The last time we looked at Europa Universalis 4 we found that a significant portion of the frametime was spent drawing simple primitives for the borders, and far too much time spent rendering trees and other map accessories.

Revisiting this two years later we have found that some of the newer updates have reduces the drawing of trees and other items on the map to the insignificant time they should be, but it appears the border drawing is still causing problems.

When the map is zoomed out to the maximum we are able to reach performance >150fps which is a great improvement over the <40fps we saw in some scenarios in the past. However, when zoomed in at the normal play level our frame rate dropped to ~60fps consistently — with over 50% of the frame time spent on the country borders.

In the above image we see highlighted the border and trade-route rendering taking the majority of the frame-time. The section to the left of the blue area is all the shadow rendering and makes sense, the small amount of calls before the yellow highlighted render calls is the rendering of the map itself.

If the border code could be reduced then the game could easily run at >144fps, if the shadows are turned off then it can be even further reduced. The game might finally be able to run on a cheap laptop, as it should have from the start.

This many years after the release of the game, which is still releasing DLC, this relatively simple rendering element still appears to be the main rendering cost of the game.

I really want to play this on my laptop without the battery being eaten. Paradox, again, please fix (or please let me do it).