Minimum EB System Requirements

Though someone suggested recently that we have them, no, we currently don't have any - it would be hard for us to figure it out really though. We have one member who is having slow loading times, and even he has had decent load times at times, but at others it gets slow. So what I'm saying is how could we know what minimum requirements should be? Looking at the RTW box, here are theirs:

RTW Minimum System Requirements
-Pentium III 1.0 GHz or Athlon 1.0GHz processor or higher
-256MB RAM
-2.9GB of uncompressed free hard drive space (plus 500MB for Windows swap file)
-3D hardware Accelerator Card Required - 100% DirectX 9.0 compatible 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card

That is the absolute base for RTW. Though some folks might have had success running it on slightly slower computers. Here is what our slowest member's system (slower than the processor minimums for RTW) resulted in:

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AMD Athlon 756 MHz
320 MB RAM
Radeon 9200

Total Load: 3 min 40 sec
Camapaign Load: 3 min 35 sec
End Turn: 2 min 43 sec

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My rig is slow too, but here are the results:

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Equipment
-AMD Athlon 1.3 GHZ
-1.0 GB DDRAM
-Nvidia GEForce4 MX 4000 128MB (Dual Monitor - this is one of those that can't show our campaign map trees, but uses sprites for them instead)
-186 GB HD - NTFS, half full (Haven't defragged my HD in ages, it's in much need of it)

Loading times
EB Total Load Up(from double click to Main Menu): 2m 15s
EB Campaign Load Up: 1m 35s
EB Campaign End Turn: 1m 13s
EB City Battle Load: 1m 05s

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It seems like some of the people who have complained about the slowness here have got the minimum in RAM. Avlvs has 256MB. Hellenes has 512 and claims he has half an hour load times to get a campaign going, but other folks with 512 say there is no real problem with their load times. I would suggest we say 512 as a minimum, but either have a faster processor and graphics card and plenty of HD space along with that 512 or else have 1GB as a suggested requirement. As for processor speed, I'm not seeing any correllation there - I've got 1.3GHz and it does fine, but Hellenes has a 2.4 and says he has that huge delay. Any suggestions here that we could put in our posts for further patches? If we put a minimum and suggested set of requirements up, we won't have to worry ourselves with complaints in this area as much I think (not much else we can do about it though, other than remove the download links and suggest you go play pretty much any other mod, since none has anywhere near as much information/detail/variedunits/etc. as ours, which takes a lot of space up :grin:).

I would suggest maybe picking a couple series of quality standards, maybe 4 corresponding to unit size, obviously huge would be maximum and small absolute minimum, then a range of scores, both load time and hardware, then averaging them all together or into certain categores, group A has 1ghz process and 512 ram and had these results, such and such, and let the reader know that. Allow him to decide for himself whether it will run well. Personally, I think if a person with TK-421's computer stats approached the game and saw the minimum requirement, it would just turn him off, when it could be possible for him to still play with a reasonable loading time. Of course, doing all that would probably be a pain in the ass, and most likely left for either someone who'd volunteer for it, or a low priority item.

I really don't think that the processor is the bottleneck. It really seems to be RAM and the graphics card. If you are unwilling to purchase more RAM or a graphics card or your motherboard is not compatible with upgrades of them you can increase your page filing.

page filing is where a preset, dedicated amount of your hard drive will act as RAM in the manner of virtual memory. Usually 1.5x the amount of RAM you have should do the trick for your system, but if you are daring you could increase it. Here is a link that should help you out with various other tips. Make sure to defragment first.