System specs, yeah RIGHT

[RTKLamorak]

It's pretty common for games that run well on lower-end machines to have problems running on high-end ones.

It just seems like some games arent made to utilise more powerful machines. Where as the performance increases in many games are predictable as CPU/RAM/GPU power is increased, some are not!

fps should increase proportionally as you up the CPU/GPU by set amounts... but that just doesnt seem to be the case with RTW

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

I can honestly say that I didn't expected RTW to run on my PC:

Celeron 466
512Mb RAM
GeForce 4 MX 440 64Mb

The big problem with this system is the lack of CPU power to account for high geometry and many troops.

From the start, I used the minimum settings available in the graphics options menu, including the smallest unit size and 800x600 16bit. It ran at about 3-5fps average with sometimes a high point of 9fps. Not very playable. Then I got an interesting tip:

Inside the file descr_auto_optimise_options in the Data folder, you can change (in the first line - minimum settings) the unit_model_detail setting from low to super_low. This minimizes the geometry of the troops to a setting that is not used on the demo, but that the game contains. So, instead of lowest you get a super_ lowest.

Needless to say that it doesn't look pretty, but makes it far more playable in my system. I got 7-9fps with highs of 14fps (small unit size and 800x600 16bit).

With 1280x960 16bit and max settings in everything, except shadows and antialiasing, I get 2-3fps with a high of 6fps...

[Red Harvest]

CA has said this game is memory bandwidth intensive. A Celeron is gonna really suck wind with it, because the Celery has very little cache on the chip--meaning it will have to access main memory even more frequently (and that is where they indicate the bottleneck is.)

[JeromeGrasdyke]

It just seems like some games arent made to utilise more powerful machines. Where as the performance increases in many games are predictable as CPU/RAM/GPU power is increased, some are not!

fps should increase proportionally as you up the CPU/GPU by set amounts... but that just doesnt seem to be the case with RTW

Well, first of all you've got to keep in mind that as your CPU speed goes from 1.5 GHz to 3 GHz, that's only a x2 speed increase, and you're unlikely to see all of that because your memory bandwidth as a proportion of CPU clock speed goes down. Even so, if you keep all the other settings constant the framerate scales pretty well, from 12-18 fps on a min-spec machine to 40-50 on a high end one. But if you then put the unit sizes from small to normal, you're immediately doubling the load on the simulation, and worse than that in some cases because collision detection does not scale linearly with the number of men. If you mod the units to become larger still, it gets even worse...

Rome is a strategy game, split second reaction time is not critical, and so we made a choice to try and give the player as many and as high a visual quality of troops as possible to play with, while maintaining a steady playable framerate. The game adjusts your default settings (as most games do) when you first start it up in order to achieve this, and again if you tell it to in the menu's. That is why the framerate appears very similar on different machines with very different specs.

The bottom line is, the choice is yours. You can adjust the settings to run the game however fast you want to (within the limits of the hardware). But be aware that when you're comparing framerates from different machines, you may not be comparing like with like.

[Medieval Assassin]

Fraps makes my game crash...