What are your system stats?

[Degtyarev14.5]

Let's see here...

Celeron 850MHz
768Mb PC133 SD-RAM (Hey it was dirt cheap&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
56Mb DDR-RAM ASUS video card
Sound Blaster Live Value sound card
Windows XP, well-maintained (defragged and all)

But when running battles of more than, say, five hundred troops total things choke. I've never crashed (except when I reach for the ALT key and hit that stupid Windows button) but a frame rate of one per second is DRIVING ME NUTS http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/eek.gif

Given that 640x480 dpi looks like utter crap, and I'd much rather 800x600, can I speed things up anyhow without having to buy a Pentium 4 or an Athlon 2200 or whatever?

The battle of Hastings is particularly rotten, for obvious reasons. One frame every two seconds is (use your imagination). http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif

[KukriKhan]

To run at 800x600 on your rig (close to mine) you'll need to turn off music, smoke, fauna, etc in the game options, and resign yourself to battles less than a thousand troops. Sorry m8; I tried a 800 v 600 battle with the Pope last November...fell asleep at the keyboard waiting for the silly game to acknowledge my moves & actually advance on the field. Took 'til Christmas for the little keyboard squares to fade away on my forehead.

Our little game is a resource hog. BTW your 56MB vid card sounds a little strange...they're usually square multiples of 8: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.

[Rob The Bastard]

I sympathize with you http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif


Amd 1200 Duron
256 Mb SDRAM
MSI 420 64Mb video

Pray for 2000 men or less...better yet pray for the next upgrade

[Cazbol]

My system:
1.9 Ghz Intel
GeForce 4
512Mb DDR RAM 2700
Win XP that I haven't defragged for almost a year.

There are two instances where I may get a little stuttering. Just after loading a map, i.e. while looking at field before the troops arrive, the movement of the camera may stutter bit for a short while. The other instance is on the stratetic map, when I have great numbers of unit stacks concentrated in the same area. Scrolling over that area may then stutter a bit.

Apart from that my system seems adequate. I really should try that defragging thing. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/rolleyes.gif

[Maxian]

My comp is a tad old:

AMD 1700 XP
512 PC2700 RAM
Radeon 8500 LE 128MB
Crappy built in Sound Blaster 64
140GB o' hd space, recently defragged
Win2k SP 3

And at 1280x1024 on both campmap and battle. Battles are smooth until I hit 10k men, or if I turn on smoke. The campmap scrolls choppily when I get several dozen stacks/agents onscreen at once. My brother has a 750 Duron and Geforce 2 MX, and he still got decent fps with a few thousand men.

My guess is: the Celeron is slowing you down, and Win2k seems to run better than XP.

[A.Saturnus]

Duron 1GHz
GForce 2 MX 32MB
256 DDR-ram

800*600 works most of the time, if it isn`t a coastal map. Win98 works even faster than Win2000.

[Lord Of Storms]

I have 1.7gig cpu intel celron, 256ram , 80gig HD, Geforce4 mx 440 vid card,integrated audigy sound card,WIN XP home, I had some framerate problemas and erratic mouse pointing problems at the beginning of my First game, I did some forum searching, I did not have the patch, But after I patched the game and tweaked the vid card, I also unchecked the hardware mixing box on sound settings (used to buzz) But now I can play at all settings only at the huge unit seeting do I get a slight lag , other than that it runs great...

[Lord Of Storms]

I copied this over from a post I made in Jan. it has all the tweaks thought it might help...I have a GeFORCE4MX440 PCI vid card and as to the stuttering or poor framerate I found that tweaking the card settings if you have that option with your card combined with the MTW patch and turning down the sound settings on the game itself, hardware mix box unchecked sound quality to med. or low seemed to help alot . Although it took some time to finally get the settings correct it was worth it. I did not care to play as much when the screen stuttered now I can enjoy one of the best RTS games around. P.S. if you do not have setting options on your vid card look around for the Nvidia card tweak downloadI found mine at 3dguru. It allows you access to a settings tab that can help optimize your vid cards settings. my settings are as follows . Go to Display>Settings>Advanced> if you see a tab that says Nvidia and the name of your card than you have the ability to optimize your cards settings. 1st slider set to Balanced .Antialiasing = OFF Anisotropic filtering =Off Direct 3D = if PCI card or AGP card in PCI comp. Mode The lower your texture memory size the better seems to be the rule the defaults on mine are 32mb while I now keep it at 16mb Mipmap detail level=(deals with image quality) set to Best image quality. Open GL Setting Buffer flip=Auto select(lets the driver determine the best method for your config. Vertical Syncing=set to Off by default (keeps it off unless required by the Application) Image texturing =again low seems to work mine is set at 8mb (again this is for PCI or AGP Cards set in PCI comp. mode. now this might seem overwhelming or confusing and it might not work in your case but the Nvidia cards all have similar chipset (Gpu)my Geforce4 is just a reworked gf2 so I hope this helps in some way

[Sigurd]

P4 1800 Mhz
256 MB DDR
GeForce4 MX 420 64MB
Onboard sound
Win2K

The game tends to lag on some occasions and other times not… even if the battles are similar.
No explanation for this… but then again I have a lot of sh** on my computer due to my studies.
(IIS, VS.NET, Oracle DB, Apache 4.0 etc.)
I have read somewhere that integrated sound cards are a typical lag problem in MTW.

[MonkeyMan]

Quote[/b] (ArseClown @ Mar. 20 2003,02:42)]Sound Blaster Live Value sound card
As Sword says I'd think that's your problem, BTW whats a 56meg graphics card never seen such an oddly specced thing in my life. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/confused.gif

[Degtyarev14.5]

Ooops, yes, sorry, that should say 64Mb DDR... Sorry, wasn't quite with it. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/dizzy.gif

I stand corrected.

A.

[ShadesWolf]

My only suggestion would be take care with what battlefields you play on.....

For Example, I seem to remember reading a thread that talked about Water and trees causing lag problems, so it appears the more stuff on the screen the more work the poor old computer has to do....

[Nelson]

AMD 2000 XP
512ram
KT3V MSI mainboard
GeForce4200/128 41.09 DX9
SB Live Xgamer digital sound

I play with huge unit sizes at 1024x768 and get good frame rates at all times in SP.

When I had a GeForce3 in this machine, I did have slow downs with large or huge units. Big battles need big video support it seems.

[Divine Wind]

Oki heres my specs

450mhz
128 RAM
20g HD
64mb video card

he game runs like dream on mine. But it starts to get choppy with fuana enabled so i turn that off. But in all...im a lucky guy i guess http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[chilling]

1.4 Althon
1.5Gb RAM
4200 64Mb gfx
Onboard sound
ASUS boards.

Plays in 1024x768 no problem. I think it's a memory hog.

[Dramicus]

Quote[/b] (Divine Wind @ Mar. 25 2003,14:26)]450mhz
128 RAM
20g HD
64mb video card

...the game runs like dream on mine....
lol are you serious Id like to believe you but some proof would be nice... If your not fooling around then great Considering that CA stated that Rome should run on a comp that can run m:tw.... lol I would love to see that happening on your comp.....

no offence.... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[Gregoshi]

I've posted this a dozen times I think, but I've been running MTW (SP & MP) on:

PII 350
Voodoo3 16mb graphics card
256mb RAM
SBLive Platinum
15gb harddrive

I've had smoke and fauna turned off, hardware acceleration turned off for the sound card, and 3rd party drivers for the Voodoo that support DirectX 8.1 features.

However, early last week I got a new baby:

P4 2.53gHz
512mb RAM
Radeon 9700 TX (64mb) graphics card
SBLive Value sound card
60gb harddrive

So far I've only tried the Hastings historical battle at 1280x1024(?) and the whole battle ran beautiful. I can't wait to try more.

[MacBeth]

Greetings, my first post.

I recently bought in the Jan sales a Dell Dimnesion 4550 upgraded with :

P4 2.8
ATI Raedeon9800 128
120 gig
512 ram

MTW now plays like a dream.

[Divine Wind]

Quote[/b] (Dramicus @ Mar. 25 2003,21:03)]lol are you serious Id like to believe you but some proof would be nice... If your not fooling around then great Considering that CA stated that Rome should run on a comp that can run m:tw.... lol I would love to see that happening on your comp.....

no offence.... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
hehe no offence taken http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif I actualy have two PC's in my house..1 being the crappy specs you have alrdy seen and the other being a much bettr PC (2.4ghz, 512ram, 128mb gpx). However the good PC has a terrible flatscreen which puts me off my game so i prefer playing with my nice old pc. I wish i could prove it I guess youll jut have to take my word for it But it definatly does work very well for such terrible specs. It suprises me too I guess the Medieval Total War gods have truly blessed me http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif

[KukriKhan]

Welcome to the .Org MacBeth http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif How's all that brooding working out for you? http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

Nice machine you have there. In my haste earlier, I failed to actually specify my specs:

hp laptop running WinME (quit laughing&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
1G Athlon
256MB RAM
8MB integrated TridentCyberBlade graphics
Rinky-dink on-board sound

I play with all but essentials off and stick to battles w/less than 1,000 troops. Saving my pennies for a newer rig before RTW comes out.

[chilling]

My new workstation at work is a 3Gb P4 Hyper thread job with 1Gb of ram and a Radeon9700Pro 128Mb.

Oh how I wish I could get away with putting MTW on it....

[efstratios]

well, hello there

I am currently going for a new machine myself facing all the problems that go with the old junk pot - I was just wondering, which is the best value for money video card for people like us MTW junkies?

E

[HopAlongBunny]

You should have more than enough coputer to run the game.

It runs nicely on mine:

amd850 athalon
512 SDRAM
G4 Ti4400 128 DDR MSI
A7V mb with VIA KT133 chipset
ES Maestro soundcard (too old to find any documentation for http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/tongue.gif)

Before I upgraded the graphics card (previous was ASUS G2 64mb) the game still ran fine.

[Jeff]

My stats:

Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz
80 HDD
256MB PC2100 DDR RAM
Geforce 2 MX 400
integrated sound

The game runs just fine on my computer on the default settings. Not sure of what they are as I haven't bothered to look and I have only had MTW 2 days.

[MacBeth]

Thanks for the welcome KukriKhan.

It was MTW that forced me to spend what is for me an obscene amount of money on a PC. I never played Shogun and MTW has been my first gaming experience. However once you are hooked you gotta pay up and play.

I had real problems with the original game install on the Dell but apart from that it's great. It was a toss up between the Dell and an Alienware Area 51.

The Dell came in slightly cheaper, they threw in a flat screen and 3 year warranty and have better credit terms. Also in the UK Alienware have only just launched and there didn't seem much back up.

My main reason for an upgrade though was to be ready for RTW from day 1.

[Sjakihata]

amd 2600 xp
radeon 9700 pro
512 ddr
a7v8x motherboard
Live 5.1
Windows XP

[Magyar Khan]

lower the pci memory on your videocard to lowest amount possible and the game will run smooth....