I just started a match on the map "Aeolian Coast", and noticed that the FPS gets visibly low at times, particularly upon moving the camera. In the previous versions, I could play with max soldier counts with absolutely no problem; now the FPS tends to drop significantly even at default values.

There really shouldn't be a reason for this - my very high-end computer is embarrassingly expensive, and there is no real reason for why this particular game should be taxing my system quite so much.

My specs:

"Two 'NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680's in SLI.
16GB RAM.
'Intel Core i7-3960X'.
64-BIT 'Windows 7 Ultimate'.
'Creative SB X-FI Titanium'. (Latest drivers.)"

Game runs from a regular non-SSD harddrive.

PS:

No new uniforms? Awww.

That is an impressive setup indeed.

You're not the first one to say experiencing a hog in FPS, but I would've expected your rig to actually handle better than before. Is it similar in all maps?

I was mostly measuring performance on the effects of texture atlases at the spot of the shots below while adding some stuff, the grass, texture cutouts, new water.
I was playing map3 without AI, 1920x1080, full screen, antialias 8 (quality), no vsync (to measure over 60fps), shadows and postprocessing enabled, everything else enabled as well.

0.76: http://modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles ... hot213.png
0.77: http://modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles ... hot216.png

I've measured the FPS with Fraps in the above shots.

My dev PC is an AMD Phenom 9550 with 4GB RAM from 2008, the GPU is ATI Radeon HD 6800, 6830 or 6850 bought last summer.

This case of course doesn't show effects of a firefight, but not awfully lot changed there.

I'd be curious to find out what kind of figure do you get at that particular point.

If it is performing well there, I'd suspect it's the character shading that's killing the performance for you. I only yesterday added a switch for that too, so it's not in 0.77 then. I can make a modified material set without the shading for you, or anyone else, to try.

I just tried the map "Stalemate", with the default soldier count. I don't know if this is incidental, but the places where I experienced the most notable FPS drops happened to be the more urban areas - places with a lot of buildings. Out in the wilderness and around the trenches, the game tended to play (more or less) about the same as it used to in the previous versions. This could of course be because some of those urban areas happened to have some fairly large-scale firefights in and around them at the time, but it should be noted that I had plenty of large engagements out on open land as well, and the FPS was visibly much better there.

do you run fraps ? If you don't have it or don't want to install it you could run the game in debugmode and press F9 to show the framerate.
You PC setup should launch the framerates in the sky! When you are talking about low fps, how much is it? and what is about the highest framerate you have? (don't forget to turn off v-sync)
Also I suppose that your other games run all smooth?

I have this issue too. Turning off shadows and water quality kinda fixed it but I don't know why the drop in FPS.

Which GPU do you have?

I spent most of the today investigating this and trying to pinpoint the things that affect FPS on my desktop with ATI and my laptop with NVIDIA (Core i5, Geforce GT540M). For an unknown reason, the change from using texture wrap mode with building and wall texturing to texture clamp mode and arranging vertices in code so that they end up making similar wrapping visually, boosted my performance on the desktop from that ~50 to ~85 FPS on that one measuring point. Other optimizations like the new water affected just a few FPS for the better in total when everything was enabled.

On the laptop with NVIDIA, the change from texture wrap to clamp didn't affect a thing, 68 FPS on 720p (I don't think I should be able to run 1080p on that laptop). My best guess is that ATI, in general or my GPU, has poor support for this texture wrap mode, which has been hindering the performance big time in my case.

As that was the case on NVIDIA, it means that the additions we made are eating out the FPS then. The thicker grass is one of the bigger ones of them, that's why it's optional at this point so you can (almost) revert to 0.76 in terms of grass to reduce plenty of polygons for now. On my lappy, I'm getting a 10% increase in FPS if I remove the grass.

I studied the character model improvements and effects at another measuring point, having 30 immobile soldiers posing on the screen, and the difference was minimal between 0.76 and 0.77 character rendering methods. The shading effect seems to be practically free on both my systems, the integrated outline which was made to reduce batch count didn't actually affect at all in performance which is a shame.

The optimizations will continue for sure, this episode helps me to understand that my desktop GPU is in fact rather powerful, with 0.76 it wasn't, and paying extra attention to optimization is even more important now.

We've already identified plenty of batches to remove for the next version and I'm hoping to get good results from the collision detection optimizations I'm working with. Getting to the next release shouldn't take a month this time, it never should of course.

Lusky my man! (sorry, couldn't help it). Did you experience any improvement with fps in 0.78?

I'm currently playing 0.80, and haven't experienced any FPS-problems yet, for whatever that's worth.

*EDIT*

Hmmm. Just tried the new map, and spawned in the graveyard. Upon moving the camera and/or my character, I noticed quite jerky FPS. There really weren't any soldiers in the area other than me, at the time.

Otherwise, I really haven't had any particular FPS-issues on that specific map.

the new map isn't optimized yet, it will be in 0.81 which should be release in the next couple of days.
But anyway, even with an unoptimized map it should ran more than smooth on your rig.