Why is this game so slow?

that's really odd. You aren't by chance running other programs while playing are you?

That's not odd at all, in late game on large map with lots of stuff going on the game will run very very slow, no matter what your hardware specs are.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/393532

Probably has a lot to do with it.

except he doesnt have an awesome rig.

Er, his rig blows this game's specs out of the water. An i7, 2 gigs of system memory and 2 gigs of video ram cross-fired? What exactly is an awesome rig then?

Unless Elemental is optimized for multi-cores, he's basically playing on a 1.6 ghz processor...2 gigs of ram is ok for Windows XP, but if he has vista or 7, then windows is using most of that RAM...His proc sounds like the bottleneck.

Not that there are terrible problems on my end, but indeed a bit of irony.

Had a three year old laptop that I loaded the game onto which was technically below minimum requirement, and have to admit I was impressed. Then it died on me.

So today I went and got a sturdy desktop with quad processor, decent graphics, big chunk of ram...and the game now runs slower.

No big deal, still playable. Yet if only every game out there could act like this

Actually elemental's retail box states "enhanced for multi-core." Find that amusing since it's been stated its barely utilizing a 2nd core.

That was actually a typo, it's 4 gigs of RAM.

And reading the core clock speed is not an accurate read on the power of the processor. He's got significantly more power than "just a 1.6 ghz" single core. No games really have much multi-core support.

If he were under powered to play Elemental, he'd be under powered to play most games now....and Intel wouldn't be king of processors. So yeah, you're wrong there.

The real issue is what's posted, and the fact Elemental was doing insane things like not even drawing off the GPU for some driver sets and things like that.

Dont forget the i7 turbo boost technology where your clock speeds go up on two cores if only two cores are being used.

Anyway you're not alone with terrible performance and mine IS a powerful rig.

AMD Phenom II 965 BE 3.4Ghz Quad

4GB DDR3 1333Mhz Corsair RAM

ASUS ATI Radeon 5870 1024MB GPU

ASUS Xonar 7.1 Surround Sound

Windows 7 pro x64

And i run all my games from a small solid state HD...

I get 9FPS on the cloth map late game on large maps..

like i said in an earlier reply here...

in late game on large map with lots of stuff going on the game will run very very slow, no matter what your hardware specs are.

Conclusion: Perfomance needs to be improved greatly. It's not our hardware!

I'm pretty sure that speed is a typo. There is no desktop i7 that runs at 1.6 GHz, and not many laptops run with dual video cards.

The problem he's having is most likely the memory leak that affects people with ATI cards. It slows the game down the longer it's running.

i'd like to point out that it's not just ATI. Alot of people with nvidia cards are experiencing the same issues. (read a few of the debug.err files in support)

nvidia GTX 275 here, and i have the same performance issues

It's also not just late game. My FPS go into the toilet as soon as I build a town with just the main building. Whats odd is I loaded the game on my 6 year old laptop and get just about the same FPS as my new computer when viewing a town.

My specs are for an Alienware M17x.  And everything in the game is slow.  Panning around, the animations, everything just crawls.  It makes the game far too annoying to play.

Is there anything I can do to help things?

Oh and it's from the get go.  Haven't gotten much past turn 100 on any game, it's too frustrating.

Guys....read the dev post. The problem is RIGHT there in plain English.

Late game, at specific LODs, the game should be phasing out a lot of stuff to improve frame rates. It's not. It's displaying everything you would see at the most zoomed in level, when you're zoomed out. That's no doubt killing performance. It's a simple optimization pass to make sure the LOD tech is hiding the correct amount of stuff at zoom detail.

Read my post.  The game is slow for me at the start.  And continues to be so agonizingly slow that it is pretty much unplayable.  I haven't even played long enough to reach "late game."

Dunno I am running an i7 920 @ 2.66 ghz, 6 gigs of ram and dual ati 5770's in xfire, with a 5 year old Audigy LE (never bought a new sound card since this baby still does the job) and mine runs perfectly. Though my machine is running XP. (so not using all that triple channel ram at all to begin with)

Edited in cpu speed, and sound card. Which makes me wonder now that I think about it, perhaps the people with slow games are running integrated audio? I know its supposed to be better then it used to be, but perhaps this is a bottleneck of sorts?

I'm having no slowdown at all...with a:

Core i5 750 @ 3.67 ghz

4 gigs PC12800 ram

AMD HD 5770 1 gig

No ATI card issues either.  weird.

No, because the game runs slow even when you're looking at a tiny city, read the last part.

"Oh, wait, Jesse just fixed some code and is now seeing a 10-20 fps boost...so apparently there WAS a silver bullet...and apparently he’s saving the details for his own change log    But good news, regardless! (jesse: so hovering over a city that used to give me 25fps now gives me 42-43)"

Nay, i've got an Asus Xonar D2 and still run slow. And the audio is still buggy sometimes.