EB Performance

[Unferth of Gergovia]

Hey everyone, first of this is the greatest RTS game of all time, I dont care what anyone says, plus you learn alot about history which is great. I want to say thank you.... I am having some problems though, I just got a new computer 3.2 ghz and installed a GFORCE 8400 gs, now I dont know much about computers but no matter what I do the campaign map runs slow and very choppy, however the battle map runs almost to where I want it... is there a trick to making this game run faster and for the mouse to not move so slow and choppy? I have all the detail settings to the lowest and still the only difference is on the battle map, I dont know if its the cloud animations or what? Its just running choppy and its getting aggravating....Im chaffing at the bit to play like a normal person....

[A Very Super Market]

Turn off shadows. That solved it for me. I didn't notice it for a while, since I usually play as an Eastern Faction, but trying out the Maks was impossible until I turned shadows off. It's the trees, you see.

[Unferth of Gergovia]

Shadows were the first thing I shut off, Rome total war runs absolutely fine, and I just dont understand why EB runs so damn slow, I have tried everything and Im definantly open to any suggestions, even if its to shoot this computer and get another one....

[A Very Super Market]

Huh. That's weird. Are there any areas that you tend to lag in more?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Hey everyone, first of this is the greatest RTS game of all time, I dont care what anyone says, plus you learn alot about history which is great. I want to say thank you.... I am having some problems though, I just got a new computer 3.2 ghz and installed a GFORCE 8400 gs, now I dont know much about computers but no matter what I do the campaign map runs slow and very choppy, however the battle map runs almost to where I want it... is there a trick to making this game run faster and for the mouse to not move so slow and choppy? I have all the detail settings to the lowest and still the only difference is on the battle map, I dont know if its the cloud animations or what? Its just running choppy and its getting aggravating....Im chaffing at the bit to play like a normal person....

What "3.2Ghz" processor?
How much RAM do you have?
What Operating System (make that: What version of Windows) do you have?

Tried killing off any unused applications such as printer/scanner/OCR software, quick-launch-applets and of course MSN messenger? Try running it while there is as little else as possible running on your system.

Since you don't apear to be trying EB on a Office PC, you can probably do something like:
From the Start Menu go to Run, type dxdiag and hit enter/click run; post a picture of the window that pops up once it has gathered its information about your hardware.
Alternatively, if you have Vista it's probably easier to type dxdiag in the search box of the Start Menu and use the program it finds (its the same thing, really).

Now for some actual solutions:
-As mentioned try running RTW/EB with as little else as possible going on.
-Try lowering the campaign map resolution
-Try running with the settlement labels disabled (you can edit this in your EB/preferences/preferences.txt directory) or use Ctrl + T when you enter the campaign map. Note: settlement names should now disappear!
Less easy to do: try running with different (older/newer) 8400GS drivers.

[gentlemanjohn]

Had the same problem, but solved it by reverting the campaign map back to the vanilla version and turning off shadows as well. You can get the vanilla version on the EB website under downloads/misc

[Unferth of Gergovia]

I have a Intel celeron 3.20 ghz and it says 1.87 GHZ of ram but I know there is more than that, I have never had a game run this slow, I will go a head and try some of this out and see what happens...

[BurningEGO]

Celeron... Heh. You already said everything. All the Celerons i had were extreme slow machines. Never buy a Celeron... They are, normally, slower then Pentiums.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I have a Intel celeron 3.20 ghz and it says

As already noted: its a Celeron so 3.2Ghz looks splendid on paper but doesn't add up to quite the same 3.2Ghz you'd get from other processor lines. Still, 3.2Ghz of not-that-impressive-per-cycle-performance still should add up to more than sufficient processing power for _doing things_ in EB. Waiting times is another matter, though...

1.87 GHZ of ram

You probably meant 1.87GB. You've got the "manufacturers' gigabyte" playing up here; I'll explain it in a moment...

but I know there is more than that, I have never had a game run this slow, I will go a head and try some of this out and see what happens...

Well, it was sold to you as 2GB wasn't it? Here's the deal: by SI standards, 1KB would've been exactly equal to 1.000B, because Kilo means a factor of 1000. Similarly, 1MB would've been (1K)KB or 1.000.000B; and 1GB would've been 1.000.000.000B.

But no. In memory management, kilobyte is defined differently, namely as (2^10)B or 1024B. Similarly 1MB is defined as ((2^10)^2)B or 2^20B or 1024*1024B; and 1GB is defined as 2^30B or 1024*1024*1024B. And that is how your manufacturer can advertise with 2GB when in fact he's selling ~1,87GB: those 24*1024*1024B are about enough to run an entire fully functioning Desktop system with.

Even so, that 0.23GB or thereabouts of RAM is probably not the reason why you experience such poor performance either.

So, I guess your problem arises from a combination of the 8400GS+drivers and resolution.

[BurningEGO]

Doesnt that graphic card got 512mb? Shouldnt it be more then enough? And if he has no problems on manual battles i doubt that is the real problem right?

I am not a real expert in hardware so i cant really say anything except... that celerons suck. Sorry.

Best of luck resolving your problem though.

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

This lovely little patch will revert the sea graphics w/ all of their memory/processor-eating cloud animation back to the Vanilla R:TW plain sea graphic.

Once I started using this I haven't looked back.

[Ferromancer]

Do you happen to have anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned up?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Doesnt that graphic card got 512mb?

Nope. (NVIDIA website)

Shouldnt it be more then enough? And if he has no problems on manual battles i doubt that is the real problem right?

NVIDIA cards tend to be troublesome in general, and in with RTW in particular (snow in Arabia is indicative of a sprite rendering problem, which in turn appears to be an NVIDIA-card issue).
Plus, NVIDIA has a knack for releasing unstable/buggy (and sluggish!) driver software to run their hardware. It probably is just the combination of everything together: not that powerful a CPU, not quite that much memory, not quite that powerful GFX card, NVIDIA card at that...

Now _on_ the actual campaign map it's the CPU and the GPU which got to work together (the CPU has a lot of work to do, so anything the GPU doesn't do is going to be noticed in the form of significant lag).

[Tellos Athenaios]

This lovely little patch will revert the sea graphics w/ all of their memory/processor-eating cloud animation back to the Vanilla R:TW plain sea graphic.

Once I started using this I haven't looked back.

Right. A) AFAIK it's not a cloud animation. B) AFAIK it's not an animation of any kind at all: it is a texture. C) The texture is made with exactly the same constraints as the original one was. D) And it doesn't eat a CPU as it is the job of a GPU to render the texture. E) It doesn't eat GPUs either, it is a very small texture -- way smaller than typical of an RTW/EB unit. So F) the question is: are you enjoying a placebo effect?

[antisocialmunky]

I was under the impression it used some shader effects.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I was under the impression it used some shader effects.

From the creator of the EB sea texture:

He's deadright . I made the new sea textures myself and the size did not change what so ever because that is not possible. I only added more detail , contrast and color to the tga's of the campaign map. The files did not change in size. They just look far better overall .
What did change with 1.0 is the adding of more scriptlines to the script .

In this thread: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=94107.

Anyways as for shaders: well, if I understand shaders correctly then there is no shader involved apart from the built-in one used to project the shadows of the clouds onto the water surface. Oh and before you ask: that effect is present with the Vanilla seas as well; AFAIK it is the *exact same* effect.

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

Turn off shadows, set campaign resolution to [your screen res]X16.

[Vasiliyi]

Do you see the Search option on the top right of this page. well type in "How to make EB run faster. A guide" or something like that. there was this one post that i read (and followed directions) and my game experience has increased dramatically. btw welcome to the forums.

[chenkai11]

Do you see the Search option on the top right of this page. well type in "How to make EB run faster. A guide" or something like that. there was this one post that i read (and followed directions) and my game experience has increased dramatically. btw welcome to the forums.

Best answer so far.

[soup_alex]

"manufacturers' gigabyte"

I haven't heard it called by that name before (it's a good name! Like "(green)grocers' apostrophe").
Forcing manufacturers to clearly declare whether they're counting "linear" or "log" when they provide technical specifications would be a good thing, in my opinion; alternatively, steps should be taken to educate the masses, if only so that we no longer have to endure such idiotic boasts as "my camera (-phone, usually) has EIGHT megapickles!" or "my computahrr has a hundred gigglebites!!"

[Rilder]

I have a nearly 4 year old 2Ghz processor and the game runs fine. Though I do have a rather nice graphics card (That won't let me play a quarter of my other games for some reason =/ )

[Finch]

defragment you drive

but try this first

turn off shadows
turn off gloss maps
turn off grass

that should give you a boost

[Unferth of Gergovia]

Thank you everyone for the input, Im going to try this again haha and see what my results are...as you can tell I dont know much about computers so Im guessing that explains alot..... thanks everyone

[Unferth of Gergovia]

I just said f*%& it and bought a new computer..... haha works awesome now!!!!!!

[BurningEGO]

Not a celeron i hope!

[Unferth of Gergovia]

Haha definantly not and never again...now...I just need to push back these Romans and I will be all set....