Suggestions for people who want EB to run faster
I see a lot of people saying that EB is too slow. You have to remember that EB pushes RTW to its limits, which means it is going to push your computer to its limits as well. Even if your system was state-of-the-art when RTW first came out, I think you still won't be getting optimum performance. You cannot assume that outdated hardware will be sufficient to play this "old game", because the system requirements are really closer to that of more modern games than that of vanilla RTW.
So, here are my suggestions for getting improved performance out of EB.
Hardware suggestions
RTW with EB is very CPU-intensive with the massive scripts that it runs. Even if you have a 3.0GHz+ processor, that may not be enough, because GHz alone doesn't mean everything; an Intel Pentium 4 at 2.4GHz is actually slower than an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU at 1.8GHz. The newer generation of CPUs can simply do much more per clock cycle. So, if you have a 3.0GHz system and you wonder why it's slow, it may be that your CPU is a little more outdated than you think. In my opinion, the Pentium 4 class of processors is completely obsolete if you intend on doing any gaming. AI turns will probably go by much faster with a better CPU.
System memory (RAM) is probably the second most important thing you need to address. I have been monitoring EBs memory usage, and if you want optimum performance you will need a bare minimum of 1.5GB of RAM (2GB+ on Vista). I'd really recommend 2GB even for XP. Why do you need so much? Because EB itself can use well over 1GB, and if your system runs out of RAM, it starts using the pagefile on your harddrive, which is literally 1,000 times slower than system RAM. This will lead to long loading times and probably contribute to long AI turns too.
The video card is important too, but in my opinion it's not as important as your CPU and having adequate memory. Even a GeForce 6600GT will give fine performance with decent settings, and this is an inexpensive card. I personally run the game in 1600x1200 with maxed settings with a 7900GS and it runs quite well.
One last area that people may not even think about is your harddrive. There are quite a few files that are being accessed and loaded into memory when you first run the game, and when you load a battle, so if you still have an older 5400RPM IDE drive you might want to consider upgrading to a 7200RPM(or 10,000RPM) drive. If you're not sure what you have that's OK, and in that case I'd say that anything under 50 or 75GB is really quite an old drive, so you might want to upgrade it. Harddrives are very cheap now (320GB for only ~$90), so this may be a worthwhile upgrade.
Other suggestions
A few final thoughts. First, the water texture fix people have been talking about will not make a difference in the least. As far as your hardware is concerned, it's exactly the same. Why? Because it's the same size texture and that's all that matters, so it will not give a performance boost to go back to the old one.
Second, there is a little trick that I mentioned in another thread that I want to mention here too. This may help many people, so please read this. On every system I have played EB on (quite a few), I get a severe drop in performance when I move a unit in the campaign map as far as it can go. I assume I am not the only one who gets this, and I also assume it's probably just a bug in the RTW engine. Fortunately, there's two easy ways to get your FPS back to normal.
The first method you can use to get performance back to normal is to simply select a unit in a city, move him one step outside the city, and then back in. The framerate should be back to normal. I say to use a unit sitting in a city just so that you won't waste movement points for units that are out campaigning, but moving any unit one step will work (as long as he still has movement points remaining after that).
The second method is to simply end the turn; things will be back to normal after the AI moves.
My EB system
AI turns take approximately 15 seconds for me, and here's my system configuration for those interested:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8GHz running at 3.15GHz, with FSB overclocked from 800MHz to 1400MHz
- Gigabyte 965P-DS3 motherboard
- 2GB Kingston HyperX PC2-5400 RAM OCed from 333MHz to 437MHz
- Western Digital 320GB 7200 SATA harddrive
- BFGTech GeForce 7900GS videocard
My system was relatively inexpensive, but you'll notice I am doing quite a bit of overclocking. The Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 is world-famous for being able to run nearly twice as fast as normal with no mods or extra cooling. I run mine at 3.15GHz, but I'll leave it up to you what you do with yours if you buy one... don't blame me if you mess something up trying to run yours this fast :) Overclocking is worthless if your system isn't stable, but in many cases you can get a great performance gain and still retain stability. This is beyond the scope of this post, though, and in short; don't do this unless you know what you're doing :)
So, I hope someone out there will find some of this information useful. EB is a fantastic mod, so it deserves to be played and enjoyed :) Five minute AI turns aren't my idea of fun, and assuming you have a little cash to spend those days should be gone.
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Originally Posted by mighty_rome
Re: Suggestions for people who want EB to run faster
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