Poor performance.

[Peadee]

Hello everybody, this is my first post on here and I'm hoping one of you can help me out. I have bought my son a copy of Medieval 2: Total War. Unfortunately that has proved to be a self inflicted wound on my part because the damned thing won't play very well. He can play the game but the graphics are not good and it's a bit jerky and jumpy which is spoiling the whole experience for him. There is nothing worse than wanting to get immersed in a game and not being able to because you have to wait for it to respond or you miss bits because it's so jerky, so my question is simple, "Why is this happening?". I believe our machine is capable of running this game, it's a Packard Bell with a Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80Ghz, 1Gb RAM and a Radeon X600 series video card. Maybe some of the settings on my machine are incorrect, I don't know. Hopefully someone out there does know and can help me out, so please, if anyone has had similar problems and has managed to resolve them, could you let me know how you did it.

Thanks

[Andres]

Welcome Peadee

First of all, your system is not really high end, so don't expect to play the game with all the eye-candy on.

My system specs are:

Pentium IV - 2.4 Ghz
Ram 1.5 Gig
ATI Radeon 9800 pro

It runs very smoothly. Until last week, my graphics card was an even worse one: ATI Radeon 9600. With shadows turned off and some of the details at very low, the framerates were still acceptable.

IIRC, turning off the shadows (choose shader 1 in the options menu), will increase performance significantly.

If you still encounter problems, you might want to check the Apothecary which is here. As a Junior Member you are allowed to post there. 512 MB extra RAM might be useful and isn't really expensive as an upgrade.

[Martok]

Welcome to the Org, Peadee.

Medieval 2 requires a pretty hefty system to run properly, and even one like yours - which is fairly beefy - could very well still have problems with it. And to second AndresTheCunning, I recommend you pay a visit to the Apothecary if you continue having difficulties; we have good people there who can probably help you out. Good luck!

[CrossLOPER]

You are trying to play a very demanding game with a 4+ year old rig. I would tell you to get a new card and a RAM upgrade, but your processor is not that astonishing.

Also, it looks like you are using a laptop. That, or you got ripped since that gfx card is made for buisness laptops.

If anything, I would get a new computer and install some custom hardware.

[sapi]

There's no need for anything that drastic

[Ciaran]

The first thing I´d advice is using shader1, you won´t get dirt and blood on your men but as long you play on Large, you shouldn´t have a problem, I know I don´t, using a 2.4 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9800 XT. As long as I don´t take on the Mongols or Timurids in a multi-stack battle, it runs very smooth, even in sieges, and I really had troubles there when I used Shader2.

Other than that, visiting the Apothecary will certainly not hurt, you´ll get a lot of info there about he technical side.

[sapi]

Agreed, but i'd advise against artificially limiting your graphics card via choosing an older shader version unless you really need to

[Bijo]

Agreed, but i'd advise against artificially limiting your graphics card via choosing an older shader version unless you really need to

That because the newer shaders are faster rendered? Just had to ask this


And welcome, Peadee. Indeed, shadows off is good to try out first; it's the greatest performance eater.

[sapi]

@Bijo - many new graphics cards are, i believe, optimised for newer shader models.

That aside, there's a huge visual hit when moving down to a lower version of teh shader.

@peadee - do you have bloom off?

[CrossLOPER]

There's no need for anything that drastic

Because buying a new computer every three years is cheaper.