PC Performance with Empire TW

[Pantsalot]

I'll be buying a £1,350 PC b4 E:TW comes out so that I can actually play
it. With M2TW then most PC's I used with it were made around 2004 Dell
XP's & a last years laptop worth £600, all worked M2TW but lagged a bloody
lot with 1 unit highlandrs on the screen
So I got at what the time was a graphics card worth £100 & then it worked
pretty well, able to fit 2 & a 1/2 armies on a screen on the original M2TW
& about 4 armies in the Kingdoms X pack which seemed to be able to hold
more units with less lag strangely
RTW it far smoother but with the upgraded PC when putting the graphics to
max then I could only get 3 full armies on a map without lag. The M2TW
graphics are a lot sharper than RTW's smooth graphics, but normally smooth
graphics work better than sharp, e.g WoW to Guild Wars. WoW has smoother
graphics & therefore works better. E:TW screenshots look quite smooth so
they might be trying to keep the graphics high with lag down. Though it's
almost a next generation like game & graphics & it's unlikely u'd be able to
at most 4 armies with a £1,350 PC I hope.. All I can really advise is get
one of the £3,500 PC's. It's currently the best purchasable PC atm apparently

[RLucid]

Love of graphics is proving expensive for you!

[Nelson]

The TW franchise is more demanding than most games in some key areas. They are graphically heavy duty and very CPU intense regarding AI. Either can result in a bottleneck that slows down framerates. I have never been able to run any new TW release with all options maxed. I doubt that anyone in this forum will be able to install Empires out of the box, set all options to the highest setting and get silky performance under every game condition.

I upgrade every couple of years to near the bleeding edge but never quite catch up with the newest TW offering. When I upgraded in February 2007 I was finally able to run Rome full tilt. M2TW is generally fine but a couple of horde armies will tank the framerate every time. I expect this will improve after my next upgrade, which in turn will not be quite good enough for Empires…

[pevergreen]

I disagree Nelson.

I bought rome about a year after it came out, and it has never lagged for me.

Med 2, got it about a week after release, and it has only lagged a few times in siege battles, because it always does that. I refuse to play any TW games on any options except full and the biggest unit sizes. And my computer is not a gaming computer.

When you upgraded in 2007, what did you upgrade to?

[Belgolas]

Um well For me W2TW runs with multi core optimized while RTW isn't. Didn't you hear about a lot of people complaining because they got a dual core cpu and RTW running badly because it only uses one core. M2TW I can have 4 full armies in a citadel or a Huge city and it runs fine. Can't do that with RTW.

I have a...
Q6600 3.4 GHZ
4 Gigs of DDR 2 1066mhz
8800 GTS 320 mb (upgrading this summer :))

I am sure I will be able to run ETW maxed settings. Maybe not at 1920 x 1200 but at least maxed when I upgrade this summer.

And you can bet that there will be a DX10 and DX9 mode.

[rajpoot]

One thing I've never been able to clear up, lags are due to problem with the RAM or graphics, while the low frame rate is due to trouble with the processor.....right?

[RLucid]

I don't think the choppy low frame rate I saw, could be due to processor, as I ran demo on dual core machine. Furthermore reducing graphics details, partly helped the issue, so I assumed it was a graphics card/driver issue.