Quote Originally Posted by RTKLamorak
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.