Viewing Fog of War causes severe slow-down

[milspec74]

Hi,

The game normally runs very smoothly on my system, even at 1280x1024, with Very High image quality and 4x Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. There is the occasionally hiccup when first viewing a city, but other than that it is very smooth to scroll and to play.

However, every time I view any section of the 3D travel map where Fog of War is present, the frame rate decreases dramatically. By Fog of War I mean the black haze that obscures parts of the map that I have not yet traveled to. Once I explore and push back the Fog of War the slowdown stops, but if there is even a tiny bit of it on the screen my frame rate drops to a stutter. This happens at all resolutions, texture qualities, and AA/Anis settings.

Is this a known issue? Does anyone else experience this?

Windows XP SP2
DX 9.0c
Athlon 64 3000+
1024 MB RAM
NVidia GeForce 7900GT 256 MB
Forceware 84.25 drivers
Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit

- milspec

[milspec74]

Hi,

The game normally runs very smoothly on my system, even at 1280x1024, with Very High image quality and 4x Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. There is the occasionally hiccup when first viewing a city, but other than that it is very smooth to scroll and to play.

However, every time I view any section of the 3D travel map where Fog of War is present, the frame rate decreases dramatically. By Fog of War I mean the black haze that obscures parts of the map that I have not yet traveled to. Once I explore and push back the Fog of War the slowdown stops, but if there is even a tiny bit of it on the screen my frame rate drops to a stutter. This happens at all resolutions, texture qualities, and AA/Anis settings.

Is this a known issue? Does anyone else experience this?

Windows XP SP2
DX 9.0c
Athlon 64 3000+
1024 MB RAM
NVidia GeForce 7900GT 256 MB
Forceware 84.25 drivers
Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit

- milspec

[milspec74]

FYI:

00003171 Loaded UI Game Root
00004625 Executing d:\program files\ubisoft\heroes of might and magic v\demo\Profiles\global.cfg
00004953 <color=green>PSRate = 2616.16; FillRate = 2614.77; TriRate = 28.4332; CPUclock = 1809.27
00004953 <color=green>AUTODETECTED: Unknown card, ps.2.0 class hardware
00004968 <color=green>AUTODETECTED: Speed: 1 Texture: 2 FSAA: 3
00004968 Executing d:\program files\ubisoft\heroes of might and magic v\demo\Profiles\Deven\user.cfg
00004984 Executing d:\program files\ubisoft\heroes of might and magic v\demo\Profiles\Deven\input.cfg
00005312 Executing ..\Profiles\autoexec.cfg

[milspec74]

FYI this happens much more severely on the above-ground Good Guy map (the campaign), then on the below-ground Bad Guy map (the "custom" map). The below-ground maps feels more closed in. I will go test to see if the frame rate still drops when I below ground on the Good Guy map.

[unreal_az]

I think this is just a demo video ram leak and the final version will not have problems like these.

[GhostDracolich]

My brother ran into the same problem when viewing the "Fog". However, we concluded it was based on his angle (if you looked at the minimap, the camera box was covering the whole map!). It will still render things behind the fog even though you can't see them.

Thats my guess ;p
When your running into framerate problems, check the minimap if you can't tell whats going on in the game. Thats what I used to do in a lot of RTS games I played http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[m0tte]

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem with the full version of HOMM5. It runs smoothly (~40-50 fsp). I only get a bad fps (~2 fps) if i use a flat angle and/or there is some fog of war on my screen. Its independent from screen resolution, level of graphics quality and all other options in the game menu.

My hardware:

Amd athlon 64 3500+
1024 Ram (dual channel)
Nvidia Gforce GT6600
Asus A8V mainboard

Software:
Windows XP SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Newest chipset & hardware drivers

None of my hardware is overclocked and i never experienced problems like these in other games.

I hope anyone will find a solution to this problem, there are only a few having this problem. :/

Thanks for reading,
motte

[unreal_az]

I've seen this problem on a 6800 too(framerate drops to 1) and what's strange is that on my video card 5900 it works ok (never drops under 10). You can use www.fraps.com (http://www.fraps.com) to see you fps in games.
You can try to install this driver:
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Files&go=cat&dwn_cat...go=giveme&dwn_id=282 (http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Files&go=cat&dwn_cat_id=10&go=giveme&dwn_id=282)
Thing is Fabrice said there are some issues with the angle of the camera and i guess they are working on a patch. I guess these are just leaking animations.
Fc post:
http://www.celestialheavens.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1683

[p4eev]

i turned off shadows (in user.cfg) and dont have these framedrops anymore.

[Elrath.com]

"The performance drops a lot !
The game has been tested on all common configurations and almost all graphic cards, and the results were outstanding, much better than i anticipated. Nival did a great job at tweaking performance in the last few weeks. However, there is one particular case where you can see a framerate drop, its when you lower the camera down to the ground level, and pan to see the whole map on the screen. In this case, logically, you get to display a huge amount of objects, and the framerate will drop. But this is clearly not designed as a playable view, it is there only for screenshots. "

thats what he said. basically. we cant fix it, we wont fix it, just dont look horizontally and youll be fine. dont worry, its only for screenshots!


bull if you ask me.

[m0tte]

Thanks for you answers, now i just dont use this low-angle-view. Now I have other problems, but these are none of technical nature. Only the game is getting harder and harder http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

motte

[Ribannah]

The same happens when the angle is high. I suspect that the game is trying to draw (but not show) things that are behind other things where it wouldn't do so on a revealed part of the map (a directX feature).