I can confirm that there is performance increase here. Still get the horizontal tearing when reacing max fps.

Maybe add an option in the game for v-sync as adjusting it in the nVidia config fixed this tearing.

[BUG] I thought I would watch the AI to see what they will do and basically from turn 25 - 43 I noticed that Procipinee's sovereign army hasn't moved for any of those turns. It looks like it cleared all the good-huts it felt it could and hasn't moved from this spot.

Edit: After turn 43 she finally moved again.

Testing on a 16x12 map ~turn 70.

Performance boost noted. (~5fps)
But: freezing during the "turns", 20 minuts loading and crashing during loading of saves.

Noticed a performance boost myself.

I got a little performance boost on the strategy map, but it runs slower on tactical. I cant understand why it is running so bad on that little map with 6 units, and why it is going so much better on the big map with hundreds of units and buildings. Also i got 8-9 crashes.  I play this from february, and i got 5-6 crashes all the Beta builds till this day. 

I dunno, I haven't looked at the tactical map perf yet.

Chiming in with my experience:

Like some others, the game starts out buttery smooth at 60FPS and then drops to 20 or less as the game goes on (especially when I have more than one city in view, but even when I have nothing but scenery in view it still tends to hover around 30).

I have tried out the unofficial Turtle build and saw no real difference in performance, unfortunately. Compared the same save file between official build and this one, and my city-full area hovers around 20 in both. I am running an nVidia GeForce GTX 560M.

I got a hang-up crash with this build, shortly after the Medium-strength she-wolf quest.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6609288/debug.err

Since I don't have my old beta saves anymore, I can't give you a useful answer, because I have nothing to compare these results to. But I started a new game and so far, in the early stages, FPS seems pretty stable with pedestrians enabled. I will report more as I play more, when I have the time. I get around 30-45 FPS on my 9600GT.

Thank you Brad for tackling this issue!

EDIT: Indeed the loading screens are bugged in this build. Only the background appears, no text, no image and no loading bar.

its turning out the gpu isn't the bottleneck. It's CPU.

Awww... but Resoln took down Delin somewhere before season 35, plopped down a nice ripe city next to the FirePyre and let me walk in and take it.  How else I'm I gonna get that kind of awesome if you don't let the AI do all the work and spend all their resources for me?

Looking forward to the improvements

So I did a bit more tweaks last night, turns out I hadn't actually been disabling Pedestrians (disabled it at one point but forgot to restart the game). If I turn Pedestrians and Outlines off I actually get acceptable framerate most places (it dips down to 29 or so if I have a couple cities in view, but I can deal with that).

Still a lot worse than at the start of the game though. Pedestrians makes by far the biggest difference on my machine (which has a pretty weak CPU, for some reason Asus gaming laptops have good video cards and low-clocked processors...).

Until I found these threads I hadn't even considered turning Pedestrians off since like others I saw in here, I assumed they didn't impact FPS when you were zoomed out enough that they disappeared. Clearly I was wrong though, they affect perf quite a bit even when you're zoomed out.

I seems to me that Brad, in his build, set the zoom level at which pedestrians appear to very high, even on things like Wild Horses, where they would appear all the time. This means that turning pedestrians off shouldn't affect performance, since they are only shown if you zoom in really really close. On the other hand, maybe the engine fetches the models, textures and animations for pedestrians, even if they are only shown up close, so it could still improve performance turning them off.

Any way to off-load threads from the CPU to the GPU? The worst case would be someone that has a bad CPU and GPU, but if you could use one to compensate for the other, that would be helpful.

Also, are more CPU cores going to help more than CPU speed? For instance, I have a Q660 (rather old now), but it has 4 cores. Would this help more than someone with 2 newer, faster cores or would performance be about the same (or worse)? Just wondering what type of bottleneck this is.

Updated again.

No realistic way to offload to the GPU for us with DirectX 9. That's one of the features that DirectX 11 makes easy.

But I've made a lot of progress this weekend in reducing how much CPU it's using. Try the latest update to see what I mean. Should be a significant boost.

The big bottle neck is just the law of unintended consequences in coding. Just needs optimizing.

For example, in the update I put out, there is a bug I introduced where going through a tile with "stuff" on it will cause it to be semi transparent. I introduced it (temporarily) because the previous code to see if a unit was there was checking every object in every visible tile every frame. Very expensive.  But the function seemed very innoculous ::IsUnitInTile() And it works. It's just that it's not efficient.

This sort of optimization is where we can get a lot of improvement going forward.

This is starting to remind me of the good old days when you guys did all that optimizing for GalCiv2. Better times were never had.

The tools available these days are just amazing.

One of the things I corrected was the excessive use of case insenstive string compares. To make modding easier, we use a lot of strings. But they come with a performance hit (not a huge one normally). But a lot of the code in the libraries we use are case insensitive. By requiring the strings to be exact, it increases performance somewhat.  

Of course, that means that if your mod said 'unitstat_dodge" instead of "UnitStat_Dodge" it'll fail.

I was surprised to find out DirectX 11 has been out since 2009 with the release of Windows 7:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_x

Now, you need a video card that supports it, too, but I wonder what percentage of FE players are playing on Windows 7 vs other platforms, as well as the percent that run version 11 video cards. Sounds like something that won't hit FE, but maybe Gal Civ 3 or other SD games for the future.

I was surprised to see XCOM only requires DirectX 9. It must have the ability to run in either that 10, or 11 mode. Sounds pretty sophisticated.

Way to start getting the optimization gun out, Brad! Looking forward to seeing how Derek and the Devs (is that a band?) react to the improvements. If it makes it in there, Patch 1.01 should be a continued maturity to an already great game.

thanx for the update!

Brad, I usually use http://mrhaandi.blogspot.it/p/injectsmaa.html in my games but with FE it crashes. any idea why it's not working here?

Any chance I could convince you to take a look at AI grouping? The faction AI is just not putting the max units into an army. Ever. It makes difficulty a relative thing indeed.

Indeed with Update 3 I feel a boost in general smoothness, not necessarily in FPS, but overall there are not lags anymore and the whole experience is more fluid. I seem to be getting a minimum of 28 FPS now, which is good enough for me, but more importantly, FPS seems to be consistent, and I'm not experiencing any FPS drops so far.

I'm actually glad to hear it's just a CPU optimization issue, since these are classic programming issues, and you guys (by which apparently I mean you and your family since these are your home builds ) should be able to gradually smooth them out. I got my CPU overclocked to the limit of its stability, so I've done everything I can on my part

Crash on the new build, end-of-turn, nothing unusual on turn:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6609288/debug%201029.err

Also, one unusual note, on my first champ, the game wouldn't accept me recruiting the champion and kept asking me until I said no, no gameplay impact as I could recruit the champion, just a UI issue.

Edit: another crash

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6609288/debug2.1029.err

This one I suspect is caused by clicking on a unit right when a turn ends, that seems to be the trigger.

I was thinking about this a bit more. If it's CPU bound, during times of slow FPS, couldn't someone go into Task Manager and verify the CPU usage is at 100%? Or is it more complicated than that?

Am I the only one who is getting much higher unit wages with this build? Is this intended?

Am I the only one who is having stability issues with this build?