What is my bottleneck for ZK?

My question is why I can only pull 10 FPS when watching a 5v6. Though really, a 10v10 would probably give me the same thing, battles don't seem to produce much more lag once you get past 6v6. Here are my specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 x2 5600+ 2.9 GHZ dual core.
Graphics: nVidia GeForce GT 520
RAM: 4 GB

From the way I understand it, these are really the only specs that should matter. I predict that the graphics isn't a problem because I run in fairly low detail and ZK simply isn't that detailed to begin with. I suspect that it is the processor, but I actually just upgraded it. I used to hava a Phenom quad core at 1.8 GHZ. I've heard that better GHZ is more important then the number of cores for gaming. And after examining it, I came to the same conclusion(for most games). Now I've seen multithreaded versions of Spring, but have never figured out how to use them in multiplayer. After saying all of this, I really want to know the ratio of speed increase between more cores and GHZ. Would a six core running at 1.5 GHZ be better then a dual core running at 4.5 GHZ?

quote: but it's currently a seperate fork under development.

Also it doesn't work with most of lua, i hear.

Looks like raw GHZ is the best then

64bit or 32bit OS?

64 bit

It's likely your graphics card. Check here: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+520

Bottom line: If a video card isn't on the high range chart, it won't cut it for gaming nowadays.

I suggest the following to de-lag:

1. Go to the Settings tab at the top right, then click the "Minimal" button and check the "Safe mode" check box.

2. Try disabling every widget that you can spare. (I always disable some, especially the map category widgets that make the pretty grid past the map edges. That normally saves me 20-70 FPS.)

3. Enable hardware cursor in the Settings tab so you won't feel any lag on your mouse.

My graphics card benchmarks about twice as powerful as yours and I get around 300-400 FPS with those settings.

Processor: AMD Phenom 2 965 BE (4 cores @ 3.4GHz each)
Graphics: nVidia GeForce GT 430 (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+430)
RAM: 8 GB DDR2-800 (400MHz)
HDD: SATA II, 7200 RPM

its unlikely the graphics card.

raw GHz is needed here.

i play on ultra settings with a geforce 560. lag comes when things like massive pathing commands/issues or much terraform revealed (on core2quad @ 2,8Ghz).

Weak video card, replace that. CPU is okish but not great.

My graphics card is defenitely weak for gaming but I simply don't see it with ZK. I tested my card with the Heaven benchmark, and what I noticed that caused lag was the fact that every pixel had to be rendered seperately. It caused lag when showing inside scenes or up-close scenes, but when most of the pixels were the same color(zoomed-out scenes) then I got considerably higher and smoother fps. I can understand this. The card doesn't have to render each individual pixel it just simply renders about 500 as 1. Mainly I noticed boost when it was showing sky scenes where most of the screen was blue. I don't see graphics in zk even coming close to Heaven with all of ZKs settings on Ultra. Since you are viewing pictures most of the time(or atleast I am) That doesn't strain the GPU at all. Agent, some of these sites will misrate things. Possibly find another site with those exact ratings. It seems strange that our cards cost the same and yours is twice as fast as mine. And yours is a lower series number. No matter how detailed I make zk I can still pull above 60 FPS in 1v1. To clear this up, I will do 1 battle with ultra, and a replica of that battle on minimal.

Graphics. The CPU could have a faster core, but graphics are easily the weakest part of the system. Depending on your power supply, get something like a 660 or 670. 680 would be really good, but probably overkill, and you'd need a 550W or higher PSU to properly power it.

If budget is an issue, then get the 570 instead.