Spring RTS Engine

Using the latest spring 80.2, I was wondering about other people's performance.

I have an AMD athalon 2.0ghz machine, with 1gig of ram.
It has dual 6600GT video cards in SLI mode, however, for spring, I have turned off SLI mode and run in single GPU only.

Now, my issue is that the game will spike to 100% cpu usage when I move 300 units (I was testing with /cheat and armflash).

I was just wondering if this is normal for this older cpu setup. A friend of mine has a core 2 duo at 2.0ghz, and sees no such CPU spike.

Does anyone else have a similar setup with problems? Any suggestions on how to fix this?

The machine is a on a fresh, clean windows XP service pack 2 install. Latest video drivers, and I actually have the sound completely off. No antivirus running, or anything else running in the background.

it's normal. 300 units starting to move put a heavy load on the engine.

Athlon is quite old technology nowadays. Your friend's CPU is a core 2 duo, which is much newer technlogy. Even though the "gigahertz" rating is similar or identical, his is capable of much more in a single cycle.

A big part of it is also that all the background processes - such as windows explorer, driver overhead and such - are being run on a separate core in your friend's case. Even though Spring doesn't really take advantage of multiple cores, being able to have full control over a core without any of the background stuff will give him a great speed advantage.

The good news is, very few Spring-based games will actually put you in a situation that requires moving 300 units simultaneously, so you're in good shape regardless.