32 bit
Operating system: Windows XP 32 bit
MoM IME client frame rate with 0.9.0: 15-17 fps
So at least from my own tests, it looks very much like the speed is more to do with what speed your CPU is than how good your graphics card is. It'll be interesting to see what other people report.
Edit: Turning map smoothing on/off doesn't affect the frame rate since it still has just as much to draw. I didn't put the option there for folks with low frame rates, I put it there a) to help me debug what was going on when the map smoothing wasn't working right, and b) because its interesting and sometimes gives me ideas to see the map how the server sees it.
Implode.
After creating a game and going into the map screen, hit Patrol for both your starting units. The greying out of the map to show where units can/cannot move slows the client down somewhat so you want to take measurements without this. Simiarly, pick a spell to research or set your research slider on the Magic screen to zero, to get rid of the book icon from the next turn button. Then scroll around the map and see what frame rates you get. Frame rate can vary slightly depending what portion of the map you're looking at (depending on how many mines/cities/units you can currently see).
What I got on my 3 PCs was:
Model: Clevo D470W
CPU: 3.06 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with hyper-threading
Motherboard: N/A (laptop)
Graphics: 64 MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9000
RAM: 1 GB
Desktop resolution: 1920 x 1200 x 32 bit
Operating system: Windows XP 32 bit
MoM IME client frame rate with 0.9.0: 33-37 fps (drops to 30-35 fps if I switch to 16 bit colours)
Model: Custom built
CPU: 1.8 GHz AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
Graphics: 512 MB NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX Overclocked
RAM: 768 MB
Desktop resolution: 1920 x 1200 x 32 bit
Operating system: Windows 2000 32 bit (now moved to Windows XP 64 bit - frame rate is exactly the same whether I run in a 32 bit O/S or run in WoW64 in a 64 bit O/S)
MoM IME client frame rate with 0.9.0: 27-30 fps (drops to 24-27 fps if I switch to 16 bit colours)
Model: Dell Dimension 8100
CPU: 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4
Motherboard: Whatever it came with :) The motherboard isn't listed on the spec sheet
Graphics: 64 MB NVidia GeForce 2 Ultra
RAM: 512 MB
Desktop resolution: 1152 x 864 x 32 bit
Operating system: Windows XP 32 bit
MoM IME client frame rate with 0.9.0: 15-17 fps
So at least from my own tests, it looks very much like the speed is more to do with what speed your CPU is than how good your graphics card is. It'll be interesting to see what other people report.
Edit: Turning map smoothing on/off doesn't affect the frame rate since it still has just as much to draw. I didn't put the option there for folks with low frame rates, I put it there a) to help me debug what was going on when the map smoothing wasn't working right, and b) because its interesting and sometimes gives me ideas to see the map how the server sees it.
Implode.