Frustrated with RTW Demo . . .

**The Shadow One** · 09-23-2004, 20:12

First, I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this, but I just joined the guild and I cannot access the Colliseum thread.

Yesterday a friend told me about the Total War Series and the Rome game. I went to the site and it looked awesome. I downloaded the demo and tried to play it but I had severe problems. The game loaded well enough and the play only jagged on occassion (there would a shutter back and forth).

I have a Dell Inspiron Laptop with a Pentium 4 1.69 ghz, 640 mb of RAM, and an ATI Technologies Mobility Radeon 7500C video card with 16 mb of video memory. I'm not sure I can add more video memory to this machine.

As I said, the game loads quickly enough and easily. The game play itself isn't a real problem. But I have problems with the graphics: leaders, in particular, either show up as a shadow image (as do the elephants) and sometimes the horses don't show at all (the riders look like their sitting on air).

Is there a way to fix this other than getting a new video card or more video memory? Anyone else have this problem? This looks like a great game but I sure don't want to spend 50 dollars on it if I can't play it on my system.

Thanks for your help.

The Shadow One

**The Shadow One** · 09-23-2004, 20:16

A quick follow up: A few weeks ago I bought Morrowind III, Game of the Year Edition and it runs fine on my system. The requirements for both games seem to be about the same.

Thanks again.

The Shadow One

**Soulflame** · 09-23-2004, 20:17

Well, the developers claim they had it run on a 800mhz laptop. Assuming that they won't have a better video card in that old laptop, which ran Rome fine, I can only suggest that you update the drivers for your video card and see what that does...

**EatYerGreens** · 09-23-2004, 20:59

ShadowOne,

Tech advice is in the room called 'The Apothecary'. You should be able to browse threads in there, even as Junior Patron.

I'm sure I've seen the ATI Mobility card mentioned wrt display problems but I have every sympathy, what with an ATI 9200 and problems of my own :(

The game itself should come bundled with the correct version of Direct X required to make it run. I'd hazard a guess that the dowloadable demo does not include this, on the assumption that you can get it from M$ by download anyway.

Just for the record, could you do a Start:Run, type dxdiag.exe, and let us know what version of DX you've got on your system? It should appear on the first Tab.

Your problems may be due to only having 16Mb on that card but, not having RTW myself, I don't know what the minimum specs are. It's enough for MTW (which I just picked up today :D )

HTH

**El_Bufon** · 09-23-2004, 21:22

You can tell this game (RTW), is one hungry mother, and is going to eat most computers for breky. Time to update me thinks.

**The Shadow One** · 09-23-2004, 22:17

Thanks to all for the replies.

Oh yeah, this is one hungry mother. I'm running DirectX 9.03 (without errors) and have now updated my video drivers. After dropping the video settings to lowest possible setting, I can actually see the generals and the horses, but the ghosting is horrible. Rocks, trees, and, of course, any moving items (horses, men, etc.) ghost to no end.

I'm thinking my 16 mb video card is problem. According to Amazon these are the system reqs:

Microsoft Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP

I have Windows XP, no problem there.

Pentium III 1.0GHz or Athlon 1.0GHz processor or higher

Pentium 4 1.67 Ghz, so I'm okay.

256MB RAM

I've got 640.

8x Speed CD-ROM drive (1200KB/sec sustained transfer rate) and latest drivers

24x, so I'm okay.

300MB of uncompressed free hard disk space

Easily.

100% DirectX 9.0b compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers

Got it.

100% Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and latest drivers

Of course.

DirectX 9.0b

I have 9.03, so I should be okay

3D hardware Accelerator Card Required - 100% DirectX 9.0b compatible 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card and the latest drivers

I have a 3D video card with the latest drivers -- but no 64MB. Only 16MB. And this is the kicker -- it's integrated into my Dell laptop motherboard. No upgrade for that.

Too bad, 'cause it looks like a great game.

The Shadow One

P.S. Here's to hoping that just maybe the game will run smoother than the demo? Maybe? Hopefully? Aww, nuts . . . .

**EatYerGreens** · 09-23-2004, 22:33

I got myself a new PC last year thanks to being in much the same position. Rock-solid HP Brio, running Win98 but the gfx card was a mobo-mounted Rage Pro, with no way of upping the video memory...

Only after getting this new PC and discussing things (in a Teamspeak server - great for sorting out tech problems in real time) with a tech-head online pal did I find out that it IS possible to add a gfx card and disable the mobo-mounted board, in the BIOS.

Not sure if extra cards are even an option for a laptop. Latest vid cards are coming with their own cooling fan so a tower case and good ventilation space around them are taken as given.

In my situation it was worth the new PC in any event - skip a few not-so-great Win versions and go straight to XP. The CPU was nearly 10x faster too!

**Colovion** · 09-23-2004, 22:42

how do you have 640Mb of RAM?

Too bad about your video card deal - cause you could get a better one for 50 bucks.

THe full version is said to run 10-15fps faster than the demo.

**The Shadow One** · 09-23-2004, 22:48

I have 640 mb of RAM because I bought Morrowind GTYE and I got sick of waiting for it to load every time I stepped across the street!

It had two strips of 128 = 256.

I replaced one strip with a 512 strip (+ 128 = 640).

It's odd how one aspect of a game can just rip system apart.

Ehhh . . .

The Shadow One

**Imperial Buffoon** · 10-01-2004, 11:00

I've reading all these ghost threads to try and find a solution for my own ghost problem (I do think I'll wait for the patch before buying RTW anyhow). I though the mobility radeon 7500 had more memory. Does it use system memory? Try going into setup (BIOS) on startup and find a "video mem" or AGP mem or something like that and slide it to 64M if you can.