Serious battle-time issue

[ShadowMagnet]

Greetings!
I have recently got a spanking new PC, and just to celebrate splashed on TW Eras too. Unfortunately, I'd gotten rid of all my previous copies of TW when I gave my old PC away, so I can't install older versions for comparison.
Game installed quickly and without fuss, I decided to test my new toy and maxed the display options and set units to huge. It worked a treat.
About third, or fourth battle into Brutii campaign I have noticed that the game speeds up during battle. It looks almost like MTW with a speed slider moved to max speed. Units move so fast, they're beyond control, their banners jumping up and down like mad, 10 times a second. This also applies to camera movement, a gentle nudge spins the camera almost full circle. Unfortunately, the above is true for ANY resolution and any unit size. It happens to any faction I play. The symptoms continue when the game is paused or at any battle speed setting for that matter. And it only affect some battles, not all of them, so I can happily win a battle with 5000 troops in it, and get totally tripped up during a tiny battle, amount of detail, amount of troops, terrain, weather - none of this seems to have any impact. The problem occurs at random. I have tried disabling antivirus, LAN, anything. I have re-installed the game a couple of times, and I'm slowly going insane. If you guys have any idea what's going on, please, give us a shout. Cheers. :help:

[Ciaran]

That´s really weird, but I´ve experienced something similar at times. Usually in really big battles (bridge battles, especially) time seems to speed up on its own. I could hazard a guess that it´s somehow like a fast-forward, the game skips frames which results in the feeling of being faster. It sounds kind of weird, I know, but it´s my best guess.

[naut]

I've experienced similar, in which pause does not respond so your units are out of control and you can't pause it in time. Most irritating.

[Quillan]

Since you have a brand new PC, I assume you have a dual-core processor? Try this, it might help. When the game starts acting funny, pause it, and ALT-TAB out to the desktop. Right click on the clock in the lower right-hand corner of your task bar, and select Task Manager. Go to the Processes tab, find the RomeTotalWar.exe process, right click on it, and select Set Affinity. A window will pop up, with 32 checkboxes, labeled CPU 0 to CPU 31. Only CPU 0 and CPU 1 should be bright, the others should be grayed out. Uncheck one of the two, close task manager, and go back into the game.

Mine does strange things sometimes when I have both cores running. Usually that involves the units jerking around on the battlemap, almost mini-teleports as they go from point A to point B without covering the intervening distance. Disabling one core stops it for me.

[AMD4EVER]

Same thing happened to me on my new PC. It drove me nuts until I finally figured out it was the dual core processor causing the issue. So like the guy above me said, just set your processor affinity. You have to do this each time you start the game. If you don't want to have to do this each time then download a program called imagecfg. It will allow you to associate a particular program file with a particular CPU permanently. It works great with RomeTW.exe but I've had issues with it working with other programs.

[ShadowMagnet]

It is indeed a dual core Athlon. The fact it may have been the source of the problem did cross my mind, but I had no clue how to even bite this apple. You guys are gold, people like you make this forum THE place to be. I'll have a butcher's and let you know how I did. Many, many thanks! :bow:

[ShadowMagnet]

I said I'd let you know, so there... IT WORKS!!
Good and proper! Again - many thanks! :2thumbsup:

[HighLord z0b]

I've got a new PC running Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 - 2.13Ghz and playing R:TW and BI, I've never had any of these issues. Maybe it's only the older dual cores?

[Quillan]

No idea. I don't have these issues all the time. It happens every play session, but sometimes it takes 12+ battles before it starts, and other times it starts immediately. It may also be AMD related, as I've got a 4800+ CPU now.

[DukeKent]

I had the same problem with my Dual Core processor:furious3: Go out to the AMD site at
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html
. Download and install the "AMD Dual-Core Optimizer" & "AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor Driver for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 Version (x86 and x64 exe) 1.3.2.16". That should permanently fix the problem for RTW and other games that directly access the processor clock.

[HighLord z0b]

I thought it may have something to do with the older AMDs...

[Quillan]

Thanks for that link, Kent. I just finished two hours of RTR without a single hiccup, after installing that dual-core optimiser. The description certainly sounds like it fixes what could easily be the cause of the problem.