Poor Map Performance on ATI Radeon X1600

from Elemental Forums

I am running Elemental on my iMac with Windows Vista installed.  I have a Intel Dual Core 2 GHz processor with 2 Gb RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card.  Elemental's performance while in full-color map mode is very slow and choppy and response to mouse input is inconsistent as a result.  I've played with the graphics settings by disabling shadows, particle effects, and and changing a few other settings, with limited success.  I played the Elemental Betas and had similar issues, but kept hearing about how the next update had massive improvements to map performance, so I didn't worry about it too much.  But, those updates haven't had any effect.

I run a fairly clean box as far as background programs go, and I can run games like Dragon Age Origins without issue.  So, it seems I should be getting better performance than this.

Are others with similar hardware having the same results?  Is my video card just too out dated?

1,845 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I got a x1650 in my computer and I have the same issues you do. I can run any game today with no problems (maybe not super-maxed video settings, though that doesn't bother me) but Elemental in non-cloth map mode really chokes my computer after playing for a half hour or so. This extends to after a few tactical battles in cloth map mode as well.

 

But I think they said that the performance issues are caused by the game not using your video card like it should and uses your CPU to render the graphics instead. And i believe they also said that they were going to be focusing on killing that bug soon. Maybe.

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Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Based on post in that thread, I added an exception to my anti-virus software to the elemental directory.  It seemed like that made a difference, but it's hard to know for sure.  I then tried running in windowed mode, with 1024x768 resolution (my native resolution is 1600 pixels across).  That made a HUGE difference.  The graphics rendering is now smooth.  I'm not sure if it's because I'm running at a lower resolution, or just because it's windowed mode, but just an FYI to anyone experiencing similar problems.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

The windowed mode option also helped some for me,but around turn 250-270 i usually get the OOM msg and the game stops respoding.