Performance difference DL vs DA

Does anyone know this, someone from Stardock perhaps?

Sorry I have no clue since I never monitor my frame rate and to date I've only played DL so I even if I did pay attention to this I couldn't hazard a comparison to DA.

The thing is that this might be unknowable to the extent that it is probably very dependent on your specific video card.

Anyway there are a couple of people I know that do go back and forth between the two versions that might be able to hazard a guess but even then one of them currently has a relatively low end system and probably plays with most graphics features turned way down or completely off.

MottiKhan and DethAdder are the two names that first come to mind, perhaps they can be coaxed to respond here.

That's pretty much it. If you have one that properly supports the enhanced rendering option, it should run faster. If not, it will probably be similar or a tad slower.

I'm afraid I won't be of much help here.  I have all video settings at the minimum on both games and view the game zoomed out to icon mode.  I see no difference in performance, but that means little or nothing with my setup.

The only difference I can see is that to set up DA for minimum video settings, there's a single click that takes care of most settings for me.  I have to click each one in DL.

 

What's the enhanced rendering option? Is this new in DA compared to DL?

I have a GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB video card. That should be rather common I guess.

I'm running an 8800 GTS 512 MB and it's barely loaded by the game at 1680x1050 resolution.  That's with all video options enabled and 4x AA.  Video performance shouldn't be a concern at all with your card.  However, the performance difference between DL and DA is going to seen in the responsiveness of the game for CPU intensive tasks.  DL does things noticably faster in that regard.  DA has a lot more features and "stuff" in the game so it's not quite as responsive.  I think GC2 is unusual in that it needs a lot of CPU power and not so much GPU power.  It even runs great on my Laptop that has an ATI X1600 GPU.  That's a middle of the line graphic processor comparable to the 8600 GT.

Yeah but you still might just have to wait around for someone that happens to have that card to answer your question and even then there may be some impact due to processor differences as well although those should have less of an impact than video card.

If I may ask, what is the underlying purpose for asking this? Is this information somehow being used as a buy determination for DA?

I'm guessing but it sounds like the enhanced rendering option is a function supported (or not) by your video card that is used by DA but not by DL.

 

 

8600GS, here (512 dedicated). Many disabled could be turned back on with this specific card since the Dual_CPU system can coordinate the extra resources at a reasonably fast rate.

 

DA still runs a tiny bit faster than on the earlier PC (6200AGP) and i couldn't really detect that much of a difference for DL.

What truly gained a noticeable speed is when bigger maps are played all the way through the end; the HUGE amounts of activity makes for cpu intensive rendering which are handled quite well. GPUs will always provide support for precision and enhanced texturing, no matter how new or 'better' while the main system CPU must takes care of plenty.

TA is an entirely new experience though, and is in fact waaaaaayyyyy faster than DA -- that is, with high-end video gears or not.

 

Don't worry though, your 8800 is again a LOT more powerful than the 8600 i have.

Well I am, just like you Mumblefratz, one of the few players who already bought DA but is still playing DL, since I still feel I have to master that game first and I don't think I like the new combat system in DA.

That said, I sometimes experience that in late game my frame rate performance drops to lower that 30 fps when I have many ships in my view. I use a 1680x1050 resolution and 4xAA set up. So that might explain the drop in frame rates. Or is it really the cpu intensity, because I also use the setting allow AI to use CPU-intensive algorithms? But then again I have a pretty decent dual core intel cpu. I just hope that when I move on to DA I would experience a better fps performance, ceteris paribus the video/ai settings.

 

AFAIC, this only add clock cycles between turns and not the 'rendering' of activities on the interface. AIs would grab up more calls & routine checks than usual and thus take longer for their decisions - which gets developped afterward by whatever happens to be ON the interface.

 

Anti-aliasing may just be *it*. I know that when this is too high, the rendering is a lot more intensive on cpu-cycles which would otherwise connect with stack ranking at a much better rate. Unstressing the global process of anything - so to speak.

I'm getting closer at least with respect to feeling I've done everything in DL that I can. But for me it's the speed limitation of DA that has me more concerned. That in itself is also a performance issue as it implies many more ships in motion late game than the corresponding DL game.

To counter-act this there have been improvements in DA for the autopilot problems that plagued DL. That's not to say that DA has no autopilot problems but these are limited to the first turn after reload and can be "fixed" by moving all ships that will reach your rally point in one turn "by hand".

Anyway from what I understand late game delays are more related to cpu than video card. I guess it all depends on how you play. I go for abundant all type games with tens of thousands of ships and late game system slowdowns are noticeable. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @2.4GHz. I'm assuming that I'll have a bit more slowdown in DA but it should be tolerable. If you don't push the ship limits like I do you should have no problem.

The thing is that from all reports the DL v1.5 that's contained in DA is virtually identical to the last DL standalone install version (v1.4x). So if you have the DA disk I think it's a safe thing to upgrade to DA and just try it and if you don't like it just continue to play DL.

Another thing to consider is to bypass DA entirely and go directly to ToA. It's something that I'm giving serious thought to as well.

i have an 8600 GTS 512MB, which is obviously different but in the same GPU family. i don't think the memory volume makes much of a difference here, and if anything your card should go faster than mine because you've got a wider memory bus and a much more robust GPU by comparison.

FYI i usually game at 1920*1200 with 4x AA while also running a second monitor off the same VGA; sometimes i even watch video on the second monitor.

no info on framerates, but GC2 typically isn't bottlenecked at the GPU. it's a much more CPU intensive game in my experience, and typically that's only between turns.

as to your original question, i would give you a "soft" answer in saying that framerates aren't much different, but the memory optimizations and changes in DA and especially TA allow for a much better looking game without much difference in VRAM/GPU footprint.

Thanks guys for all the quick replies, very helpful. I already noticed that lowering my AA really improved the fps performance, even though GC2 would be likely to be bottlenecked more by the CPU.

That actually might be a good idea from a performance perspective.  I've found that TA is faster in some areas than DA.  One thing to consider is that a gigantic/abundant galaxy in DA yields around 700 habitable planets.  An immense/abundant galaxy in TA yields around 500 habitable planets.  So, right there, you're going to get less of a slow down just because there's less data.  Of course, that makes TA's economy tighter.  Plus there's higher ship and building maintenance.  In TA, I've been more limited in the number of ships I can build.  That has a big impact on score, unless TA's scoring system has been adjusted, but from what I can tell, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Actually I was comparing ship maintenance between DA and DL and for some reason DA ship maintenance is far lower in DA than in DL although ship build costs are far higher in DA than in DL. The end result is that in DL you can build ships quicker but your economy gets dragged down by the total cost of ship maintenance with far fewer ships.

Not quite sure of the total picture in TA. You mention ship maintenance being higher than DA so perhaps that means it's back to the levels that it was in DL or perhaps higher. For comparison in DL a huge hull BHE attack ship will probably cost about 100bc per turn in maintenance whereas in DA that ships maintenance is closer to 10bc per turn from what I've heard. For ship costs in DL a 1/1 huge hull "fighter" costs about 4K and in DA it's about 8K. So I guess the question is how does TA compare to that these number of both ship maintenance and initial buy cost that will determine what's the best way to play your military score.

TA is definitely different in some of the things you need to do but Mag has shown that you can still get a 1M score in TA but perhaps you need to do a bit less in the military area and a bit more in other areas. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

By the way, most active Diplomats have moved over to Tyranny of Evil. Magnumaniac, DethAdder and myself along with Justinsane and perhaps a few others, there really weren't all that many that are still active. You should join us at http://www.tyrannyofevil.com/. There are some non-obvious scoring advantages to TA that we discuss there.

I haven't played DL in quite a long time so I can't really compare it to TA as far as maintenance costs go.  You may be right in that maintenance costs are more similar to DL.  Planet counts definitely are.  I'd have to play a DL game to say and I don't think that will happen, I'm probably not going to play any more DA games either.

Thanks for the invite, I'll probably take you up on that if and when I start playing my "Kenny" character again.  Right now I'm playing my "blockhead" character with the Kzinti emipire, but when I finish with that one, I'll switch Kenny over to the TOE.