PC upgrade time?

Hope this isnt in the wrong place.

After the posative reviews of RTW:BI i decided ti bite the bullet and buy it. Even though it involved buying RTW again, one disk was used as a coaster, and one in a drunken frisbie comp. Think is it really slow, both in the "loading" screens and when scrolling on the campaign map.

I'm not asuming this is a problem with BI but that my pc is getting on a bit, 3 years old now. So the question is what do I need to do? Would a new graphics card and some extra ram help?

Any other suggestions? thats for the help in advance.

The most important part in making the game runs smoothly is by far the processor, and NOT, unlike we could think, the graphic card.

Sure, the graphic card DOES help, of course. But the main CPU has a FAR bigger impact.

Is that a "Intel celeron 2.00GHz"? and if so does that need tweeked to?

If not where do I find out what ive got?

as the more astute of you may have guessed im not what you would call "technically minded".

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Originally Posted by red comyn

Is that a "Intel celeron 2.00GHz"? and if so does that need tweeked to?

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Yep, that is the CPU.
"Intel" is the brand (the two main are "Intel" and "AMD", the former being the most famous, but I personnally much prefer the latter, which has on average slightly more powerful processors for a substancially smaller price ; though the battle between the both groups are fierce and common :D).
"Celeron" is the model. It's crap. Pure crap. No wonder you feel it's time to change :D
2.00 GHz is the frequency of your processor. It means how fast it goes (though it does NOT necessarily imply how powerful it is. It's a bit like the RPM on a car : the faster it goes, the faster the car goes, but a different car with a different engine can go much faster with a more powerful engine, even at lower RPM).

As for today, it's quite low frequency, though not completely obsolete.

See folks explaining things in easy terms works when talking to stupid people ~:cheers:

So then what should i be looking for and how much will it cost approx in UKP?

Well the System requirements for RTW is 1.0 GHZ so there should be no problem with rome working, But i wonder what are the requirements for BI?

The same requirements I think. I run an Athlon 2000, 1gb ram and an Asus A9600XT. Runs sweetley for me, I noticed most difference when I threw away my old MX440 graphics card, it was a little crappy before that.
I think you will be ok if you throw some more ram and a nicer graphics card at it. You dont need to go the the expense of a new motherboard then. And even if you are technically limited, it is easy enough to swap a graphics card and some ram without knowing about which chipset, bios, FSB speed etc.

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Originally Posted by red comyn

Think is it really slow, both in the "loading" screens and when scrolling on the campaign map.

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That's not because you need to upgrade. There's this odd copy-protection program that starts up when you play RTW, called ~e5.0001, which slows down the campaign map significantly, and there's nothing you can do about it. Turning it off while your playing RTW crashes the PC.

Weird. I didn't know that, seems bizarre they use an anti copy program which restricts the performance of their game.

So how does this anti copy thing work and how do I stop it turing every pre and post battle screen into a "off to make a brew" time.

Hehe, if you want to talk about slowdown you should try fighting a five stack battle in a large town on huge unit settings and high graphics. I have a pretty beefy machine, but even that brings it to its knees. I can't live without my massive man battles though. Anything less than Huge doesn't seem like a real war to me.

A graphics card 6600gt, plus upping ram to 1024, speeds up loading time and gameplay.

Right after speaking to a little pc shop, they will so the following...

ATI Radroen 9950 256MB and 1GB of ram fitted for £170....(although maybe a bit less for cash...nudge nudge.)

does this sound good in both performance and price?

If you're running windows XP, 256MB of RAM just won't cut it anymore. I'm suffering under that mistake on my current work machine. Spend the extra to get 512 MB, you won't regret it.

Edit: Never mind, misread your post. The 256 is cache memory, which is good, and the 1GB is RAM which is double what I just suggested above, so you're in good shape.

As for price, a pound is going for a bit less than $3US these days, right? So this would be in the $500 range? Sounds fair to me. He got two? How much for shipping? :)

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Originally Posted by red comyn

Right after speaking to a little pc shop, they will so the following...

ATI Radroen 9950 256MB and 1GB of ram fitted for £170....(although maybe a bit less for cash...nudge nudge.)

does this sound good in both performance and price?

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At today's exchange rate that is $299.38 US.

I've never heard of a Radeon 9950. A google search seems to indicate it might be another name for the x800 so I will base my answer on that. There are many different kinds of x800s, but you the basic AGP type goes for about $170. The price of RAM is completely dependant upon the brand, type and speed, but the general range would be $50 to $200 depending on the variables. You're probably receiving the lower end of that given your quote, so I'll pick $70 for the RAM just to be completely arbitrary. That gives the estimated end price for the parts at $240 US, leaving $60 (about 30 quid) for labor.

That seems completely reasonable to me, though I could give you a better answer if you indicated the exact video card and RAM you would be getting. If it IS an x800 card, you should be happy. ATI cards have a few more driver issues with RTW than nVidia cards, but they still perform well. Assuming you don't have a CPU bottleneck, you should be able to run at high resolution with all bells and whistles on Large unit size without a problem. Huge will work well too, but will slow down in multi-stack battles.

Thanks for the info. looks like its time to spend my heard earned cash.....being scotish it always hurts to take the wallet out :furious3:

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Originally Posted by red comyn

Thanks for the info. looks like its time to spend my heard earned cash.....being scotish it always hurts to take the wallet out :furious3:

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It looks to me like you might be going overboard on the graphics card and end up with a system bottlenecked with that celeron 2 GH cpu. Celeron's don't use as much L2 cache memory, and are therefore less efficient at processing program instructions. The chip itself has the same L2 cache as a Pentium, but Intel disables some of it so that the cpu doesn't perform as well. It's worth checking out if you can upgrade to a Pentium IV. Often, you can't because of changes in the cpu socket type or the voltage regulator required which is on the mainboard.

The move to 1 GB of system RAM is ok although you can get by with 512 MB. Having extra memory doesn't help performance if it's not used. RTW/BI does have a memory leak, so 1 GB RAM will allow you to play longer before the inevitable slowdown sets in, and, if you like to run other programs while you are playing RTW/BI, it will also help.

As far as I know there is no game that uses even as much as 128 MB of video RAM, and video RAM is very expensive. So, you could save a lot on the video card without degrading the performance of the game at all by getting the same video card with 128 MB of video memory. At least price it out, and then decide.

Slow map scrolling is probably the result of running out of system RAM (physical memory) so that some of the map ends up being stored in the pagefile (virtual memory). Getting information out of the pagefile back into system RAM is a very slow process compared to already having it in system RAM. When I run RTW and all of the map is in system RAM, I have no problem scrolling it. If I minimize RTW and come back to it later, WinXP has moved the entire map into the pagefile to free up RAM. I have to scroll over the entire map, which stalls repeatedly, until the whole map is read back into system RAM, and then it's fine.