With major IPC improvements on these last two generations of Ryzen to the point that AMD are now claiming significant Ryzen 5000 performance leads in games where Intel previously always dominated (eg CSGO, PUBG), I have to say I'm looking forward to finding out once and for all whether it is possible for a CPU upgrade to make 4v4 late game playable in COH2. Or at least make 2v2 always smooth.
I just feel like if anything can help COH2 process its game state efficiently, it's probably this giant cache:
At the very least, I fully expect to get one and benchmark it against the 9900K at work. My 1600X was a huge upgrade for me at the time, but has always been a bit 'first gen'. I've been looking forward to AMD reaching a point where they had a nicely polished Ryzen chip. And judging by the very straight forward marketing and price increase, it looks like they think they've made one.
Hello all.
I suceeded in getting stable 100-110 Fps on 2560 * 1440 on very high settings with Threaded optimisation from the Nvidia control panel!
In what part of the game did you get that FPS? That's quite a normal figure for me (Ryzen 1600X, GTX1080) at the start of any match, particularly 1v1. However the game is notorious for steadily losing FPS as each match goes on, particularly on larger maps, presumably due to the deterministic engine struggling to keep track of the increasingly complex game state.
How does pop-cap affect the game besides limiting the army size?
Just in case this wasn't clearly answered:
Your manpower income goes down as your population goes up.
The more population you use up by having certain unit compositions on the field, the more you will struggle to reinforce or replace units if a fight goes poorly.
So increasing the population cost of a unit does have an impact on your game beyond mere maximum army size.
As USF I would get a similar issue to Array's when trying to place a fighting position. The ghost image would only display on valid areas to place it. Over invalid places (ie blocked or enemy terrain) I would just see a normal mouse cursor instead of the red ghosted image. It makes it hard to tell that you have correctly select the button to place the structure.
Yeah, after trying it out in 4v4 it doesn't feel like the engine overhaul we've all wished for so dearly. Even after just 10 minutes it was chugging like always while under-utilising my CPU and GPU. It's probably more of a bandaid solution to potentially delay or hide the worst shortcomings of the engine, such as crashes. They were always fairly rare for me though.
But hey, the menu is smooth now! And I didn't pay for it.
But seriously, I would totally pitch in for a crowdfunded or 'Remastered' version to improve responsiveness in the bottlenecked parts of the game, such as particle effects (smoke/fire) and late-game in team matches. The fact that no matter what CPU you buy 7 years later, it never fully utilises a single core still hurts. That kind of engine development is probably 'new game release' money only though.
Do you think that going dual channel would help with the FPS?
Oh, I didn't pay attention to your RAM.
RAM clock speed and latency makes a substantial difference to performance for all Ryzen CPUs due to it controlling the Infinity Fabric speed that links the CCXs. Your CPU would have 2 CCXs containing 4 cores each, and those CCXs trying to communicate to each other would be the greatest source of latency (and therefore bottlenecking) in your CPU.
The optimal RAM speed for Ryzen CPUs before you hit diminishing returns is "3200Mhz" and higher. At "2400Mhz" for your current RAM there is definitely room for improvement in your CPU's performance.
Latency also matters with RAM. The 'CL' number is the most important, but it is completely relative to the clock speed. So you should try and buy RAM with the lowest CL number you can reasonably afford at a given clock speed. CL16 is a good one to aim for with 3200Mhz DDR4.
As for dual channel, I don't have data for COH2, but this JayzTwoCents video makes for a pretty compelling argument to always use it: https://youtu.be/bm4U_S_5dSo?t=643
I would also just generally recommend having 16GB (2x8GB) of RAM for gaming in general these days. If you have your settings maxed out, then long games on large maps could quite possibly be causing your 8GB of RAM to fill up and page to your hard drive, which could definitely tank performance. I know your dad's also has 8GB, but there may be other stuff on your laptop also using RAM. Close any unnecessary background programs, and then try turning textures right down and seeing if it makes a difference. If it helps, then bump up textures by one level at a time.
So all in all, I would first try lowering textures and closing background programs (especially browsers) to see if that helps. But regardless, if you find you have the money for something similar to 2x8GB of 3200Mhz CL16 RAM, you are likely to see a noticeable improvement in performance for all your games. There are an abundance of tech videos on Youtube showing real-world benefits in the double digit range. The biggest problem I'm seeing is that most laptop RAM seems to be 2666Mhz or lower, so if you look at upgrading you may have to shop around to find something better. Good luck.