Profile of Inverse

The thing about performance issues is they slowly become less relevant as time passes. Back in 2006 you needed a lot of grunt to get the most out of CoH. If you were lucky enough to have a $500 x1900 you could max the game at a whopping 40fps at 1024x768. I'm sure plenty of people complained they couldn't run high settings above 10fps on their favourite 6600gt even though it played CS flawlessly. Fast forward 8 years and we still have people who talk about how good CoH looks and nobody cares about performance in the slightest.

Having said that, if they can squeeze more out at the bottom end without impacting the experience for higher-end users that would be a very good thing in terms of popularity right now, today. Many of us are completely happy with the performance on high settings considering how stunning the game looks. But a common complaint is that low end computers are always bottlenecked regardless of how much you push down the settings.

That's a very good point. I guess the problem I have with their approach is the fact that I really don't think the visual quality you're getting from CoH2 justifies the ridiculous hardware requirement. You kind of expect PC games these days to have pretty damn good scaling; games like Dota 2 and SC2 and CSGO and even single-player games like Bioshock Infinite and Skyrim look absolutely beautiful if you have the hardware required to max them out, but also have extreme scaling on the low end. You can play those games on nearly anything if you're willing to set everything to the minimum, and in the case of competitive games, a lot of people do that regardless of their rigs in order to guarantee consistently perfect performance. CoH2 has the beautiful, high-end aspect nailed down, but lacks the scaling on the lower end that has become standard for PC games in the last few years. Given the visual quality of CoH2 at minimum settings, there's absolutely no excuse for me getting sub-60FPS during chaotic action while being able to get 80+FPS consistently on higher settings in the other games I listed above.

I play mostly in 4vs4 and the game is always between 50-60 fps with the specs posted above. So i would suggest not to exaggerate on the topic of performance as the game is really fine in that matter. If someone don't like the game, it's fine, but using performance issues as an excuse for not playing is not. I'm a computer engineer whose hobby is playing computer game since i was 12 years old and i'm now 47, so i may know something in the matter.

i played vcoh 7 years and yes that engine is lighter. But Coh2 is damn fine for competitive play on a middle rig as it is.

90% performance issues are from a computer not fully optimized. Maybe for games that are not as computer intensive as Coh2 it's wont be matter. Coh2 is one of the most demanding game on the market, it need a fully optimized computer to perform at it's best. ( Even for a new rig).

If anyone need help to optimize their computer, just page me. Ill gladly help.

I use Glary Utilities 5 to perform optimizations. (it's free and the best tool of the market) and i'm not advertising.

Hoping to help and this post is not intended to offense someone in any ways. (just telling the facts)

See you on the battlefield.

Like I've mentioned above, acceptable framerates are entirely subjective. You find 50-60FPS acceptable; I find 60-70+FPS acceptable. I notice a significant difference between 50-60FPS and 60-70+FPS, and I find it very frustrating to play with, especially when I've neutered the visual experience and still can't maintain what I believe are acceptable framerates. That's why I posted this thread. In my opinion, the framerates I get make the game frustrating to play. If I'm alone in that opinion, then nothing needs to be done. But I think the response to this and other performance-related threads over the course of CoH2's lifespan make it clear that this isn't just a fringe issue.

performs fine for me.

"Fine" is entirely subjective, and doesn't really bring anything to the conversation, unless, of course, you define what "fine" means to you

I'm talking about playing on the absolute minimum settings that the game offers with a rig that can easily handle 99% of games on the market right now and getting sub-60FPS during stretches of heavy action. In my experience, it is extremely frustrating to play any game in a competitive manner when you're running at less than 60FPS; I personally find I stop noticing a difference at 70+FPS, but I'm using 60 as a benchmark because it's more widely considered the ideal framerate for smooth gameplay. Anything below 60FPS (again, in my experience) is noticeably choppy when you perform rapid movements such as camera panning and quickly issuing commands to multiple units in a short period of time.

Of course, different players have different views on what acceptable framerates are. My post is based on my belief that being unable to maintain 60+FPS throughout the course of a game results in a frustrating gameplay experience. My rig can handle that self-imposed requirement in every other game I play, including playing games that look subjectively better to me than CoH2 does at minimum settings while retaining higher framerates. That is the focus of my complaint.

...and it was actually pretty fun! The gameplay feels vastly better now than it did when I last played months ago, and while I didn't play enough to get a grasp of things strategically to the point of being able to comment on that aspect of things, I generally enjoyed myself.

But despite this drastic improvement in gameplay, I really can't see myself continuing to play. Why? Because while the core gameplay itself is far better than it used to be, the act of playing the game is still ridiculously frustrating and terrible.

I know there have been a million threads about CoH2's problems on here, but I wanted to post this because for the longest time I had asserted that CoH2's biggest problem was its core design and unsatisfying gameplay. I no longer think this is true. Don't get me wrong, CoH2 is far from perfect, and there are still a lot of really glaring gameplay issues, but the game's core playability problems come from two entirely different areas: performance and interface.

I still can't believe how terrible CoH2's performance on modern machines is. I have a pretty good rig (i5 2500k @ 4.4GHz, HD6870, 8GB RAM), and when I ran the performance test yesterday on bare minimum settings, I got a whopping average FPS of 41, with a minimum of 28 and a maximum of 61. On bare minimum settings, without streaming, without anything else going on. This is a rig that can play Crysis on medium at 60+FPS, vCoH while streaming at 1080p at 100+FPS, Dota 2 and CSGO maxed at 80-100+FPS. Yet it can barely keep above 60FPS in CoH2 matches, and struggles to keep 30FPS while streaming at 720p. Playing an RTS at sub-60FPS is probably the most frustrating thing in the world, and there's no excuse for it to run at anything less when you take into account how subjectively terrible it looks at minimum settings.

And the poor performance isn't even limited to in-game. How is it that when I mouse over a clickable button in a menu, the background video actually starts stuttering and drops to 15FPS? Use the CoH2 menu interface, then use the Dota 2 or CSGO menu interfaces; the differences are striking. CoH2's menus are so sluggish and frustrating to navigate; though visually appealing, interacting with them gives a real feeling of tackiness. Compare that to the CSGO menu, for instance, which is crisp, clean, and incredibly responsive. I don't understand how the game can be so poorly optimized that even the menu interface performs extremely poorly.

But performance isn't the only thing that hasn't improved since the last time I had played. Somehow, someway, the already-polarizing CoH2 user interface has actually managed to get worse. The biggest new problem I noticed was the painfully cluttered tactical map. I cannot fathom how a UI designer could think it was a good idea to put the resource income values of every single point overlaid on the map, with no option to hide them. That's information that you memorize after your first game; why is everyone being forced to see it every single time they open the tactical map? I can't count the number of times yesterday that I had to consciously look for capture points to click when I opened the map because of these numbers, instead of just being able to open it and issue my commands without thinking.

On top of the new issues, there are still serious problems with unit and information visibility in CoH2. On winter maps especially, where there is very little contrast between the white snow and the light blue unit icons/health bars, it is extremely difficult to gauge at a glance the status of a fight because the icons and health bars of units you don't have selected go semi-transparent. This mixed with the white backdrop means you can't just glance at a unit and see quickly their number of men remaining and their current help because it all blends in with each other and the background. Why there hasn't been an option added to make unit icons/health bars opaque at all times I do not know. It's a simple change that would drastically improve the playability of the game.

Like I said at the start, CoH2's gameplay has come a long way. I had a lot of fun playing against the new factions, but I felt like I was fighting the game every step of the way. I want to enjoy your game, Relic; please quit putting so many technical and aesthetic boundaries in the way of me doing so.

First of all, the Relic that designed vCoH is far from the Relic that designed CoH2. Most of the core vCoH team is at Smoking Gun.

Secondly, if you think vCoH had better support than CoH2, you're delusional. vCoH's support was flipping awful. Bugs lasted months, and balance patches were rare. The only reason MGs act like they do in buildings right now is because someone at Relic fucked it up years ago and nobody knew how to fix it, so they turned it into a "feature". There are even posts on GameReplays of the community manager at the time promising additions to the UI to let you choose which side of a building an MG initially sets up in when you put it in there. That was 4 or 5 years ago, and it's never been added.

Relic's business model for CoH2 requires that they continuously support it. They've done a far better job with CoH2 than they ever did with vCoH in that regard.