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Performance problem

Posted: 29 Jan 2006, 03:06
by Voxan
I played only few games. I can't finish playing or watching any replay on the map Altored Divide. My comp starts swapping intensely short after the game starts, then it starts to lag and freeze for a second, then game breaks from insufficent memory. And I noticed that on other maps I played we had much more units and it was ok.
What can the problem?
my comp is not powerful but should be ok:
Turion 64 1600Mhz
890 Mb RAM
video - radeon XPRESS 200

Re: Performance problem

Posted: 29 Jan 2006, 04:04
by mother
Voxan wrote: 890 Mb RAM
Are you sure about that?

Posted: 29 Jan 2006, 07:56
by Archangel of Death
890, could be 512 + 256 + 128. :shrug:

Posted: 29 Jan 2006, 08:10
by Voxan
yep, it is 1Gb chip and 128 Mb shared video mem.
of course it is not a gaming machine, but on other maps(that were basically smaller) with all options close to the left it works ok.

Posted: 29 Jan 2006, 10:38
by IMSabbel
well, altored divide is a very large map (in filesize).
It could be that you run out on memory just there...

Try to alt-tab out of the game while its slowing down/ swapping and look at the task managers memory load...

Posted: 29 Jan 2006, 23:26
by Voxan
ok, I test ran downloaded replay on altored divide that I was unable to finish watching. I when swapping started after several minutes I switched to task manager it showed that spring.exe took 700 Mb. But surprizingly after I left task manager running it showed that spring.exe decreased its memory fast to 300 mb and then stayed about this level. And I was able to continue watching the replay. Nevertheless page file slowly continued to grow up to 1.4 Gb, I was able to watch the replay but perfomance was really slow

Posted: 30 Jan 2006, 00:20
by Nemo
1.6 ghz is the slowest processsor I've seen with spring - I have 1.8, and things tend to slow down in a jiffy (768mb of ram, so I don't think its that >_>)

Most slowdown comes from pathfinding, but some maps make me lag too - that I blame on my supercool nvidia geforce mx 400 with 64mb of rock hard video memory.

Nothing technical, but I've found that switching to metalmap mode (press f4) can help my computer's framerate by a fair bit on some maps.

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 03:24
by Voxan
nah, it's just not enough memory.
I can't play the game cause after a while it crashes from out of memory on any bigger map.
Do other people have 1.5 - 2 Gb RAM?
or it's some kind of bug?

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 03:32
by mother
Yes to both...

You shouldn't be having that kinda problem playing with 892mb of ram.

That said, I've got no real ideas to help.


It's a laptop sure but even so it out specs a lot of peoples machines.

Are you:
1)Sure it's Spring that is using all that swap?
2)Running other applications at the same time?

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 06:07
by Caydr
Hey, unrelated question for you. How's the turion working for you? I'm looking to get a new laptop sometime in the future and can't decide whether to go with Pentium M or a Turion. If I go Turion at least I'll have 64 bit compatibility, and AMD is supposed to be really good. Anyway... how would you rate it?

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 08:08
by Voxan
yes, I don't have any other applications running. Spring.exe takes reasonable amout of memory, but page file continues to blow up.
So I guess the problem is in Spring's compatibility with my XP system or just my system.

As for Turion, it's good inexpensive mobile proc. But in 32bit OS like winXP pentiumM has a bit better performance. It seems to me that Turion heats up less that pentium, but it probably depends on a notebook.

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 11:47
by Kelson
I can't help you with your specific problem. To give you a reference though - I have no problems running spring and I do so with a 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M on 512mb of ram. I'm also using a Mobility Radeon 9200 (on-board) for all the graphical stuff and I've never had a problem (short of trying to render all the trees at once on plains & passes...stupid 20x20 map full of trees).

I find it kind of ironic every time someone mentions a ram below 1 gig at least 5 people jump in that it is DEFINATELY the problem and they need more ram!...yet I constantly play without any problems at all with half that. Then again, lots of people flip out about the 'low' GHz counts...yet with 1.6 GHz I've consistently stayed well below several much 'faster' computer's usages all game.

Moral of the Story: I don't have one. I would just suggest you look at what software applications are running before going out to buy more numbers to stack on your ram/cpu/swap/video card. I'm normally in the low 30s as far as processes are concerned (36 processes running right now), what about you?

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 16:05
by Masse
i played spring with 1.1Ghz and seen 700 or was it 800Mhz dude play there... so :P

the big spring maps really eat all your memory... if u have 512mb u surely will run out of memory on big maps so it starts to use your hard disk more and that causes some serious slowdowns

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 16:58
by Maelstrom
512 DDR runs fine for me, even on Wide Open Combat, Altored Divide, Shore2Shore ect.

Posted: 31 Jan 2006, 17:36
by FizWizz
Same here, 512 DDR. What really eats cpu time for me on many maps is reflective water coupled with large numbers of units and such.