Tips to improve performance

[XLightningStormL]

1. Disable advanced effects (FXAA, SSAO, Bloom, Water Refraction + Reflection) optionally Footprints, and Dynamic Lights aswell.
2. Change to a lower resolution, typically 1920x1080 lags with low-medium power systems.
3. The Ace in The Hole: Go to your AoM Steam installation folder then Startup, then open Desync Tracking, look for "DesyncTrackingEnabled=1" and change the 1 to 0. The Desync Tracker checks every 1 second in order to record Desyncs, so by disabling it, you are deactivating a costantly running feature, this may or may not affect MP.
4. For best results, installing the Ensemble Studios terrain set may also improve performance, due to the removal of bump, and brightmaps, thus using less render time.

Have Fun!

[Callistonian]

Just came accross a comment from Lycarous in 2014 (also wanted to bump this thread).

1. Drop screen resolution. Dropping from 1920x1080 down to 1280x720 increased FPS by 43%. This can be dropped further but 720 should be lowest acceptable quality.

2. Drop shadow level from 5 (default) to 4. Increased FPS 9%

3. Drop shadow level from 4 to 3. Increased FPS a further 15%

4. Disable water reflection. Increased FPS 11%

5. Disable FXAA. Increased FPS 8%

6. Drop shadow level from 3 to 2. Increased FPS 5%

7. Disable SSAO. Another ~5%

8. Drop shadow level from 2 to 1

Apparently this is what Skybox told beta testers for EE. From what I can tell, SSAO (which is supposed to put shadows in corners and would have made EE look amazing) actually doesn't do anything but add these little confetti artifacts to all surfaces when you zoom in really far. So dissabling it is an easy 5% fps increase.

I have found that on my machine, dissabling water refraction has by far the greatest impact on fps. I mean it's night and day.

[[KeeN] Flame]

just disable all the graphic options

[Android]

Really the only thing that helps is a new graphics card... I bought a GTX 1060 3GB and it's running smoothly at last. Anything in the EUR 150-200 league should do I guess.

[Az]

still lagging (ONLINE MULTIPLAYER)

[123456789]

Originally posted by Android:

Really the only thing that helps is a new graphics card... I bought a GTX 1060 3GB and it's running smoothly at last. Anything in the EUR 150-200 league should do I guess.

3gb for 12 year old game, means that game has bad codding.

[Callistonian]

This video from Nakamura may be useful if you have a high-end PC but can't run the game due to fps issues. Apparently, the V-sync in EE doesn't work (bad coding indeed).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiXykXPnPJ8