I Wish This Game Ran Better Than It Does

[Fredrocker]

Thanks for the info Erik

[Richie61]

Fredrocker,

Your 2GB of onbaord RAM isn't a lot now a days. I don't know which operating system you have:

XP and Win 7: Supports 4GB (sees 3.25 GB)
Win7 64 bits: Supports 128GB

My old XP machine with a really good video card and 4 GB of RAM and single core is a dog. But my multi core Win 7 64 GB of RAM is faster.

[Fredrocker]

ORIGINAL: Richie61

Fredrocker,

Your 2GB of onbaord RAM isn't a lot now a days. I don't know which operating system you have:

XP and Win 7: Supports 4GB (sees 3.25 GB)
Win7 64 bits: Supports 128GB

My old XP machine with a really good video card and 4 GB of RAM and single core is a dog. But my multi core Win 7 64 GB of RAM is faster.

I really wasn't clear I have 16GB of System RAM and 2GB of RAM on the GTX 560 ti card.

[erichswafford]

Crysis 2 bores the crap out of me, but boy it sure is pretty. Point taken! And yes, this game is seriously threaded. There's a fairly huge difference between the dual and quadcores thus far. It runs great on my quadcore desktops (i5-750, i7-920, i7-2600k) and not as well on my laptop (i5-460m). Like most games, it doesn't benefit from Hyperthreading.

My instincts tell me, however, that something is a little screwy.

I wonder if they're really using the GPU at all? I mean, I can run 8x super-sampling on a measly HD5650 and still not break 50% GPU utilization? That's rather extreme.

I haven't seen anything that CPU dependent (as far as games go) since maybe 1996.

Still, THE GAME ROCKS. That's the take-home for you fence-sitters.

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Just FYI, while Panzer Command is more CPU than GPU-bound in general, it does vary based on your combination of hardware and on what settings you use. A minimum level of GPU is required to avoid being GPU-bound. As long as you have a reasonable GPU, the game is mostly CPU-bound, but it likes multiple cores. The more you have, the happier it will be.

Continuing to optimize the game engine where we can is part of the plan, but comparing us to major AAA graphics engines is like comparing a nice Cessna and a F-22. Totally different magnitudes of budget and development resources. With that said, there are things that we can optimize, but the main focus for optimizations will be at release points rather than in updates.

Regards,

- Erik

[erichswafford]

Load times for me are excellent, but I'm using a Sandforce-based 120gb SSD. SSD's do an amazing job with loading lots of small files (zero seek time). If you really want to see an extreme example, try loading Hearts of Iron III (with it's 10K+ little parameter files) on a regular HDD. It can take 5 minutes. My SSD does it in 15 seconds.

Get an SSD. I recently went back to a HDD-based system, and I couldn't even stand it. With the SSD, you'll soon stop noticing the speedup. But the minute you go back to a HDD, you'll want to tear your hair out.

You're welcome on the analysis. But remember - with a WEGO wargame, what you really want is great AI (since it's handling your units as well during the execution phase). And PCO has that. It's also one of the very few games that really uses 4 cores at max capacity. That's damn impressive threading.

I've tried just blindly ordering my units to advance, and the friendly AI does a great job of dynamically reinterpreting my stupidity and implementing something eminently more sensible. Impressive.

Open question: Can it use 6 cores?

ORIGINAL: LeadMeister

Hey, thanks Kondor999. You're the man ... [&o]

I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all this in such detail. Yeah, I think it's a good game/sim too, but I"ve wrestled with buying the full version (I'm still playing the demo) because of FPS and scenario load time concerns. By the way, I've read here on this forum about how awful load times have been for some PCO players, up to an hour or more for large maps. What's your take on this load time complaint? - Thanks

[Richie61]

ORIGINAL: Fredrocker

ORIGINAL: Richie61

Fredrocker,

Your 2GB of onbaord RAM isn't a lot now a days. I don't know which operating system you have:

XP and Win 7: Supports 4GB (sees 3.25 GB)
Win7 64 bits: Supports 128GB

My old XP machine with a really good video card and 4 GB of RAM and single core is a dog. But my multi core Win 7 64 GB of RAM is faster.

I really wasn't clear I have 16GB of System RAM and 2GB of RAM on the GTX 560 ti card.

[X(] Ohhhh. Now that is a sweet system! It should really run the game fast with all the eye candy [:D]