Very Poor Performance

[Balladeer]

Hey folks. I've installed CoAS after about a five year period to finally get into this particular Akella sail game after having enjoyed PoTC and Build Mod. I'm so disappointed though because I'm getting very poor frame rates which just doesn't make sense to me. I figured it had to be something simple but after having edited the config lightly and also trying vertical sync, even though the ini is set to max 120 fps I think I'm getting only 30 or so fps. I'm going to try to find out what exactly it is but regardless, it just shouldn't be that. It should be butter smooth and something like 60fps should be expected. I did install the GOF2 mod and made the mistake of not trying the vanilla game first so maybe the mod is using some unoptomized textures?

Windows 7 64bit
core i7 4790k 4@4Ghz
Geforce 970 4GB

I'd appreciate any help. I still feel it must be something simple but I can't figure out why its running so poorly. Thank you.

 

[Thagarr]

Are you positive that the game is using your Geforce 970 and not the built in Intel graphics? I would suggest uninstalling, then reinstalling just the vanilla game and check that performance.

 

[Balladeer]

Well I may have found what it was. The game's max resolution is something only like 1440X. I was looking to edit the engine ini to use my native resolution of 1920X1080 but in another thread someone said they had figured out how to run the game in that resolution except for setting fullscreen=0 and setting the resolution to 1920X1440 (I can't remember the exact ratio) and that this would make it run their native resolution while at the same time keeping the game menus from stretching.

I should have loaded the game up vanilla first but instead I made this person's edit thinking it was a fix I needed before even trying. I went back and let the game run at its highest available resolution but even still the FPS was horrible which is still odd to me. Usually lower resolution creates extra FPS.

I went back to the engine ini and set it to my native resolution but kept it full screen(fullscreen=1) with vsync turned on in Nvidia control panel and now its running smooth. As far as I can tell nothing in the menus seems too stretched or cut off so maybe I'm in the clear. All I know is that its running smooth now. Is there anything else I missing? How do I force the game to use graphics card if indeed its not? I don't think it is as all has smoothed up now but I feel I'm still not understanding something.

 

[Thagarr]

Glad that you are at least able to run the game smoothly now mate. As for changing which graphics your your computer uses, it really depends on the manufacturer, or how the drivers are setup. I am assuming that this is a desktop PC based on the processor. The first place I would look would be the BIOS and make sure that it is set for your Nvidia card. Also, if this is computer that you bought from a retailer and not one that you built yourself, it may be sharing video memory with your main system ram. That would be a huge reason for performance drop.

There should be an Nvidia cion in your system try that alerts you when it is using the dedicated card, but I think that depends on your graphics settings. If the BIOS isn't your problem, after that it gets complicated because it can be a number of things, even Windows it's self. I would need to know a bit more about your system before I could really advise you on that.

 

[Balladeer]

Thanks for the feedback Thagarr. I'm pretty sure it was using the appropriate video card as this is a PC built for gaming by ibuypower.com and I don't believe I've ever run into the problem of a game trying to run off a motherboard's integrated graphics. I'm getting ready to re-install the game and try a more procedural process this time. I'll run the vanilla first to see how that performs. Then I'll try to force it to run my native resolution and make sure that's not causing a problem. If everything is a okay then I'll install the GOF mod and try again. I hope it was just an issue of the game not running in full screen or something to do with the resolution.