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…