[VC] Battle Size vs Optimization

[Drogowit]

Hello folks. Imho my machine is capable to sustain such a game. In Native, and some mods like 1257 AD I am able to get a battle up to 800 men without larger issues. But in VC? I tried lowering graphics and stuff, and still +100 people give me terrible headache. Game is unplayable then. Any tips what to do?

12gb ram, gtx860m, i7, w8, just in case game on SSD.

[Sohei]

Try disabling blood and gore, setting corpses at 0 and ragdolls at 1, disabling particles, and disabling shadows.

[Tuidjy]

The problem is that VC has a lot more varied, high quality textures than many other mods. For example, my old XP laptop runs Gekokujo at 1000 battle size with full textures, but for full size battles in Viking Conquest, I set the textures to 10%. Even then, sometimes I get the dreaded two-frame dance when I approach an enemy line made up of too many different troops.

[Sohei]

Having lots of VRAM seems to help. If you are using a chip that shares with system RAM or you have just a modest amount of VRAM and it has to go to RAM or disk anyways then performance will suffer. Turning down textures only helps so much because while they don't have to be rendered at full quality they still may need to be loaded into memory at full file size. Caching on an SSD or RAM is much faster than a HDD but still much slower than VRAM.

Some other things you can do is turn off music in the configure menu before loading and enable load textures on demand. This will reduce the memory footprint to some degree.

[Tuidjy]

Oh, yeah. At home, I have 400 on 1500 battles in one round, full detail, no slowdown. VRAM is king. But on the laptop I take on location, I was too cheap to get a decent mobile card.

[Very serious person]

Sorry for reviving this thread it's just that I have the same issue except I'm running VC on a GTX950M with 2GB of VRAM. I don't think 2GB of VRAM is a lot, however, I used one of those benchmarking programmes and found that the game wasn't using my GPU to its full capacity.

I made a custom battle with 30 men on each side and the game ran at 60 FPS with CPU usage oscilating between 15-20% and GPU usage using up 40-50% sometimes going to 70 for a second

When I did the same thing for a battle with 200 men on each side the FPS dropped to 25-30 FPS but the game's usage of CPU did never go up 25% and GPU usage values stayed the same as when I did the battle with 60 men

Could this mean that game is not built to use the resources you actually have?

[Tuidjy]

All you established is that your bottleneck is not the CPU.

The next step is to find where the bottleneck actually is.

For example, you can use the performance manager to see whether your harddrive is being used during the battle. If that is the case, it means that your PC is loading textures, i.e. the VRAM is your bottleneck. So reduce the texture fidelity, and see whether it affects the frame rate.

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By the way, do you differentiate between 25% CPU utilization and 100% utilization on one of the four cores of a mutli-core processor?

If you have Warband in single thread mode, it can only fully utilize one core, no matter how many you have. Some of the work (swapping, disk operations, etc.) can be offloaded to another core by the OS, but that's minor.

[Very serious person]

Originally posted by Tuidjy:

All you established is that your bottleneck is not the CPU.

The next step is to find where the bottleneck actually is.

For example, you can use the performance manager to see whether your harddrive is being used during the battle. If that is the case, it means that your PC is loading textures, i.e. the VRAM is your bottleneck. So reduce the texture fidelity, and see whether it affects the frame rate.

-------

By the way, do you differentiate between 25% CPU utilization and 100% utilization on one of the four cores of a mutli-core processor?

If you have Warband in single thread mode, it can only fully utilize one core, no matter how many you have. Some of the work (swapping, disk operations, etc.) can be offloaded to another core by the OS, but that's minor.

I'm using MSI afterburner and I can't find anything about HDD in the display options.

Regarding the CPU usage I have a lot of cores and the MSI afterburner will show values like CPU1-CPU8 usage for them to be displayed on screen there's also a CPU value without any number which I assume is the global usage.

I did the same again and saw all 8 of those values change though some reached 90% in ocassions whilst others ranged from 0-10 %

I don't know how to check VRAM usage, according to some tutorials the option called Memory usage is VRAM but I think that's more likely RAM since my graphics card only has 2 GB worth of VRAM and my laptop has 16GB of RAM. The display shows that I'm using 6 GB of memory which wouldn't be possible if it was referring to the video card.


Edit: I found the option to display the memory usage of my GPU and it oscilates between 600-800 MB.