xander-p: Hello there!

So I purchased the game to try the full version of SF3. Unfortunately, it performs at ~8 FPS in the menu and even less in the game itself.

This is my setup: laptop with AMD Ryzen 5 3550H, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q, SSD.

Changing the settings does not really help; I could do a max of ~12FPS with shadows reduced to the minimum. Changing the GPU in the setting does not help, and there's literally no difference between the integrated and discrete ones in terms of performance, same low FPS.

Surprisingly, the Steam free version ("versus") works just perfectly with ultra settings. I even compared the config files and did not find any graphics-related differences.

I know this issue was published several times over the internet; however, I did not find any working solutions to solve it.

Any ideas about solutions/tricky settings I am missing?

Unreal_NeoX: Yeah this issue is sadly known. This game is VERY CPU intensive (single thread) and the official Hardware recommendations are not correct. I recommend at least a Ryzen 5 2600X or an Intel 8700k. The hardware recommendations are still the same of the base SF3 game who was a lot more close to these hardware recommendations.

What settings and resolution do you use?

Here you can see how many CPU-threads the game actualy only uses:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2278679060

Have an overview how fast most CPU's are compared to others:
http://www.smb.keepfree.de/benchmark.html

In my experience the CPU does not bottleneck anymore if it has a Singlethread score of at least 160.000 points.

Could you please post a ticket here on the bug-tracker to push this issue a little? thx!
https://redmine.thqnordic.com/projects/spellforce-3-fallen-god-community/issues/new

Nutzer001: I think the AMD Ryzen 5 3550H is not the problem. It has more power than my old AMD Phenom II X4 965. I have partially played SpellForce 3 and SpellForce 3 Soul Harvest on my old PC. It ran around 30 FPS most of the time. The CPU utilization was mostly between 80 and 96%.

The game needs a very powerful graphics card. On high settings, the RX480 was partially in the power limit (150W) and has reduced its clock rate.

My old system:
Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64
Motherboard: ASUS M5A99X EVO R2.0
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 with custom cooler
8GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM (2x4GB)
Saphire Nitro OC Radeon RX480 8GB @ 1432MHz Core Clock, 2000MHz Memory Clock (comparable to a reference RX580)
Screen: Fujitsu Siemens P19-1A 1280x1024.

Check if the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q is selected for rendering SpellForce 3. Reduce the resolution scaling.

The reached number of FPS suggests that the Integrated Vega 8 graphics unit is used for rendering.