When I first discovered that the S2TW demo was only using 1 core, I couldn't believe it. I thought it was a joke. 5 years with dual core's on the market and Creative assembly still can't get it right? Really?
Dual core cpu's have been around since before 2007, yet CA still cannot figure out how to optimize there games for multi-core systems.
Since the advent of dual core's and now quad core's, CA has been unable to properly support multi-core CPU's in there TW series of games and it's completely unacceptable. It's one thing for a first person shooter to neglect CPU optimization, but not a company who's entire reputation and fortune is built on a real time strategy series. A series which relies almost solely on Artificial intelligence.
I find it totally ironic, seeing as RTS games tend to be very CPU intensive and you would expect the developers to give special attention to CPU optimization and making sure the game uses all available core's if it needs too.
In a game that relies so heavily on AI, the CPU is one of the most important, if not the most important aspect of gaming when it comes to the TW series.
On top of that, memory leaks have been an issue in almost every Total War game since Rome. It seem's no amount of memory is enough to please the TW games.
I know people with system's that are off the charts, yet they can never run a TW game without lagging during large battles. Then they check task manager, only to find that there $600 Quad Core CPU isn't worth jack **** in Creative Assembly's eyes and the game is only using a single core.
The truth is, a PC 3 years old should be able to run S2TW without dropping under 40FPS, but CA lacks the optimization skills neccesary to make it happen.
Instead, we have people running Core i7's with GTX 580's and 8GB of RAM running NTW and the S2TW demo at 30FPS, sometimes less.
And why the hell is DX11 being patched in? Did the CA team forget about DX11 half way through development and now there bum rushing to patch it in when the game comes out?