Demo graphics auto detect a bit... off?

[crazyviking03]

I have:
Vista 64
6 G of RAM
Intel Quad Q8200s at 2.3 GHz
ATI HD3650

And yet the demo is only auto detecting Medium setting. I have seen screenies on TWC of several people being autodected on highest.



If my rig is only good enough for medium setting.... well, I wish I could say was was stong enough to not buy the game in some odd protest, but I'm not that strong lol.

Anyone else getting only med setting on good/decent rigs?

edit** I read a post elsewhere where some said only one of their 2 cpus was being utilized, perhaps this has something to do with it, the demo (hopefully not the game) cant recognize multi processors?

[Rhyfelwyr]

Do you mean the 'Automatic' button?

When I click that it puts me to the highest settings, even though I only have 1GB Ram, although my graphics card is pretty good (can't remember exactly what it is).

[crazyviking03]

high and highest are unselectable on the side, and completely noexistant on the drop downs

[Rhyfelwyr]

I meant it just put me to the best setting, checked all the boxes for shadows etc, I think it was 'ultra' for unit detail.

[Wartz]

I have:
Vista 64
6 G of RAM
Intel Quad Q8200s at 2.3 GHz
ATI HD3650

And yet the demo is only auto detecting Medium setting. I have seen screenies on TWC of several people being autodected on highest.



If my rig is only good enough for medium setting.... well, I wish I could say was was stong enough to not buy the game in some odd protest, but I'm not that strong lol.

Anyone else getting only med setting on good/decent rigs?

edit** I read a post elsewhere where some said only one of their 2 cpus was being utilized, perhaps this has something to do with it, the demo (hopefully not the game) cant recognize multi processors?

The HD 3650 would be why, its not a very good card.

[Gaius Terentius Varro]

yepp it was a budget card 18 months ago.

[Sir Beane]

I managed to run the game fine with the auto-detected settings, without any lag at all. I noticed shadows looked rubbish on medium though, they made my horses look all stripey.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Hehe, the auto-detect seemed to have assumed I had an Octo Core with a DX12 card or something. Nearly everything max.
Had to turn the settings to more realistic settings for my E6600, 7300GS. :)

[pyradyn]

Just to let you know Quad-Cores are not even being programed to. Duel Core is being used but Quad-Core will not help you until programmers starts programming to them.

[Wartz]

Just to let you know Quad-Cores are not even being programed to. Duel Core is being used but Quad-Core will not help you until programmers starts programming to them.

There are a few games that use quadcores.

[Sol Invictus]

Hehe, the auto-detect seemed to have assumed I had an Octo Core with a DX12 card or something. Nearly everything max.
Had to turn the settings to more realistic settings for my E6600, 7300GS. :)

Yeah, it did the same for me as well. I was afraid to even try the demo with everything Maxed so I turned it down to High. I guess for giggles I will try the Auto Detect Settings.

[lobosrul]

I'm stuck with medium settings on the demo, and I mean everything higher is grayed out. I currently have an 8800GT but was planning on maybe upgrading to a 260. Does anyone know if I can't go with any higher settings because I'm on WinXP or is it because of my card?? Because theres no way I'm upgrading to Vista at this point (win 7 should be out late this year).

[Tassen]

I have:
XP 32 bit SP3
2 GB of RAM
AMD FX57 at 2.8 GHz
NVIDIA 8800GTX 768MB

Not too shabby but anything but not exactkly state-of-the-art anymore. Game still set everything to ULTRA for me with 4AA 16AF. Actually worked great in both battles with just a tad of lag when zoomed in close during the landbattle with a lot of units. I'll set it down a little though to get that extra smoothness. Looks like it is more GFX than CPU dependant since my GFX card is a lot nicer than my CPU for being 2009?

[NovaColonel]

It's a lot more depending on the graphics card than previous titles, which tended to run better with a faster cpu. At the beginning, I had that weid flimmering bug as well as a little lag, it improved a lot once I updated my two month old catalyst drivers (and overclocked my card slight tad). Auto-detect put everything on ultra, with AAx4 and AFx16. I put down the resolution from 1440x900 to 1280x800, and it runs really smooth now.
Card is a 1 GB Radeon X4870, bought five months ago. My CPU is a Phenom X4 black edition @2.6 stock.

[jumpyg1258]

See your sig and I must say "Demo Not FTW!"

[Greyblades]

Interesting choice of first post but... Welcome to the org Jumpyg1258!

[jumpyg1258]

It actually wouldnt have been my first post had it been for the dumb rule about URLs in first post. Wanted to post a pic of my problem in demo and it wouldnt let me so that became my first post.

[Greyblades]

Well I cant realy say my first post was much better. Its to stop people from making usernames purely to advertize a website. Dont worry after about a week and some responsible posting monk or martok will make you a member and then you can do anythi... well more than you can do on the site now.

[crazyviking03]

After shopping around a bit online, i figure I have no where to go but up with my gfx card, lol. I was caught off gaurd by this, as she runs CoDWaW, HL2, M2tW all att maxed/high with no probs. Ohwell, I will just run down to wall mart and grab something, looks like anything on the shelf will be better than what i have now LMAO

[Belgolas]

After shopping around a bit online, i figure I have no where to go but up with my gfx card, lol. I was caught off gaurd by this, as she runs CoDWaW, HL2, M2tW all att maxed/high with no probs. Ohwell, I will just run down to wall mart and grab something, looks like anything on the shelf will be better than what i have now LMAO

I don't know about you but walmart doesn't seem to be the right place to buy a gaming computer.

Anyways you don't need a super computer to run this game at max.

[Megas Methuselah]

Never, ever go to Wal-Mart for a computer. Even more, never go to a large company for one.

I got my gaming laptop from a local computer store, and it was $400 cheaper than a slighty suckier one at Future Shop.

[crazyviking03]

LMAO no i was just going over there to grab a new GFX card, but they were out. hell no id never buy a comp for gaming there lol

[cannon_fodder]

Auto-detect was close to the mark for me, though I was able to turn a few things up (from "high") and maintain a good (~50 zoomed out, ~25 zoomed in) framerate.

lobosrul, I'm using an 8800GT and WinXP, it must be something else.

[crazyviking03]

Ah, situation has been remedied. Going to pick up my GeForce 9800 GT with 1 GB in about an hour.

[Sol Invictus]

Well this is just crazy. I finally went with auto-detect; which defaults to Max; just to confirm that I could not run it at this level, and things pretty much look similar to High and the game ran fine. I have a fairly mediocre system and assumed that I would need a Graphics card upgrade at a minimum and probably need to double my Ram, but I think I may be fine as is.

Specs

Duo 2.4 E6600 4 MB cache
2 Megs Ram
GeForce 7900 GTX 512 MB
XP

[A Very Super Market]

It looks fine. 7900 will be a good card for many years.

[Daevyll]

Just to let you know Quad-Cores are not even being programed to. Duel Core is being used but Quad-Core will not help you until programmers starts programming to them.

That would be prefectly true if the game was the only thing running on your PC.
However, that's never the case, any PC will have a multitude of other processes running. And so long as there is any software running that does make full use of the quadcore (such as the OS if you have Vista 64 for example) it does help you out indirectly by making other things more efficiently thus freeing up resources for the game.

[Polemists]

Well now the I7 is out which is supposed to be even faster then quad so there you go, I can never keep up with these things. I've learned to live with games in medium graphics most times.

[crazyviking03]

Yeah, I cant keep up either, and I think this gfx card will be my last hardware purchase for a while. I got lucky, best buy was running a sale on it, it was $60 off.

[Tellos Athenaios]

That would be prefectly true if the game was the only thing running on your PC.
However, that's never the case, any PC will have a multitude of other processes running. And so long as there is any software running that does make full use of the quadcore (such as the OS if you have Vista 64 for example) it does help you out indirectly by making other things more efficiently thus freeing up resources for the game.

There are two catch 22's here:
(a) Excepting a few really pricey, high end Quadcores... the Q series aren't _proper_ Quad *cores*. What they are amounts to 2 dual cores welded to make a single processor. In effect this means more cache, less clocking speed (thus slower cache), and only up to 2 concurrent threads. The point is that at any given instruction only two threads have a core, the other two are iddle. The reason is that both cores share the same connection (path) with the cache and RAM:

Now if both dual-cores have continuous 'load' that won't matter as much (because you will have good caching results) but if one core 'suddenly' has to step in for a certain process caching will be much poorer: indeed there will be quite a bit of non-cached instructions as a new program stack needs to be loaded into the registers and the old one needs to be written to RAM! So if you have the choice between a faster dual core with comparatively (per-core) large amounts of cache versus a Quadcore with lesser per-core performance you can expect the Dual Core to outperform the Quadcore in most situations. (Heavy media encoding and decoding is the notable exception.)
(b) Proper process scheduling assings some kind of priority to certain processes over others. That is, the Game is given max time slices to execut its code for better responsiveness; other processes are kept in the background as much as possible. It also means that there will be very little going on apart from your game: for instance your desktop will not be refreshed if you play in full screen modus, because the OS knows that the entire desktop is pretty much idle anyways and thus it defers desktop refreshing till later. That is also why windowed mode incurs heavier workloads for your system when running a game: there *are* notable background processes going on.