Now that the new campaign system is almost upon us, I'm a bit concerned that I won't be able to run it as well as I'd like. Mostly I've used the QMB and online function for play so far, as these don't tax my system as much as multiple AI's do.

Currently if I have more than 12-15 AI aircraft in a single player mission at once, the framerate stays good but the overall speed of the game slows right down to a smooth slow motion - around about half speed. If there is a fight, once the numbers thin out through attrition the speed of the game climbs back up to normal and is fine from then on. It tends to kill any immersion you might get from the current campaigns though, as you are swimming through treacle or have to choose wide open spaces with the smallest sprinkle of opponents. The N28 and DVII campaigns are out of my reach for the moment.

Has anyone else had a similar problem? The smooth fps makes me thing it is not related to the vid card as such and must be to do with the CPU or RAM instead. My system is near the low end by current standards - A Q6600 quad core, 2gb DDR2 and a GTS260. Currently I'm eating less to squirrel enough away for 8gb of DDR3, but won't be looking at a new graphics card until early next year so it'll have to do for now. I'm wondering if the community geniuses can advise where the biggest botleneck is. I'm sooo hoping it's a lack of ram thats the problem, as it is by far the cheapest to fix.

All insights welcome. Please feel free to point and laugh at my current specs and regale me with tales of RoF and your 580x cards if you feel the need.

The slow down you have is the simulation rate that is slowed down and as you guessed it it is not related to your CG but to CPU/RAM combo. You can try at least 4gb of ram.

It's your CPU. Each new individual plane you add in has to have several components calculated for it - FM, DM, sound related to you, AI. Try disabling HyperThreading and see how high you can overclock it. It can boost your CPU performance quite a bit.

I noticied a few things in your post, maybe it will help:

- You indicate a "GTS260" video adapter. The only GTS 260 I know of is a "mobile" Nvidia GPU - these mobile variants are almost always grossly under-scaled compared to their non-mobile counterparts. For example, the GTX260M has much fewer vertex shaders (112 v 192) when compared to a "real" GTX260. Also, the memory bus width on the GTX260M is only 256 bits, where the GTX260 is 448 bits. These couple of things could make a huge difference in the way that video card performs. (But please do read on...)

- Even in spite of the above, of all the components you named, I would say the RAM is your 'weakest' area. On that point, though, you mentioned going to DDR3 (from DDR2) and from 2G to 8G. I didn't catch if you indicated what OS you're using, but unless you use a '64-bit' version, your machine won't recognize memory beyond 4G (and slightly less than that, in reality). Also, are you sure your current machine - which supports DDR2 - will accept DDR3 memory?

Just some things I thought to comment on.

Throwing more RAM won't help unless you have a lot of system pauses due to storage access. So unless you notice a lot of hard drive access, more RAM won't do anything.

My bet is the CPU is to be beefed up. I just upgraded to a Radeon HD6950 and it still slows down like you said on very busy missions. The main one I notice this on is the final mission in Du Doch Nicht, which has a lot of aircraft in it. For that matter, I also noticed it even on the prior mission (to kill a tank in NML). It was slow over NML until some of the AI aircraft had been thinned out. I have a 3-core AMD Phenom II. I overclocked it to 3.6GHz, btw. This is rendering on a 23" monitor at 1920x1080 with most settings set to max values. The beefier graphics card will let you max the settings, but its a better CPU that will be needed to handle large numbers of AI objects.

RAM is used for much more things than HDD accesses. In the case of multithreaded applications, in order not to have stops in the simulation thread when RAM amount is not enough the Simulation Thread Rate drops giving this slowdown effect.

The problem is that if the CPU is itself struggling and need a pause too (thus if it is on the CPU side) it will have the exact same effect so a diagnostic is hard to tell but 2Gb of ram is for sure a limitation since rof uses up to 4Gb...

You know, just once I'd like to post something on this site without having to be attacked by uninformed drivel...

It's OK, though...everyone's entitled to their opinion (even those who have no idea what the hell they're talking about).

Fun question, what is RAM?

When you finally arrive at the conclusion that it's Random Access Memory used for neat things like manipulating those crazy equations, storing textures, or pretty much everything that the CPU NEEDS to access for QUICK changes then you can believe you know what you're talking about. But no, more RAM is only needed unless your system is running out of storage necessary for quick manipulation and drive storage can't cut it. If your computer is not hitting the HDD, the SSD or - for those that think I don't know what I'm talking about - the floppy drive, then you don't need more memory.

i'm sorry but that's wrong...

RAM is used as a dynamic storage for anything from hdd files to CPU-CG communications to CPU processes variables and processes storage.

When the CPU cache memory is full and or some data is used with reccurence this data is stored into the RAM.

Dude, seriously? That makes as much sense as saying that anytime you need a hammer it should be in your hand, otherwise it belongs locked in your toolbox.

Here: Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, 2GB RAM, ATI HD4870 1024MB, Win7 64bit. My system can handle about the same number of aircraft as yours before the slow motion kicks in, so either I am just lucky or there may be something else that is putting extra load on your cpu?

.......


http://superuser.com/questions/78362/what-is-the-relationship-between-cpu-usage-and-ram

"The speed of this recurrence (the load latency) is crucial to CPU performance, and so most modern level-1 caches are virtually indexed, which at least allows the MMU's TLB lookup to proceed in parallel with fetching the data from the cache RAM"

From:

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


And..

"RAM is merely a temporary storage area for information that the CPU needs to constantly access. The CPU is the heart of your machine, and everything goes through it. Game data does not travel directly from your drive or RAM to the graphics card; it must first be processed and allocated by the CPU. Your CPU is constantly reading from and writing to RAM, directing information and receiving input from all the devices on your system, all of this occurring through the information pathways on your motherboard."

from

http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_2.html



happy? Ram IS used by the CPU and not enough ram available is a possible cause of slowdown in the simulation thread rate.

This is silly, you are reiterating every point I originally made.

Lol...Well enough.

Lol indeed.

Just my $.02, I hope that they work performance hard. Performance can be rough - been there - but it would benefit every aspect of the game.

NattyIced, I have no idea what you've learned (or from where), or what you think you know...but you're talkin' out your a$$ here pal.

The Q6600's, along with many of that same line of Intel CPUs, are renowed for out-performing their cost; indeed, these things are still considered plenty capable as CPUs go. Admittedly not top of the line by today's standards, but still well within the range of what RoF is known to perform well on. The Q6600, especially with moderate overclocking, can hold it's own against most any dual core; even against some of the best quad-cores around. Does about as well as an AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black, almost as well as the Core 2 Extreme QX6800...even the mighty QX9650s are only about 14% better than the Q6600 in 'across-the-board' performance.

And there are quite a few people here who report running RoF fairly well with only dual-core CPUs. Mine did, when I still had an E8400. Actually never saw any "slow-downs"...then again, I had 4G RAM.

By comparison, you're considering a Windows-based PC with half the memory it can support as not being a potential bottleneck (and that's only if we assume the OP is NOT running a 64-bit OS).

Now let me ask you: Dude...seriously?

So, although yes, the Q6600 might be a bit 'long in the tooth' by today's standards, there's still whole lotta whip-ass left in that quad core, be assured. At least as far as RoF is concerned.

Anyone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about wouldn't look at the OP's arrangement and say the CPU in this case is the biggest likely bottleneck, if you're allowed to pick only one.

And, for the record, yes, *NOT* having enough memory actually forces constant drive access - like you said. But that's not - by far - the only thing RAM does in a computer. Among other things, consider the amount of crap the average WIndows PC loads these days; even a 'clean' one can have several tens of processes running while at idle.

It's long since impossible to run a PC where only one app (RoF) is actually loaded into memory. In fact, that hasn't been the case since well back into the DOS days - hell, even then command.com was always loaded into memory no matter what else was running (let's discuss "internal" and "external" DOS commands some time, shall we? Or did you even know what those are???)

I feel almost certain you'll continue to argue the point; that's too bad, because while being ignorant isn't wrong, staying that way is.

Best of luck.

So you learned your information from the product descriptions and while researching what to buy next.

You have that sweet SATA controller at 3G/s. How fast is your disk read/write on those Barracudas? It's not 3GB/s I can guarantee you that.

Regarding the RAM discussion - if there is not enough RAM for a program, then where is the required memory coming from?

The relatively slow hard drive?

Which agrees with NattyIced's statement "Throwing more RAM won't help unless you have a lot of system pauses due to storage access. So unless you notice a lot of hard drive access, more RAM won't do anything."

I don't see how you can have a lack of RAM resulting in slower performance, without the HD being used. If there is a way, please tell me!