Red Alert 3 - Weird Lag/FPS hault issue.

[Guest MonkeyMhz]

RA3 plays flawlessly with everything 1680x1050 all ultra high, shaders medium, water medium. Like im talking 25-30 FPS (i can even put on aax a bit like 2x-6x and still get almost the same fps). Never below.

But now ive decided that I want the nice Jelly looking water and the nice shaders on the ground. For some odd reason if i put everything Ultra high, shaders high and water medium, in 1680x1050 it runs like 19-26 FPS. Which is not good, i thought whoa big performance impact. I then decided to try Shaders high and water high to see the nice jellyness, and suprisingly it was the same FPS 19-26, changing the water from medium to high made no difference whatsoever. Then what is even more shocking, even when i lowered the Resolution to 1024x768, i still got the same fps, maybe a tiny bit more. This confused me. I then turn off Vsync and the game runs 23-28 FPS in all those same settings in 1280x800, now this is were im really confused, why would vsync cause such a performance decrease but only in settings above Med Shaders. Im so confused. I prefer to have vsync on cuz then u dont get those screen tears when scrolling fast and stuff. O well, ill eventually tweak the game and find the culprit. But it still confuses me out of my mind. Any ideas? anyone have a simular problem?

[Guest thecoolguy98]

oi MonkeyMhz,

Different graphics cards specialize at doing different things and also suck at doing somethings. Obviously your card doesnt like shader effects and/or reflections.

My friend had a card which wasn't good with smoke and he got a higher framerate with smoke effects on high than medium because u could see through the smoke on high.

If your card struggles with shader effects then leave them on medium and increase AA or something.