Significantly More Stutter Issues on High End Hardware vs Older Hardware

[Triumph Jordi]

Hey Teddy Bear, thank you for your question.

My question is - should it not run smoother on a more powerful CPU, instead of running significantly worse?

Fundamentally lower-end hardware has a much narrower window of operation than higher-end hardware. On your higher-end machine you're playing the game at a much higher base frame-rate then when you play on your lower-end device. When these spikes happen and the frame rate drops, they will do so from a higher FPS and be more noticeable on your higher-end machine then on your lower-end machine.

Your different devices can also be limited by different pieces of hardware. On your laptop you are most likely GPU bound while on your PC you're likelier to be CPU bound, which creates more bandwidth on your laptop.

Also if it's caused by animations, why does turning them down to low not improve the stutter?

Because that setting controls the animation quality. As we've explained on several occasions, these stutters occur due to the initialization and deinitialization of the Animation/Modularity Systems on the units.

I can get Planetfall to run perfect if I use Vsync off or Vsync on but it is pretty much unplayable if I limit the framerate. They both use the same engine I think so Im not sure what is going on.

Planetfall is a game that released in 2019 and used tech that was even older. AoW4 is made on the next iteration of the Creator Engine, as all our different games are, which has seen several improvements and changes. PF f.e. uses DX11 while AoW4 has transitioned to and only supports DX12.

 

[Triumph Jordi]

@Triumph Jordi could you please confirm that there are fixes to this issue and these fixes are coming to the mainline release and when ?

What we have in the Open Beta branch is the only mitigations that are currently being worked on/pushed.

 

[Triumph Jordi]

Any news on a patch for this? Bought the game few days ago and it’s randomly decided after 30 turns to become unplayable

We released a Update/Fix for high end hardware during our previous patch cycle, which was the extend of what we could do about it. Stutters when panning over the map are inherent to our Modularity set up and not something we can fix.