[Ailantd]

Hi

After reading some coments of people here I made some tests with the latest beta patch, with game running in a window an graphs of my machine resources at the other side, cpu, gpu, memory and hardrive access.

My system is a 775 quad core, 4 gb ddr2 and Nvidia 9800 GT wich is a very old card. win 7 64

My first bottleneck as expected with this card are shaders, so shader terrain for me is a killer and I need to have it deactivated so I can fly over terrain with more than 1 frame per second in a window bigger enough so I can see something. Over sea I can fly at even 40 to 66 fps with all maxed but terrain if terrain is not visible and is not too much planes, no more than 10.
The test also is performed with trees, buildings and terrain at low level, max effects and models and shadows on.

Over terrain what I have seen is that the CPU and memory is never fully used ( not even only one of the 4 cores ), the GPU is not performig so bad in windowed mode ( less pixels to perform shader calculatios ) so I can fly with average 20 with max about 30 fps over terrain (not over cities) unless the HD is being used. Every time de HD runs the game freezes like crazy. Of course over terrain, even in this low settings, the HD is working every few seconds and I think thats the bottleneck, as others have already reported.

I think that is the reason because even in most powerfull computers the game perform bad, they have good CPU, good GPU and a lot of memory, but none of these are fully used because every one have a standar HD, bigger or smaller, not more fast than 7400, 7600 rpm.

I would like to see someone with medium system and the game installed in a really fast hard drive like a ssd.