Not my call, but as MOOtant said, all the settings that supposedly make DX8 as good as it is are easily disabled in DX9. But in my opinion, and possibly MOOtant's too (although you never can tell), one single thing is hammering FPS down, that's why I asked you to try all the settings. All you need to do is find the one destroying FPS, and then we'll fix it.
It doesn't seem to be the maps, since they've been around for aeons and the situation has gotten worse at some point. It's not entirely particles because particles are only rendering onscreen about 20% of the time and they're oonly covering a large section of the screen maybe 5% of the time, nowhere near enough to cause continous low FPS.
My point being that it's not a machine specific problem. For me it occurs when there are more than say 5 tanks fighting. It kicks in as soon as the part of the map those tanks are on starts to get modeled (can't remember technical name), even if they are still round a corner out of my actual field of view. I assume it's a particles thing as it's tanks fighting rather than just tanks that cause it... oh and it's particularly bad with nuke tanks.
What you tried to say was "disabling 90% of fancy renderer features disables one that was eating your FPS". That's why we had these Steam tests with sv_cheats on to see where game spends time (CPU/GPU). KMCorpse: I assume that your problem is GPU problem (something costly being rendered). Try this: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Showbudget. It's a cheat so you might have to record a demo and use if when replaying it with sv_cheats 1. If assumption is correct then performance problem will still be there when replaying.
I said at least! I was only 6 or 7 when it came out! @thread It didn't drop that low unless I had 20+ vehicles on the screen. And it hasn't dropped since 2.30, yay for devs!
I don't have anything empirical to add, but as a frequent flyer of the 9fps airline (prior to getting this laptop at christmas), I have to say I think it is happening because of one specific thing... and it feels more like some kind of leak than anything intentional. I don't know really why it doesn't gel with older systems - it somehow goes much more beyond performance and into the realms of bugs or bad interfacing somewhere. Perhaps something that would be negligible to newer dual core+ cpu architechture, is something quite intensive on older single-cores. Dunno..though i'll get around to testing it one of these days.
I still haven't fixed memory leaks on the client so it might be related (low chance but leaks are kind of unpredictable). We leak like every single time event(KeyValues) is sent to GUI/HUD.
So I guess one of the fance rendering features in Direct X destorys everyones FPS randomly without a reason. Oh and I experienced another bizarre effect yesterday. My game Sound almost freezed after like 2 hours of playing. It started to stutter and after 5 Minutes of stuttering sound and voicechat my game startet to stutter to everytime the sound did it. Memory leak?
It's happened to me, but only on 32v32 rainbowroad. I'm fairly sure every sound channel got used up by all the tank fire going on and empires just gave up.
why not tell empires to not bother with all the sounds? theres gotta be a way to reduce the static noise we all love so much
