Windows: Age of Empires III Performance Issues

[eldakim]

Hi! I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2009 model with the 9600 Nvidia graphics card and bought the Age of Empires III Complete Edition off the Steam sale during the holidays. When starting up the game on Bootcamp, I noticed that it doesn't perform as optimally as I had hoped for... especially for a game that came out like 3-4 years BEFORE my laptop.

Initially, I had a map scroll stuttering issue which I fixed by going windowed mode and lowering the shader setting slightly. Also, turning on Vertical Sync helped limit the stuttering. But I noticed in sea battles consisting of 3-4 ships as well as medium-sized land battles, I get a noticeable framerate drop. While I do realize that AoEIII was, in its time, a graphics-heavy game, I just can't help but feel a bit embarrassed to see my laptop struggle to play this game smoothly.

Is this all my laptop can pull out?

[mmomega]

Originally Posted by eldakim

Hi! I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2009 model with the 9600 Nvidia graphics card and bought the Age of Empires III Complete Edition off the Steam sale during the holidays. When starting up the game on Bootcamp, I noticed that it doesn't perform as optimally as I had hoped for... especially for a game that came out like 3-4 years BEFORE my laptop.

Initially, I had a map scroll stuttering issue which I fixed by going windowed mode and lowering the shader setting slightly. Also, turning on Vertical Sync helped limit the stuttering. But I noticed in sea battles consisting of 3-4 ships as well as medium-sized land battles, I get a noticeable framerate drop. While I do realize that AoEIII was, in its time, a graphics-heavy game, I just can't help but feel a bit embarrassed to see my laptop struggle to play this game smoothly.

Is this all my laptop can pull out?

I had that same laptop, an '09 2.66Ghz C2D 15" MBP w/ 9600 and I ran AoE3 in OS X all of the time. Small LAN games with 4-5 of us playing sometimes remaining 3-4 spots filled with computer so 8 opponents 90% of the play time, my wife was actually still using that same laptop for AoE3 and WoW up until Dec.
My nephew plays AoE3 on his C2D 13" MBP and never raises any complaints. The only times we experience slow down is once all colonies are almost maxed and a huge battle breaks out on the map.