Questions for those with Performance Issues

[Erik Rutins]

Quick questions for those still having issues, to help us keep better track of who's still having what problems. Please answer all questions in one reply.

1. Do you also own WITP and if so, does WITP behave the same way on your system or only AE?
2. Did you already try setting the processor affinity through the methods described throughout this thread (read the whole thing)? tm.asp?m=2182033 If so, tell us which method you used and whether it improved anything. If you had a problem getting this to work, tell us which methods you tried and what problems you had please.
3. Did you already try using Start -> Run -> DxDiag and using that to disable DirectDraw acceleration? If so, did that help? If you had any problems doing this, please describe the problems.

Finally, describe what you are seeing now as far as performance issues and any additional info you feel is important. Please attach your latest DxDiag to your reply.

Thanks, consolidating info for any folks who are still having performance issues will help us greatly in troubleshooting this.

Regards,

- Erik

[invernomuto]

System: Notebook Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo PA 3553, turion x2, ATI graphic card.
 
1 - No, WITP runs fine both mode, windowed or full screen
2 - No, will try.
3 - In the ATI control panel I set the driver to "optimal performance" (the range was from "Optimal Quality" to "Optimal performance", I was esperiencing problem with AE also with "Balanced" setting) and disabled all graphic effects (AA and other).
This solved the problem for me: now AE runs fine both in windowed mode and in full screen mode. No more performance or graphical issues. Hope this helps.
 
Bye

[fcam1387]

HP Pavilion Dv5 1010tx / Vista Ultimate 64x



1: I own WITP. I recently tried playing it on this system for the first time and the performance was very similar (ie. bad).

2. Setting processor affinity made no difference.

3. I am unable to change directx settings in dxdiag as well as hardware acceleration in the troubleshooting tab in "display settings". I believe this is a Vista or an NVIDIA phenomenon (or both).

4. In terms of performance, the entry menu and scrolling speed are fine. However it is painfully slow (sometimes 2.5 second delays) when I click on in-game menus, cycle through ships / troops / planes etc as well as aspects of the combat resolution phase which are even laggier.

5. When I uninstalled my NVIDIA drivers and resorted back to VGA mode the game performed perfectly. All the delays disappeared. Interestingly, in the dxdiag box, DirectDraw, Direct 3d and AGP Acceleration were all listed as disabled. Therefore, I think the problem (for me at least) is with those areas. Unfortunately, as I stated before, users in my position cannot change those settings.
I tried to simply disable my video card in device manager but when I enter the game it says: "Error: unable to find DX 7 object" - so I don't think this is an option.

Hopefully this problem is resolvable! I was looking forward to playing this game!

[Erik Rutins]

Attached DxDiag for above post. Please post DxDiags as attachments.

[myros]

I had posted earlier about the large amount of lag after ending a turn (lag begins at start of new turn, and was cleared by saving, exiting, reloading).
 
Just wanted to post and say the 'affinity fix' has worked wonders, now running on just the 1 processor and see no lag at all, ran multiple turns to make sure and it seems to be gone. After 3 turns it was just as smooth as a fresh load.
 

[Charbroiled]

Performance issues??? Oh....you mean with AE.....uh, nevermind.

[GK]

Also experiencing performance problems with WitPAE, but not with WitP.
Disabling Direct Draw Acceleration solves the problem (disabling Direct Draw Accel also disables Direct 3D Accel and AGP Accel on my system)
Running WinXP SP2
NVIDIA Graphics Card - GTX 8800, driver should be a few months old
CoreDuo , 4 GB of RAM
DXdiag file enclosed

GK

Performance problems = 1 - 3 seconds lag when scrolling the map with map scrolling delay set to 0. This goes away when disabling Direct Draw Accel

[devoncop]

1) No in dont own WITP
2) Tried setting processor affinity without noticeable improvement
3)Tried to disable direct draw but unable to change this on my setup as it appears hard coded.

performance issues include a 4-5 second delay when options are chosen from the menu and long delay in text becoming visible.
Once into the Midway scenario (AI v AI) battle animations work correctly but unit box descriptions do not load or the text of unit descriptions.Selecting a hex will often initially revert to a hex 2 hexes distant.

Long delay in scrolling or using minimap ....up to 10 seconds.

Hope that helps as the game is unplayable for me at this time with a decent 3gig , quad core and two ATI 8670 graphics card set up.

Cheers
Ian

[apbarog]

1- No problems with WitP. Performance issues with AE.
2- I have a single processor. Dxdiag shows 2 processors, but this is due to multi-threading being on. The single processor is Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.73GHz. 4 plus years old.
3- Did not try settings in Dxdiag. Wanted you to know that there are performance issues on a single processor also.

Issues include clicking on screen items, followed by lag. Some screens lag, partially filling in. Have not determined if this is a progressive issue.

[edit] Lag is not progressive. The problems exist from game start. Clicking on bases, menu choices, using the minimap: all have significant lag of around several seconds. The processor usage is low. Will try Dxdiag settings next.

[edit] Disabled DirectDraw. This also disabled Direct3D automatically. This significantly improved screen performance. It is still a bit more lag than in WitP, but 90% better than before in AE.

[fcam1387]

Erik,

Sorry to breach the one reply policy but I think I've found a patch-up remedy for my particular problem.

I was unable to modify hardware acceleration or change directx settings, however, by using the NVIDIA control panel, I modifed my graphics card settings to the lowest possible levels for WITP AE and noticed a performance increase. While performance isn't perfect it is better than before and the game is now playable.

Therefore, I suspect it is clearly a graphics card problem.

[Mark Weston]

I'm happy disabling DirectDraw to get AE running, but I thought I'd post my info just in case it's useful.

1. I haven't installed WiTP on this PC.
2. AMD 64x2 CPU; I tried setting affinity to CPU 0 or 1 via task manager but it didn't seem to make any difference.
3. Turning off DirectDraw via dxdiag or the Troubleshooting tab in the display properties dialog seems to fix all performance problems. Once AE is loaded I'm able to turn DirectDraw back on again.

The performance problems I've been seeing when I forget to turn off DirectDraw are 1-3 second delays on anything that might cause a redraw of the tactical map. e.g. scrolling (the delay occurs for each hexrow scrolled), selecting a hex, clicking on a unit, clicking on the mini-map etc.

P.S. And the tenth wicket falls! Go England!

[jwilkerson]

Well we think we've got two fixes that address the two problems we've been able to reproduce so far - one fix essentially moves the affinity fix into the code - the other moves the direct draw disablement into the code. Our biggest problem has been finding machines we could reproduce these problems on - but we were finally able to find some. These two fixes seem to address the video issues we've been able to reproduce - which seem to match the issues people are having. We hope to have some kind of hotfix for this soon.

[devoncop]

Great news! Fingers crossed[;)]

Thanks for all the efforts.

Ian

[Haplo_Patryn]

In my case this problem is weird because i'm having this perfomance issue playing as japanese, but not as allied. (?)
 
And some other players have the same problem...it's strange. Why i would have perfomance issues playing as japanese and not when playing allied side?

[medicff]

1) WITP was no problem on system

2) Solved with Ryan's "imagecfg -a 0x1 WITP_Affinity.exe"

3) No did not use dxdiag. I tried using Nvidia display tool and eliminated Antialiasing and anisotropic to off (from application controlled) which helped alot but not as much as 2 above

Thanks for the quick responses to solving this.

Pat

[Erik Rutins]

We should have a beta hotfix available on Monday to hopefully resolve all these reported performance issues. Stay tuned.

[USSAmerica]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

We should have a beta hotfix available on Monday to hopefully resolve all these reported performance issues. Stay tuned.

You can't beat that level of customer service with a big old hairy stick! [:D]

I'm having no problems, but thanks for the dedication to the customer, Erik, Joe, and everyone else!

[Erik Rutins]

Everyone here, please download and install the new v1.080 public beta hotfix and let us know if it resolves the issue for you without any other fixes required. It should, based on our testing.

[Mark Weston]

Yup, it works for me. Nice job.