Huge performance gap between Dread Lords and Dark Avatar

A lot of changes were made in the expansions to ensure that graphics were rendered more easily and the entire game was altered so that it runs on a smaller footprint, therefore the newer expansions are no longer the resource hogging monsters that the original was.

You may want to run the updates as some of the alterations were released in the updates and this may well assist the issue you are having.

FYI Twilight of the Arnor is one of the smoothest games i have run and even with huge amounts of planets and ships i get little to no time lagging until very late in the game.

Best of luck in your games

Thank you Drengin!  It gets confusing as most updates are advertised for Twilight of the Arnor, do the 3 games update separately or should I just pick the latest one no matter what it says it's for and let the hopefully clever installer sort it out for me?

Reminder : I don't have Twilight of the Arnor installed, just Dread Lords and Dark Avatar.

-Marco

The answer to your question is twofold: Each chapter has its own updates and both SDC and Impulse are smart enough to give the game the appropriate updates.  However, changes that are made to TA aren't necessarily made to DA, and are almost certainly not made to DL, because they are three different codebases.

So, yes, update.  If the problem persists, we'll be here.

If you do not yet have Impulse loaded onto your system it is the best way to keep all your Stardock games up to date. Once loaded all you need to do is click on the games tab and then on your game, on the right hand side you will then see an options panel and you need to just click the update button.

The link for impulse is on this site or simply click below.

Any other questions please feel free to shout.

I just updated every component using Stardock Central, a very well-done interface that makes it easy to update games for a change.

Little to no progress however, I really think something is wrong, I mean I can understand the first game not being completely up to par with its expansions but just to give you an idea, even the Stardock logo you see for a few seconds when starting the game is sluggish in Dread Lords and smooth in Dark Avatar.  Same for the introduction video but I guess one could argue there are more or less frames in one or the other so that's why I decided to use the Stardock video as a benchmark and blatant example of side by side games, one working perfectly and the other running as if on a 386.

Of course, I have the option to give up on Dread Lords and start with Dark Avatar but I'd like to learn the game without the asteroid fields, super abilities and all that stuff first.

-Marco

The problem with this theory is that new patches aren't being made available on SDC anymore.

DL is old enough that it almost doesn't matter, but Impulse has a Vista-specific fix for DL and I'm guessing that might be it, though I really can't say for sure, as you neglected to mention what OS you're on.

Sorry for not mentioning my O.S. but I didn't want to start listing my pedigree in case in was a well-known issue.  I am indeed running Windows Vista but even the latest update to DL didn't fix it.

Believe it or not, I disabled SLi on a wild guess and it worked!  Day and night difference, I'm telling you!  Now I can enjoy Dread Lords smoothly, thanks to everyone who helped!

-Marco

That'd be the one.

Next step was to post your debug.err, which (I believe) would have shown that.