Age of Empires 3 Poor Performance

[TC91]

I am having poor performance with one of my favourite games Age of Empires 3, especially when there are a lot of units (50+) on screen or gunpowder units start shooting. The fps counter from fraps tells me that the fps drops to 8-15fps when I have 40+ gunpowder units shooting. This makes it almost impossible to micro manage, and is extremely frustrating.

My system is as follows:
QX6850
Asus P5Q
Mushkin HP2 4GB
WD Caviar 640GB SE16
Sapphire Radeon 4870 1GB
Vista 64bit

All of my drivers are completely updated, and I have tried all of the catalyst drivers with HD4000 support with no luck (using the latest 8.12 right now). Everything is 100% stock. Most of my other games run fine. Any help would be appreciative.

 

[Bateluer]

I haven't tested AOE3 on my desktop since I got my 4870 in July. AOE3 was a game that I played with my brothers when I was home on my laptop, which lagged badly due to its Dothan core CPU.

What resolution are you running at and are you running with any AA on? Make sure you check the CCC to see if you've got it set to force AA. 40+ sepoys firing at once at 1920x1200 isn't a light load, and AOE3 boasts a good amount of detail.

Also, the Catalyst 9.1s should be out in a few days. They're oddly late this month. There are some betas floating around though that you could try.

 

[TC91]

Thanks for the reply Bateluer, I am running a resolution of 1680x1050 (22inch) with ccc set to "Use application settings" and "Box" filter. I have also tried lowering the in-game graphics settings (have even tried everything set to low/off at 1680x1050) but with not much luck unfortunately. I will wait for the 9.1's and report back. If anyone has AOE3 and a 4870 to test and see if they are getting better results I would greatly appreciate your results/help.

 

[chronox]

I don't have a 4870 but I did have performance issues with AoE3 on a more-than-adequate system as you do. I started this thread but really didn't get anywhere...that is, until tonight.

My setup uses an 8800GTS 512 and had very choppy map-scrolling even at the beginning of a game with few units at 1680x1050. Long story short, I had accepted it as a driver-related issue and tweaked the camera distance and acceleration to mask the choppiness. This only alleviated the problem somewhat and never really solved it.

Tonight, I downloaded and installed new nVidia drivers and updated DirectX 9. Only the latter action applies to you and I think it might be worth a shot. I don't think the Nov. 2008 DirectX 9 installer worked when it originally got released and I forgot about it until today. After updating DirectX 9, all my choppiness issues were fixed! You can download the DirectX 9 End-User Runtime from Microsoft here. Hope this helps.

Another possibility: I noticed that AoE3 ran slower for me when VSync was enabled even with triple-buffering forced in the nVidia Control Panel. I don't know if this is true with an ATI card but you could try disabling VSync as well if it is currently enabled.

 

[ghost recon88]

What's your CPU overclocked to?

 

[soccerballtux]

If your micro were uber enough you could overcome the FPS even if it were just 1 fps.

 

[TC91]

Thanks for the replies, I have tried installing the latest Nov. 2008 installer as suggested by chronox, but unfortunately the poor performance is still here. I also encounter a choppy camera like chronox when i am scrolling around. In addition, when I like drag my mouse on the mini-map really fast in circles, the fps tanks hard, going into the 20's.

Right now my system is 100% stock, nothing oc'ed. I have tried playing @ 3.67ghz but it doesnt make a difference except for the rise in heat/temperatures. The biggest issue is the frustrating low fps when there are lots of units on screen or ~40+ gunpowder units firing.

 

[chronox]

What are your shader settings set to? For me, the "very high" shader settings will cause the frame rate to drop. Everything else I have on "high".

 

[TC91]

Usually I always had shaders set to "Very high" but lowering them (even to low) does not prevent the drop in framerate when there are a lot of units showing on screen or when there's lots of gunpowder units firing.

Just curious chronox, what kind of fps are you getting with your 8800GTS 512? And what resolution/settings?

 

[TC91]

ok so I have installed the catalyst 9.1's a few days ago, and the big dips in fps are still not fixed . This is just utterly frustrating

 

[Bateluer]

I have not been able to duplicate these slow downs on my 4870 512MB. My system is similar to yours, an E8500, 8GB RAM, Vista 64, Asus P5Q SE Plus motherboard.

I have two possible suggestions.

1) You could try one of the after market drivers. Omega drivers used to be pretty solid, but it looks like he's stopped developing them to spend more time with his wife. I don't see the Radeon 4000 series listed as supported. The other major one I recall are the DNA drivers, http://www.donotargue.com/ . They're based off the 8.12s at the moment, but may be worth a try. Be sure to uninstall all other ATI drivers before trying the modded drivers.

2) Since your CPU is a quad core, about the only significant different between your system and mine, have you tried setting processor affinity? Set the AOE3 process to run on only one or of the cores and to use higher than normal priority. You may want to do some research into the best settings for this, I've never had to do it myself.

 

[TC91]

thanks for the reply Bateluer, the DNA drivers do not help my slowdowns. I tried changing the processor affinity in task manager, running on only 1 core slows the game down a little more, while running on 2, 3, and 4 cores have identical performance.

I am just extremely frustrated because my old graphics card, an 8800gts 320mb, ran the game without breaking a sweat using the same video settings, and its feels like i wasted almost 400cad (I got the 4870 on the same day the AT review came out) on the 4870 and it can't handle my older favourite games. Please note that this is a new vista installation so there are no leftover nvidia drivers.