Supreme commander dual core?

snowdog · 18 Mar 2007 at 17:26

Argh, tried a 2nd map and also 2vs2 and my pc became a lagmachiene.
I've had about 400 units, itd defo had cpu lag as even the music started stuttering, i alt tab and:
Core 1 , pretty much always 80%
Core 2 Pretty much always 60%

This is ******* me off, cpu lag but it doesnt even use my cpu 100% :mad:

.
I mean what the **** i'd belive my cpu was crap if it'd at least use 1 core 100%, but both cores aren't used 100% whats wrong with the game.
My cpu according to benches is as fast as a e6400 @ stock, if an e6400 cant run this what pc can, surley this game should work fine on non quad core pc's?

I meet al ''recommended'' system requirements with ease...
Game is on low details btw.

DJKahuna · 18 Mar 2007 at 17:51

SupCom works best on a multicore setup. With OctCores and HexaDecCores (8 core and 16 cores respectivly) CPU's in the pipeline, SupCom does more "one core per process" type of thing, so AI on one or 2 cores, physics on a seperate core, other processing on another core. But i believe that when it gets to more than 4 cores, it'll simply share each thing among the cores rather than one core per item or one core per AI team.

With a single core, well, you can see why there's a "problem".

Also, when you have like 400+ units, you will start to struggle. You have to remember that each entitiy or unit has to think how it needs to react to situations. It has to react there and then because otherwise, it's simply not realistic. The calculations in it are immense.

And the reason it doesn't use 100% of the cores is down to the engine. IF it did, there'd wouldn't be enough CPU time to run other essential things, such as Windows itself.

Things you should try and disable are you AV. This could be bottlenecking you if the game has to frequently access your HDD. Also, try changing the CPU priority (Right click My Computer. Select Properties. Under Performance, click Settings. On the Advanced tab, Set both processor Scheduling and Memory Usage to programs). Also, move your pagefile to another drive to the one that SupCom is installed on (not a seperate partition, a completely seperate drive). Those are the basic "in house" tweaks. For even more tweaking, download "Tuneup Utilities 2007". 30 day trial available, excellent program. You can trust any of the recommendations it makes unless it's your preference not to change it. But all the tweaks it does suggest are safe and do improve performance a helluva lot.

snowdog · 18 Mar 2007 at 18:09

Windows hardly uses more as 1% cpu though, i have very few background apps, hdd usage is minimal while playing it and i've tried a lot of different drivers by now.

Pagefile is on My h drive ( 300 gig maxtor dmax10plus sata 16mb cache), game is on raid array of 2x250 gb 7200.10 16mb sataII seagates...
So basicly, pagefile, supcom and windows are all on 3 seperate drives.
So i dont think that's a problem.

Also just tried to patch the game from the release version to the latest and it gives a file not found error :confused:

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Combat squirrel · 18 Mar 2007 at 18:09

V|per said:
e6600 @ 3.6, 1gig ram @ 500mhz...

game against a mate with 1000 unit cap on a 20x20 map...

we both decided to build 50 t4 aeon bots and 200 t3 bots.. alt tab showed core 0 @100% constantly, and core 1 at 30% ish, told them to attack.. alt tab showed core 1 up to 100% constantly...

As caustic says.. get a lot going on and moving/attacking and it flies way up there

What in the world......you got core 2 at 3.6ghz......and only 1 gig of ram ? :eek:

DJKahuna · 18 Mar 2007 at 18:23

Combat squirrel said:
What in the world......you got core 2 at 3.6ghz......and only 1 gig of ram ?

Exactly. 2Gig my friend, 2Gig. It's the only way! Any less, you get bottlenecked, any more, Windows doesn't like you.

HighlandeR · 18 Mar 2007 at 18:49

snowdog said:
Windows hardly uses more as 1% cpu though, i have very few background apps, hdd usage is minimal while playing it and i've tried a lot of different drivers by now.

Pagefile is on My h drive ( 300 gig maxtor dmax10plus sata 16mb cache), game is on raid array of 2x250 gb 7200.10 16mb sataII seagates...
So basicly, pagefile, supcom and windows are all on 3 seperate drives.
So i dont think that's a problem.

Also just tried to patch the game from the release version to the latest and it gives a file not found error .

Tried to reload the SC and apply the patch?

HighlandeR · 18 Mar 2007 at 18:57

I too was baffeled with Supreme commander and dual/quad core myself, especially when the benchmarks show 5fps difference between a E6600 and the top Quadcore chip.

Did a lot more digging into it and found this thread here with plenty benchmarks/testing.

http://www.legionhardware.com/Forums/viewtopic.php?t=1607

And in summary I too think he was a bit baffeled cos the 2nd core and even on quad core it was showing very little performance differences... but its clear that having dual core or quad is helping out ! Looks like it is in the physics and other things being sorted with the other cores.

Others on that thread have just said the benchmarks may not show much difference but in game performance u certainly do see the smoothness, some folk are saying 4gig really helps especially after 3-4 hr games !

Eitherway Supreme Commander may not be the most graphicly best looking game but yeah it definatly does bring any Power house PC to its knees.

As the folk have said though u only need 25-30fps in Supreme commander for smooth gameplay, remember for RTS games its a little different.... even CnC3 is capped at 30fps.

Caustic · 18 Mar 2007 at 19:00

Snowdog: I would imagine it is down to your CPU. It is a guess, but the P4D is not the best dual core processor. Even if other benchmarks show it to be good, it all depends on Supreme Commander, every program is different. PC gaming just got more complicated by have multicore CPU's.

Personally I don't think most of the benchmarks do a great job, the problem is you must have loads and loads of units, all be moving around, and be firing as well to really show you the benefit.

For example (this is merely a guess, but stick with me), when you click to move a bunch of units, it calculates a path for each unit. This could be a big task with the size of the maps, and the number of obsticles. This won't take too long, and can use a separate thread, but is required before the units can move. Hence why a quad core system might make the game play much smoother, but hardly show a large framerate boost in the vast majority of benchmarks.

HighlandeR · 18 Mar 2007 at 19:39

Caustic said:
Hence why a quad core system might make the game play much smoother, but hardly show a large framerate boost in the vast majority of benchmarks.

Yeah thats what a few people with quad core chips were saying... u may not see the difference in benchmarks but when actually playing its a different case. Can only imagine once the patches arrive and further optimisations arrive its gonna be really impressive.

PESolution · 18 Mar 2007 at 23:27

with my rig (in sig) it is smooth at all times. However i say at all times, if i spam an instant build cheat and put a serious amount of the long ranged nuke missiles etc etc it can lag a lot ^^ but to a reasonable extent runs well and im happy with it

snowdog · 18 Mar 2007 at 23:34

PESolution said:
with my rig (in sig) it is smooth at all times. However i say at all times, if i spam an instant build cheat and put a serious amount of the long ranged nuke missiles etc etc it can lag a lot ^^ but to a reasonable extent runs well and im happy with it

Hmm so i shouldn't mass build lvl 1 power gens and mass fabricators ar start for it to not lag that much, as i build over 200 of them, tehn i attacked with about 300 medium and 100 heavy tanks, the lag was so bad even the music was stuttering...

Not really a tech3 man myself, i just build masses of units & lvl 1 power & lvl1 fabricators asap and kill the enemy commander before he gets as much units as me.

Lag a lot with a core 2 duo @ 3.2 ghz doesnt sound well, ahwelll ill wait 2 years then ill buy a dual xeon board with 2x quadcore xeon cpu's, till then i try to live with drops to 5 fps...

HighlandeR · 19 Mar 2007 at 00:04

snowdog said:
Hmm so i shouldn't mass build lvl 1 power gens and mass fabricators ar start for it to not lag that much, as i build over 200 of them, tehn i attacked with about 300 medium and 100 heavy tanks, the lag was so bad even the music was stuttering...

Not really a tech3 man myself, i just build masses of units & lvl 1 power & lvl1 fabricators asap and kill the enemy commander before he gets as much units as me.

Lag a lot with a core 2 duo @ 3.2 ghz doesnt sound well, ahwelll ill wait 2 years then ill buy a dual xeon board with 2x quadcore xeon cpu's, till then i try to live with drops to 5 fps...

Sounds like your taxing it big time ! 200 power gens/fabs?!

Still sounds like 2gig+a good 1950 or 8800 around 512meg+ would do your trick, id msconfig and close every last program just for test sake with nothing downloading/running in background.

The new patch does apparantly improve performance and glitches but theres still a few bugs/memory leaks about I hear.

snowdog · 19 Mar 2007 at 00:08

HighlandeR said:
Sounds like your taxing it big time ! 200 power gens/fabs?!

Still sounds like 2gig+a good 1950 or 8800 around 512meg+ would do your trick, id msconfig and close every last program just for test sake with nothing downloading/running in background.

The new patch does apparantly improve performance and glitches but theres still a few bugs/memory leaks about I hear.

Yes 200 approx. I just did the 1st story mission and 2 skirmishes and didnt notice the lvl 3 power gens and fabs till later on, at that point when i noticed i had 30 lvl 1 engineers mass building fabs and power gens and had about 200 ish of them.

PhillyDee · 19 Mar 2007 at 04:33

It does eat CPU for breakfast. I run E6600 @ 3.0. Using my G15 performance monitor, ingame it usually shows core 1 @ about 95-100% and core 2 around the 50-60% mark. Doesnt use a lot of RAM though. I havent played this with my 8800 yet, so we shall see what the card is capable of soon. It seems that they have designed the game to eat top spec pc's for at least a year or 2.

geeza · 19 Mar 2007 at 12:36

I alwasy built 100s of energy storage and mass storage which makes it drop serious fps. I should really get SCUs and get resource allocation instead.

Is there a way to make engineers build SCUs faster like building units/building?

DJKahuna · 19 Mar 2007 at 12:52

geeza said:
I alwasy built 100s of energy storage and mass storage which makes it drop serious fps. I should really get SCUs and get resource allocation instead.

Is there a way to make engineers build SCUs faster like building units/building?

Yeah, sure, build more engineers

VeNT · 19 Mar 2007 at 13:18

geeza said:
I alwasy built 100s of energy storage and mass storage which makes it drop serious fps. I should really get SCUs and get resource allocation instead.

Is there a way to make engineers build SCUs faster like building units/building?

yeah just use the assist button rather than clicking.
tis a bug

titaniumx3 · 20 Mar 2007 at 03:19

The main problem I'm having with SupCom isn't actually low fps, but order/command delay. I find that on skirmish maps with total units exceeding 1500, there is like a 5 to 20 second delay between giving an order and the unit actually acting on that order. This may seem like a trivial issue, but its not that simple since the delay causes huge problems when attacking or trying to automate your units. The fps is still 20+, but the delay makes the game impossible to play.

Caustic · 20 Mar 2007 at 08:16

titaniumx3 said:
The main problem I'm having with SupCom isn't actually low fps, but order/command delay. I find that on skirmish maps with total units exceeding 1500, there is like a 5 to 20 second delay between giving an order and the unit actually acting on that order. This may seem like a trivial issue, but its not that simple since the delay causes huge problems when attacking or trying to automate your units. The fps is still 20+, but the delay makes the game impossible to play.

I think this is a known issue. I can't remember what the cause was tho'. Have you checked the official forums?

geeza · 20 Mar 2007 at 09:45

VeNT said:
yeah just use the assist button rather than clicking.
tis a bug

thanks. also another bug i found was that i paused a mass pump just after i told it to go to T3 and then it was stuck with the pause button on it but in T2 and didnt allow me to upgrade to T3 (T3 tier dissapeared) the production toggle didnt do anything either