Wow, I just started playing skirmishes on my new copy of Forged Alliance and am just amazed at how much slower it is on my dual core Vista system than vanilla Supreme Commander. After 45 minutes or so my skirmishes virtually come to a halt, with units moving only every 30 seconds or so. Even the artillery barages seem to move in slow motion.

And this is only a 1v1! And here I thought FA was supposed to have performance improvements over Supreme Commander.

turn off your intel ring display.

1. if you have range overlays on, turn them off, they eat fps like an emotionally unstable teen at mcdonalds

2. turn down graphics settings; especially shadow fidelity, bloom render, anti aliasing (vista allows AA to g up to 16 in some case and even higher, in rare occasions the default is set to 2 or 4, which can hit performance) and vertical sync, they do little but again, eat fps ( note these areent the only 1s u can turn off, just the best to my knowledge)

3. switching to cartographic mode can nearly double your fps in some cases. and it has been so modified in FA that the game is fully playable in cartographic mode, some people even prefer it to normal!

4. turn off any programs you may have running in the backround, internet explorer or your equivalent wont cause problems unless its dling something, but things such as msn, bittorrent, videos, or any active computer function can steal away a few fps points. emphasis on few though.

5. you can track your dps, rounded to the 1st decimal point, by clicking the / that is on your keyboards numpad. note the / that becomes ? with shift will not work, only the other /

6. this is about all i know that can help, i have however heard about numerous rumours that vista is connected to perfomance and errors. if your deperate you could try running it on XP or overclocking your dual core.

thats about all i know that can help, good luck

fa does have performance improvements, but its max details settings are higher than sc's to push the best machines out today, so to get a similar level you have to set FA's settings lower.

Basically, turn off everything and set everything else to LOW except for Fidelity which can be left on MEDIUM.

You'll be able to play FA at 30 fps against more than one AI in about two years. Patience.

Pretty much, just like TA before it, no one's computer can handle FA the year it releases.

Exactly. But worse now with SupCom/FA. Maybe add another year to that two years. Quad cores will be available for cheap then.

The real question is, is it the sim or the graphics that are resulting in this.
It would help if we knew your fps when zoomed out.

Not going to be sim in a 1v1 against 1 AI, even maxed on the standard 500 units each. Even my PC would do better. You have three real choices:

A) Your PC is a piece of real crap and you need to upgrade. Dual core doesn't necessarily prevent this, but most/all dual cores should perform much better. Your graphics card is unspecified.
B) Your settings are overdone and need toning down, plus other small perf improvements like closing background programs
C) You have a major perf issue like sound conflicts.

I was at -5 about 20 mintutes into a 1v1 against an adaptive AIx on setons, wheras I would be about +2-3 against a human opponent at this point. The AI is an insane sim hog.

I too have done a similar game on that map, and whilst it was slower than vanilla with the same settings, it didn't go that slow. 3800X2 here.

I just got FA and it's running super slow. Vanilla SupCom ran at about 15 frames most of the time. FA runs at about 7-10. I've tried adjusting the resolution, tried out all of the graphics settings, turned the rings on and off, and nothing makes it better or worse- it just stays around 7-10. It sucks...

I get the feeling my problems are driver related, so I'm doing a total driver cleaning and reinstall. Let's hope it helps.

How do you measure FPS in-game?

I built a new system this week and would like to compare my old rig to new rig.

You press the "/" button.

Nope, my performance is still the same.

You updated motherboard drivers too? One guy said he had unplayable performance until he updated his mobo drivers.

I think it's just the new visuals and the lack of non-minimalist UI that's taking those precious 5 or so frames away from me. Hopefully we'll see an SCA UI for FA.

That means your CPU is the bottleneck and you need a faster one. Your video card isn't the problem.

Its not my CPU, as I've been messing around wth ATI tray tools all day and have been slowly improving my FPS. I've finally hit an average of 13, so Im close to where I used to be.

Following the advice of those who have posted to this thead I have turned the sound off, and se all the graphics options to the lowest possible settings. This has helped, but only just a little. I still find my 1v1 skirmish grind into the dus when I reach the 700 unit mark or so (playing on Martian Domination).

By contrast, when I play this same game on Intel Dual Core box using vanilla Supreme Commander I don't notice any slow-down on Martian Domination even against 4 Sorian AIs. There is definitely something different with how FA works on my system than SC.

Can you tell me how to turn my rings off

Also can you list other ways to improve the speed and list instructions thanks a lot! BTW i have all my settings on the lowest

ctrl-W for the rings

Q6600 + 2Gb RAM + 8600 GTS = perfect tool for FA

costs : 500-600 $

nothing more

for me is max details , 16x AA , with no freeze, no crash

If Caesar243's statement holds water, then I've got some serious issues.
System Specs: E6700 @ 2.8GHz, 2gig's DDR2 ram, 8800 GTS w/ Vista 32bit.

About fifteen minutes into any skirmish game on any map (1 AI, 6 AI, tried them all), my gamespeed goes to Antarctica. By the time I finally get to the 45min mark, about three realtime hours have gone by and the gamespeed is sitting at -5. The bizarre part is I actually sped up the gamespeed to -4 by desroying all fifteen T3 shields...and the game stopped freeze-framing. Changing over to the cartographic maps, dropping graphics to nothing, making sure everything other than FA isn't active....still a solid -4/-5.

There's no "junk" to be had on this thing. Anti-virus scans are done 2 or 3 times a week, anti-spam and anti-spy about once a week. Everything has the latest and "greatest" update I can get. Oh, and defrags are performed every week.

Edit: fixed a couple typos