Shogun Total War Warlord Edition very low performance

[grigor91]

Hi,

I have serious performance problems running Shogun Total War Warlord Edition.
When I move the camera with arrow keys the frames drop even lower 10 fps. If I don't move the camera the armies movements are fluid.
My PC specs:

CPU: i5 6600K
GPU: RX 480
Driver version: 20.4.2
OS:Windows 10 2004

I attached the autolog.

[gho]

The log shows several failed attempts to create a D3D Device version 3 in hardware accelerated (HAL) mode:

CreateDevice(D3D3): d3d=0x125b4c8 GUID=0x84e63de0(IID_IDirect3DHALDevice) lpdds=0x1289908(PRIM)
...
CreateDevice(D3D3) ERROR: err=0x80004005(DDERR_GENERIC) at 1901

so the game bypasses the problem and falls back on a software mode (RGB):

CreateDevice(D3D3): d3d=0x12a9328 GUID=0xa4665c60(IID_IDirect3DRGBDevice) lpdds=0x1289968(BACK)
...
CreateDevice(D3D3): lpd3d=0x12a9328 lpd3dd=0x12aeeac

this way the game works, but you can't expect the same level of performances for such a demanding game.
The interesting question, though, is there a way to configure the DxWnd settings so that the game could start with HW support anyway? This is not an easy question and may also depend on your video card. As soon as I will be able to make some tests with this game I'll try to see if this is possible.

[grigor91]

I made a test on a Windows 7 partition using the same GPU driver version and the game runs without dxwnd flawlessly.

[gho]

Without dxwnd the game runs in fullscreen mode that usually allows a much better video handling than the window mode. Have you tried to run the game with dxwnd but unchecking the "Main / Run in Window" flag?

[grigor91]

If I uncheck this flag the game crash after few seconds.

[dippy dipper]

I doubt Shogun Total war uses Direct3D version 3. So perhaps this is some kind of fail safe when Direct3D version 7 failed to initialize. Since it worked on Win7 with the same hardware it's possible that you are missing the legacy Microsoft DirectX End-user runtime on the Win10 system.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

[grigor91]

I installed the directx runtime, but nothing changed.

[dippy dipper]

I just tested my Shogun Total War Gold Edition and the game crashes at start up. After having a seizure with a blinking screen it finally shows a SEGA logo and the background for the main menu followed by a crash to desktop.

[dippy dipper]

I needed to enable hook tab "Inject suspended process" and compat. tab "Handle exceptions" for the game to start.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) the game ran fine here otherwise with FPS staying ~60 when using the keyboard to scroll. The games video options allowed the selection of software mode but this made no difference to the performance.

Testing was done on Win8.1 64-bit.

[grigor91]

I don't know if it's related, but I don't see black helmet menu transition effect when running from dxwnd on win 10.
I tried to run the game from dxwnd also on win 7 for making further comparisons, but it crashed immediately.
Here there is the win 7 log, I removed the end because it contains the same DxWExceptionHandler error.