Quote Originally Posted by Quickening
Im running a

3.0Ghz Intel Procesor
with
GeForce 7600 GT 256MB
and
1 Gigabyte of RAM

I am inches away from being able to play the game at top settings at all times. But in my tests I have found that it makes very little difference whether shadows are high or off. What really impacts performance from what Ive seen, is the anti-alaising. At x8 things really do start to crawl in the epic battles so Ive settled for x4 grudgingly. There is still a tiny bit of stutter in epic sieges though and am contemplating what visual candy I am willing to sacrifice for that a little more performance.

Now, what is that Shader 1 and 2 business all about? Why would switching to Shader 1 make things faster and would the game be recognisably more ugly if I did so?
Why don't you just up the resolution and get rid of the anti-aliasing then? At 1600x1200 and even 1280x1024 on my 19 inch screen I don't even notice a difference between anti-aliasing on or off and there's not much of a hit these days for upping the resolution compared to upping the anti-aliasing despite what cardmakers say. Just a suggestion of course.