Iron out Total War tech myths

[alQamar]

well seems you team up, not only with your names being crazy. I really do not like to discuss this matter but a SPM and K/D is not objective as you do not play the same game situations on and on with different monitor speeds.
Then I am not sure how you set your monitor to 30, 60, 90 and 120 Hz dedicated and working. Usally monitors have an optimal setting.

granted non of this matters in Total War games but it does matter in other titles.

that's all counting here. Thank you for your postings.

Well then. Back to topic?

[Crazyeyesreaper]

Average over hundreds of hours of play. So the data stands. with 1000's of hours played its no big deal for me to limit the frame rate and try stuff out as I game.

Surprisingly in BF3 at least lower frame rate on a high ping server will actuall help rather than hinder lol.

Anyway yes back on topic. Total War as long as the frame rate is above 30 is perfectly fluid.

[TuuSaR]

Screen Hz and reaction "jitter" to human input are two different things that still today are totally confused. More there is FPS, less "jitter" there is while player looks to a new direction.

With LCD/LED's the input lag time is also something to consider compared to old analog CRT times. There's some good youtube videos showing two screens and guy doing fast moves with the mouse, one screen is slower to respond.

[alQamar]

I accept your views but back to topic. For Rome 2 and before this make proovingly no advance.

To show I am accepting your input I edited my posting accordingly.

[YouRéady]

Well, i have 32 bit system with 3GB ram. should i upgrade them? to 64 bit and 4gb ram?

[alQamar]

That depends on the amount of your graphics card ram. How much is it?

[YouRéady]

its ATI Radeon™ HD 5450 512MB
I know its bad but i bought my laptop 3 years ago.

[karamazovmm]

its plenty bad, even the intel HD4000 is more powerful than that 5450m and no best thing is to buy another notebook, it doesn't make any economic sense to upgrade anything

[alQamar]

Well no need to upgrade 4gb ram or 64bit windows then as 3GB ram + 0.5 still below 3.6.
Leave everything as it is. Next time please use the hardware advice thread.

[alQamar]

hello everyone,

I've added some more tech myths regarding Total War

This time I am focusing on i7 / hyperthreading performance and the blood patch DLC. Wanna know the answers on this? Read the OP

[Fanest]

very informative thread i must say, thanks

[alQamar]

Thank you aswell appreciating it.

[Biggus Splenus]

Any chance the Answer: part to the myth could be renamed to Busted:

I think I'd love it humor is always nice.

[alQamar]

I can give it a try but some already now accuse me being kinda wrong. While I haven't seen the opposite evidence.
Honestly prometheus will love to see it renamed splenyi

[JaM]

64bit system with 8gb+ RAM still has many advantages over 32bit system, even in running 32bit games - with 34bit system, game will get its cca 4gb RAM, while background processes will use remaining RAM, with 32bit system and 4Gb RAM, your background processes will need some RAM space, so there is less RAM available for the game...

[alQamar]

Mm, I tested that on 64bit OSes mate. Can you tell me then why I don't get more or less fps having only 4 GB RAM or even 16? A normal Windows 7 or 8 installment uses about 1 - 2 GB RAM for background processes including those that are not from Windows but third party software. Please remember that no game I've played yet consumed more than 2GB in the task manager and the reason is simple because they would otherwise have to less resources to allocate a proper amount of video RAM. And unless we have situation RAM situation is not conflicting. Or do you use other applications while playing a game (video editing, browsing with chrome)?

[JaM]

It depends on how exe is handled.. usually i got better results by adjusting exe to allow large address (Large Address Aware or LAA) space. Some game developers release games with it already (Skyrim got it as a patch) but others do not use it. Without it, usually game can only use 2Gb, so with 4Gb you are still fine. with LAA enabled, game can go up to 4GB.

[karamazovmm]

It depends on how exe is handled.. usually i got better results by adjusting exe to allow large address (Large Address Aware or LAA) space. Some game developers release games with it already (Skyrim got it as a patch) but others do not use it. Without it, usually game can only use 2Gb, so with 4Gb you are still fine. with LAA enabled, game can go up to 4GB.

tell me about it, if you played SoaSE you know how the ram gets used up pretty quickly, since it loads everything to the ram and with mods it becomes quite a pain

however I would still go for 64bit will give you better results due to the things that are going to be open in the background, and thats for TW as well, I already made the case for it, but with benches you use a sterile environment, its not uncommon now to have one monitor for the game and the other for other stuff, and I bet no one posted a result like that, everybody that benches will close everything possible

[crzyrndm]

however I would still go for 64bit will give you better results due to the things that are going to be open in the background, and thats for TW as well, I already made the case for it, but with benches you use a sterile environment, its not uncommon now to have one monitor for the game and the other for other stuff, and I bet no one posted a result like that, everybody that benches will close everything possible

My initial CPU bench had a second monitor involved but nothing memory intensive (I'm really quite fussy about closing things I'm not using ). What you get for doing things too quickly

[A Barbarian]

Myth: TW runs faster with a graphics card with more than 2 GB RAM
Answer: And another time it is 32 bit game and cannot handle it. Multimonitor is not supported aswell so the game simply do not need more than 2 GB VRAM

That is not correct. Even if the application is 32 bit, the graphics card might use more than 2GB of VRAM. All graphical settings which are primarily performed by the graphics card drivers might result in more than 2GB VRAM usage, essentially independent of the game engine . Best example is AA and especially SSAA. With 4xSSAA @ 2560x1440, Shogun 2 uses about 2,4GB of VRAM. With 8xSSAA it would probably be over 3GB. Triple buffering would be another example of a driver feature which raises the VRAM usage.

It's still true that in most circumstances, TW games don't need more than 2GB of VRAM but it's not impossible for the game/graphics driver to exceed 2GB of VRAM usage when using high screen resultion + MSAA/SSAA settings.