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At which point does the game stop taking advantage of the hardware? I mean what is the best GPU after which upgrading higher is a waste of money? Cause RTW had no limit CPU wise since it could bring even $1500 cpu monsters at its knees with 38k men on the field in custom battle...
There is no such point. The best video cards out there right now can not sustain above 60 fps throughout, which IMO is necessary for the smoothest experience possible. Don't start arguing about how much the eye can see, 60fps can be "felt". When you are scrolling around the battlefield in 60fps compared to 30, it is quite noticeable.
I think it'll sooner come down to Engine limitations.
Yes, that's what it will most likely come down to.
You can spend about 1200 US on a pair of GX2 7950s from NVidia with a SLI hookup, then buy one of the decent new boards for about 200 with twin PCI-E 16 x slots, and SLI 590 chipset, and one or two pairs of paired 1gig Corsair Memory with EPP (another 3 to 400 per pair), and then tweak them all up some more, maybe in conjunction with a dual core cpu (not too much cash there) decent fans and the like... decent sound and PhysX card... 2k US ought to get you about where you need to go if you build it yourself. Give or take a few hundred. Upper limits on the game for small monitors may be reachable with that kind of hardware and even lessor cards in tandem, easily before the engine begins to be the limiting factor. Larger monitors in the greater than 21 inch viewable range however, may offer a greater challenge when highest resolutions are used, and here the argument of FPS might hold water, but I have not the understanding of the limitations of the engine to know.
There really is no such thing as "max spec." for a properly coded game.
Eg, Total Annihilation, released in 1997 when most people had something like a Pentium 75 & no hardware 3d acceleration can run at any resolution that your D3d compatible 3D card can run at and with at least 5000 units per side * up to 8 players (40,000 units).
The most powerful PC out there even now will not be able to hit those kind of numbers without lagging out.
Similar is the case with RTW where you'll hit hardware (& OS/directx) limtations before the game engine itself throws a hissy fit.
my PC runs the demo maxed out at 1920x1200.
you can't really expect much more than that.
C2D 6600
XFX 7950GT
1GB PC6400
I'm not the most tech-savvy person but I imagine that in terms of the game's performance it'll come down to the strength of the computer, not the strength of the engine.
Those of you who saw the Decisive Battles series on the History Channel, or can recall early RTW screenshots, will notice that in those cases there really were thousands or tens of thousands of soldiers in battles (this is particularly noticeable in the Battle of Chalons episode).
As both the episodes and the screenshots were created on Creative Assembly's own machines, which are presumably vastly more powerful than anything we can realistically afford to buy on the market today and were probably in at least several aspects specifically built for the RTW/M2TW engine, then the only way you'll likely be able to find out just how far you can push the engine is to literally call CA and ask.
Since it's not likely that you'll be able to get to a point where you can ask that question, or even that they'll actually divulge such potentially confidential information, then you're not going to know. If you want to go get a super-uber computer from, say, Falcon Northwest, and find out just how far you can go with M2TW, then be my guest, but I agree with the general consensus here that it is far more likely for your computer, no matter how sexy it is, to reach a limit than for the engine to finally crash.
I can make a movie of M2:TW with 10000000 units, and still make it look like it runs smooth as hell.
As far as i've seen, on any pc, You can't put more than about 8000 units before preformance cracks down.
I think something like this is stated on the Wikipedia article of R:TW too
Assuming you're not full of BS, I'd love to see a video of that :2thumbsup:Quote:
Originally Posted by Maizel
Well,
I personally can't, lol, zip video editing skills. :P
But i've seen some people make movies in R:TW with Tons of units, running smooth.
I have E600
7900 GTo
2GB ram 5200 oc to 6400
My framerate never chugs but i can tell when it's going smoth then it slows down some...