Hi guys,

I just upgraded my PC and decided to reinstall Stronghold 2, expecting to get an improvement in FPS over my previous system configuration.
Both computers had: Phenom 9950 black, 4GB 800MHz DDR2 dual-channel, 60GB Corsair Force SSD. The old machine had a 512MB 7900GTX, the new machine has a 1GB GTX560 Ti Gigabyte OC.
Considering the game came out in 2005 the system is overkill, yet I'm still getting lag at certain parts of the game.

I'm playing at 1920x1080, all settings to the maximum including Anti-aliasing (8x) which I don't expect to be an issue on the above specification, but as soon as I build a moderate size castle (the sort you'd expect to build on most maps) the FPS as displayed by FRAPS drops from 40 into the high 20's. At one point simply building a church dropped my FPS by 5, and as soon as I tell 100 archers to move somewhere it goes into the low-20s. This is only on mission 6? (the one with monks under siege by wolves), so I don't know what to expect once the maps get bigger.

I can play C&C3 at the same res with all settings max and 8xAA without the slightest hint of lag, it hits the 30fps limit regardless of what's going on.

I read about multi-core processors being a hindrance to Stronghold 2, is this true? If so my upgrade to an i5 2500k in a week or so should improve matters, but I'd like to make it more playable if possible.

Any advice or shared experience would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Andy

Problem solved simply by disabling real time shadows, everything else maxed out and not a flicker below 40fps all the way through.

I think I don't need to worry too much about Stronghold 2 since Stronghold 3 is coming soon.For cost and efficiency I'd like to suggest---> Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz <--- If you need any more suggestions just ask or PM

Hi,

I considered the difference between the 2500k and 2600k, the only real difference being hyper threading on the cores, and as I don't do any conversion/compression and it'll be years before games gain anything by having 8 cores vs 4 cores it wasn't worth the extra £60 (the 2500k was only £130). In addition there will be a new wave of socket 1155 processors in the coming year and it'll probably be better to upgrade in 18 months time, when actually needed.

I guess I'll just perceiver with SH2 for now, try and put up with unexplainable lag. Hopefully SH3 will be more efficient and tessellates well.

Andy

Hi guys,

As amended this issue is now partially solved for me. At least so far I've not had any lag since disabling real time shadows, that setting alone seemed to pull a lot of resources from somewhere (my guess is CPU but could be GPU). I increased the game speed to 90FPS to 'unlock' the FPS but it hovered around 40-45fps unless I moved the camera to somewhere empty, where it maxed out at 90fps.

So perhaps the real time shadows is not THE cause of lag issues, but a major drain on resources nonetheless. Either way I'm very disappointed that an old game is causing my system to lag, I can only hope it's a bug that is solved in Stronghold 3 .

I went through a process of dropping all settings include Anti aliasing from 8x to 0x with zero improvement in FPS (so obviously the GPU is powerful enough), I also disabled all options one by one until I found the cause, that is to say there is no FPS drop between "lowest" and "highest" settings with exception for real time shadows.

Sincerely hope this helps someone who is as frustrated as I was.

Cheers,
Andy

I think SH2's bloom feature had compatibility issues with Nvidia GPU, worth a try maybe a help.

CrackleJackal wrote:

QUOTE:
I think SH2's bloom feature had compatibility issues with Nvidia GPU, worth a try maybe a help.

Hi,

The bloom just made the screen completely white with bright lights, made it virtually unplayable so I disabled that before even beginning to play, lol.

The issue with performance is still present, as I build a larger army the game begins to lag down to the high 20fps again, even with real time shadows disabled. I've just installed my copy of SHL so will see if they made any engine improvements on that, already the graphics look nicer and the UI seems more intuitive (for some reason I never played SHL when I bought it several years ago).

I'm seriously doubting it's the graphics card now, but will have to see. I remember 3D Mark 03 displaying quite poor graphics quality compared to some games I was playing, yet it lagged and the games didn't, indicating engine design and how much it taxes the system (deliberately or not) seems to have a lot of bearing on the performance, regardless of the "eye candy".


Thanks for all your input, can't wait for SH3 !

Andy

Could be that it only uses one processor core,not coded for multi-core processors.for old games I'd suggest--->Intel Core i3-560<---.......blah.........blah