My comp not good enough to play Supreme Commander online?

[Agme]

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance has a number of game breaking issues where the overall simulation speed the game can run at drops like a stone. This is the result of a series of nasty memory leaks.

SupCom has two major threads running called the renderer and simulation thread. The renderer thread primarily depends on graphical power and translates into frames per second. The simuation speed primiarly depends on CPU power and translates into something called simulation speed. Simulation speed ranges from -10 to +10, depending on your CPU power and amount of players and units on the map. At simpeed 0 one second in real-time translates into 1 second of game time. Once simpeed goes negative, 1 second of real time will only be worth a fraction of game time, slowing unit movement to a crawl. In a networked game, the game will default its simspeed to the slowest computer, since ingame calculations are done client side. So it is possible for a weak computer to dramatically slow a networked game down to unplayable levels. You can check your and others simpseed ingame by opening the console with ~ and typing "ren_ShowNetworkStats."

I have the same CPU as Haruko and I usually play computer stomps (I really suck at competetive RTS) with my friends against one very strong AI. It is not uncommon to see -2 or -3 simspeed after half an hour. Simspeed should be higher in games without any AI, since the CPU will not have to manage the AI. So try that console command to see where your simspeed is. If you need a bit more CPU power you can overclock your Athlon X2 7750. It commonly can run at 3Ghz with no additional voltage. Mine for example is at 3.1Ghz with no additional voltage. Just watch your cooling.

[Stark]

Does the simspeed drop due to resource problems or as unit count increases?

[Xon]

Neither, it is a memory leak which causes the game engine to never cleanup threads in the scripting engine. It has remained unpatched since SupCom:FA launch and there are only a few mods which help migrate it (not remove it all together). Even the latest beta patch (cos THQ isn't willing to let it go live) doesn't fix the issue.

[Uraniun235]

Does a system typically get choked by not enough RAM to cope with the memory leak before the game ends, or not enough CPU power to manage all the threads that don't get cleaned up?

[Xon]

Both.

It is a really nasty memory leak.

[Haruko]

Do you know if that's the same problem where, if you play a huge comp stomp game (say, six players or more), you're guaranteed to crash the game? I had that. Somehow found a patch (unofficial, of course) that fixed the problem. Something to do with changing the registry to allow the use of more memory, I believe.

[Genii Lodus]

Yeah it will crash eventually in a game with a large number of AI players. Without that hack you mentioned Haruko it'll die at about 2GB of memory but even with that hack it'll still crash when it hits the 3GB mark and there's nothing that can be done to fix that (memory limit of a 32bit application).

[Haruko]

Well, I don't even remember what hack it was exactly, or if we're talking about the same hack, but there hasn't been a single crash since, even though my brother still plays these massive comp stomps. I'll see if I can retrieve that hack.

[Genii Lodus]

Oh it'll probably be fine unless you have 8 AI on one of the large maps with a high unit cap. Then it'll still exhaust the memory. But you'll probably be playing in super-slow motion with the sim-speed slowing down before you quite get there.

[Uraniun235]

Both.

It is a really nasty memory leak.

That's weird that it cropped up in FA but not the original. I wonder what they added that caused that.

[Xon]

A similar issue was around in the original, it is just the expansion made it much much worse.

[Hawkwings]

When I played the original and played 6-8 player large games, the simspeed was about 7 real-time seconds to one in-game second by mid-end game if we were lucky. On one particularly bad day, it was 14 seconds to 1 second. Which is why you see game names including "dual core MINIMUM" and such descriptors.