CPU power more important than Video Card when running Total War Engine?

**Mr Durian** · 08-20-2006, 18:54

Someone said to me the CPU power is more important when playing Total War engine than the video card. No matter how fast your video card is it will lag if your CPU is not up to standard.

How important is the CPU when playing the total war engine? And when higher the cpu power the larger the unit size you can make without the game lagging?

**Oaty** · 08-20-2006, 19:27

For the most part the CPU is most important. You did sya what you had or what you were looking at buying.

If your buying a new computer, dont even worry about what video card it has because typically they dont put a good video card in

**Matheis** · 08-21-2006, 03:51

Hmmm I got 2 gigs of ram the best graphics card geforce 7800 but I got a shit processor a 2400 AMD so I guess thats why my game still lags.

**CBR** · 08-21-2006, 12:43

Originally Posted by Matheis

Hmmm I got 2 gigs of ram the best graphics card geforce 7800 but I got a shit processor a 2400 AMD so I guess thats why my game still lags.

Yes your CPU is certainly a bottleneck in your system for a game like RTW. The game also likes fast ram. I think with lower end cpu's you start seeing low fps and lag at around 6k soldiers or so. High end CPU's is more like 14k+

CBR

**Mr Durian** · 08-21-2006, 14:08

I have the Intel® CoreTM Duo Processor T2400 (Processor speed 1.83GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 667MHz FSB). How much units you can I play with this?

**CBR** · 08-22-2006, 00:34

Hm yes interesting question. It seems to be a very powerful cpu. If I was to do a pure guess I would say at least 16k or more. Im not sure how much fast ram plays a part in it though. But you should be able to play with huge unit setting and not worry about having 4-5 armies in one battle.

Edit: ah damn I didnt see it was older core duo. Well it should be I dont know...10-11K

CBR

**Quillan** · 08-22-2006, 04:20

Core Duo? Is that on a laptop, Durian? I don't know enough about those processors to compare them with others, and I haven't started up RTW since I dropped the monster X2 4800+ into my system a couple of weeks back, so I can't say how well it handles the game.

**grapedog** · 08-22-2006, 16:21

A core duo with that clock speed can only be a laptop, slowest core duo for desktops is 2.66, slowest core duo for laptops is 1.60.

Sadly, RTW is not optimized to take advantage of both cores from what I've seen, though I could be wrong. If you start up RTW and get into the game, then minimize it, hit Ctrl+Alt+del, go to your processes list I think you'll see a column called processor affinity, or maybe just affinity...that shows you what processor the game is currently using. I guess you could try setting both processors to checked...don't know what, if any, affect that would have. Guess I would check the tech support forum first...probably some information in there if you search for it.