Do older clients have better performance?

[The King]

It seems some newer client (2015+) lag when there are a lot of players on screen. For example, if 2-3+ guilds are all on the same screen in a WoE, everything can freeze and the game becomes unplayable.

There is a rumour that older clients (2013) have better performance and don't suffer from these problems.

Can anyone attest to this or provide anecdotal evidence?

Edited June 10, 2020 by The King

[Ai4rei]

To some degree this applies:

Newer clients suffer from memory fragmentation and thread leaks. The increasing use of Lua also hampered the performance (as opposed to hardcoded tables). The compiler has also been changed many times in the last few years, which also has some impact on performance (different processors take advantage of different optimizations). For some time clients have been encrypted with Themida, which is not healthy for performance applications.

At last the obvious reason: newer clients have more features, icons and other magic that have to be processed per frame.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Ai4rei