... but after a LONG game, it slows to 10-16 FPS. I build LOTS of SB's.
I build a lot of Starbase too... 125 starbase in a single gravity wheel, good for 6.25 million poly onscreen... look at the video if you don't believe me : http://www.love-from-russia.be/g4_swarm-6.25_million_poly.avi ... Starbase is not your problem...
This is not a problem with my computer UNLESS you can prove to me that more than 2 gigs of RAM (3 or 4) would drastically improve game play.
In my case, it help... below, a screenshoot of my memory use from these week-end... all setting on very high and everything enable, playing on a huge random multistar map with 10 different races and pirates ( using a big mod called 7DS )... as you can see, the sins memory use is a little over 3.5 gb ( and CPU use is only 6% )...
Well, with a windows OS, the game will crash... first due to the memory use and second because the 7DS mod directly crash on windows when all setting are high... well, the topic is not about to show that sins run better by not using a windows OS, so let see what happen on windows when you have only 2GB ram...
Your seem to be running into a CPU limit that SINS has, maybe RAM but it would dump if thats the case.
Sins will dump only if sins use more that 2gb ram... in the case of "knownalien", with only 2gb physical ram, something other happen... these 2gb ram are shared between the OS and application... any computer have plenty of application running in the background who already use some ram ( firewall, auto-update, steam, antivirus, chat software, etc )...
For example purpose, let say that before starting the game, already 1gb ram is used for Os and the numerous other application/process... mean that you have 1 gb free for the game...
Once you start a game, memory use increase... once OS+application/service+game fill the 2gb physical memory, virtual memory kick in... virtual memory is using harddrive for caching when there is not enough memory... speed of virtual memory is relatif to the speed of your harddrive...
Let see how sins work... when you start a game, everything is cached in ram for speed up the game... ready ram is a lot faster that ready the harddrive... not if you don't have enough physical memory, the system begin use virtual memory who in fact negate the effect of ram caching...
How much ram "knownalien" need for fully enjoy soase... start your system and see how much ram is already used... for example, let say that 0.5 gb is used... 2gb + 0.5 gb = 2.5 gb will be the minimum amount of ram needed for fully enjoy the game...
Using 4gb ram will not fully solve everything... when you have 4gb, you loose some memory due reserved address for your hardware... this can be solved by using PAE... so, you will have your full 4gb...
Well, a other problem is that from these 4gb, 2gb will be reserved for the windows OS and 2gb will be reserved for ALL application... solution is to use the "3gb" tuning who reserve 1gb for OS and 3gb for ALL application...
In XP, you only need to edit your "boot.ini" and in Vista/win7, you need to edit some register key
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366796.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613473%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
Microsoft OS are not bad OS but default installation is not optimized... tuning your OS can only improve performance from your game... in this case, using PAE and 3GB allow to have 1gb for OS and 3gb for application ( 2 gb for sins and 1 gb for other application like firewall, steam, anti-virus, etc )...
It will not resolve all the slowdown problem but it will help... if you are playing original sins or entrenchment, the TSOP mod will help you a lot too... for diplomacy, the latest patch have include several of the TSOP mod optimization, so lag is not a so big problem...
Will not begin to explain how i have so good performance with sins on Linux... if somebody is not able to tune his windows OS, he will not be able to tune a Linux OS and compile a fine tuned wine with GCC... anyway, sins code is very good and it is not a coding problem...
PS: if you migrate to a 64 bit OS ( XP pro x64, Vista x64 or Win7 x64 ), you don't need to play with PAE or/and 3GB because the WOW64 who is used in case of 32bit application is able to reserve directly 4gb ram by application... in so case, for fully enjoy everything, best to have 5 or 6 gb ram...
p.s. my system specs:
win xp
2 gig ram
3.0 intel quad core socket 775 Q6600
nvidia 8800GTX (OC'd to ultra)
Display 1280x1024
MOBO 780i
my system specs : 16 gb fully buffered ddr2 ram mounted in raid mode ( 8gb available at 32 gb/s ), dual xeon quad core at 2.66 ghz, nvidia 8800 Ultra 768 mb 384 bit and nvidia 9600 GS 256 mb, display 1680x1050, OS : win xp pro x64, Kubuntu and OpenSolaris... well, a 5 year old workstation who beat performance from recent desktop with i7 extreme edition...
