Old-Old Interface Lag

[Konstantinos XV]

Hello,

This is the first time I've laid my hands on PoN, and what I experience seems to be the very old interface lag / FPS drop.

It can be observed as early as the game menu. Particularly if I get the statue of liberty. Whenever I hover over different new game scenarios or over flags in the grand campaign, the render rate of the torch flame tanks. Same is true of the flags on the map: whenever I hover the cursor over anything with tooltips / toggle info panels, their frame rate drops (I'm pointing at the flags here as at the visible indicator of the overall performance, and as such responsiveness). Interface responsiveness on zoomed out map and moving around the map is sluggish, as are all the data screens (with F6 province census being particularly bad).

Naturally, I've tried searching for a solution before coming here, but all I could find were 2011 threads suggesting to uncheck Limit Map Loading. I assume this option is no longer in the game? I've also tried reducing texture size and tinkering with AGESettings.exe (making the game fullscreen and such) to no avail.

The game itself is a Steam one, V1.03. I'm not sure if it matters, but a nearby topic makes me think it does, - the client still has Paradox logos on the launcher and during the loading sequence.

Is there anything else I could try to improve UI experience?

(AJE performs fairly well on this PC. The only thing that irks me with it is movement of the camera around the map not being smooth, but there it's more in the "irritating but bearable" category, not "I really struggle with this" as in the case of PoN.)

[Kensai]

Γεια χαρά!

Please turn on the "debug mode" of the game (from Options) and tell us in which parts of the game you have the most important drop. Also, are you running with latest drivers and everything?

[Konstantinos XV]

Debug Mode is probably called "Error Logging"?
* In the menu FPS drops to as low as 4-5 whenever hovering over a new game scenario. Interestingly, the more flags the scenario description has, the lower the drop. In case of flagless Grand Campaign or 1880 Campaign it dances around 8-11.
* In the game itself FPS is never above 20 (max zoom in), 12 on a completely zoomed out map in a sterile state (cursor hides, not looking at any info).
* As soon as I hover over any province, it drops to 11-12 in the former case, and to 7-8 in the latter. Selecting armies or cities plunges it a few FPS further.
* List of Forces - 6 FPS, Provincial Census (F6) - 2.

So, it's sort of overall. Moving the cursor around the map to select something (and thus rapidly summoning all the provincial tooltips) aggravates the issue further. I haven't really played - just navigating around the tutorial was a pain (with reduced responsiveness mouse clicks often "miss"). And having tried different scenarios to confirm that it's not a tutorial specific problem, I set out to find solutions.

One thing that spikes with FPS is "Export" value. At the minimum of 20ms in general in the game. Up to 200ms on Provincial Census (as Austria). Render latency is generally low (<20ms), but rises with zooming out (into the ~150ms range).

As for the drivers, I usually let Windows do its update thing.
The system is a 64-bit Win7.
Even with the largest textures preloaded it has almost 3 GB of free RAM available.
Having unchecked "CPU Sleep Mode" to see how it loads CPU, PON was never above 40% of a single logical core (or 5% overall).
The video adapter is nVidia GeForce GTX 460, driver version is the latest 327.23.