Poor Performance with 8800 GTS

[Aberration]

Hello everyone,

I'm having a bit of a performance problem which I can't figure out a resolution to. I just cannot, for the life of me, get this game to run at a decent frame rate on high settings. I have a fairly decent machine which should be able to handle the load (see specs below), and I have my system tweaked for performance.

During the Tennenberg scenario, I get between 15 and 25 FPS on high settings with a resolution of 1024x768 and 2x AA/2x AF. In contrast, I typically get between 25 and 40 FPS (occasionally spiking a little higher) on medium settings with the same resolution and no AA/AF. The unit size in both cases was set to normal.

Now, clearly it is playable on medium settings, but I didn't invest all of this money to play a game which is graphically the same as Rome: Total War. I've tried just about every combination of settings that I can think of but nothing works. And I'm not having any problems in any of my other games.

I'm completely out of ideas. If anyone has any suggestions, I would be happy to hear them.


AMD Opteron 185
XFX Geforce 8800 GTS 320 MB
2 GB DDR400
ASUS A8N-E MOBO
Windows XP

[Lacirtemis]

Actually it's more graphically intensive than RTW, but thats beside the point, your system is almost the same as mine (except my GTS has 640mb and my opty is overclocked), and I run the game with no issues whatsoever.

First things first, what video drivers are you running? When you installed them did you clean the old drivers first using driver cleaner?

[Aberration]

I'm currently using Nvidia's latest drivers (6.14.11.6218), which were installed after a fresh reformat.

[Player44]

I have a question about driver cleaner... is it compatible with vista?

[Lacirtemis]

Ok, a few things about the RTW engine.
Anything above 40fps is rare, the total war games run smoothly at 20fps, it's something to do with the engine I find.
If you find you are getting lag you have a few options, one is to turn of anti-aliasing, it isn't really needed at higher resolutions. Another is to turn down shadows.

Other than that, what programs are running in the background? and...have you considered overclocking, overclocking a video card is easy as, just download rivatuner (for NVIDIA cards like yours) and away you go.

You could also overclock your cpu, it will take it, opty dual cores are known for overclocks (and before intel core 2 duos were one of the chips of choice).

Edit: I don't use driver cleaner with Vista, Vista has it's own routines when installing drivers and inserting driver cleaner into that mix is a bit like russian roulette. (I just install new drivers over the old ones and let Vista "clean" itself, as it has been known to chuck a fit if it can't find the old entries).

[Aberration]

...the total war games run smoothly at 20fps, it's something to do with the engine I find.

This really isn't an accurate statement. The game is visibly slower when the frame rate drops into the 20-25 region. I wouldn't have even bothered to check the frame rate were it not for the game running like a slide-show.

If you find you are getting lag you have a few options, one is to turn of anti-aliasing, it isn't really needed at higher resolutions.

Turning off AA improves my performance, but it's still overall sub-par given my hardware. And my resolution is only 1024x768 to begin with.

Other than that, what programs are running in the background?

None. Nada. Like I said, I have my system tweaked for gaming performance. I have no background applications running and every non-essential Windows service is disabled.

All of the newer games I've played on this machine run like a dream. It's just M2TW that's giving me trouble.

and...have you considered overclocking, overclocking a video card is easy as, just download rivatuner (for NVIDIA cards like yours) and away you go.

I really shouldn't have to overclock my card to get decent performance in M2TW. The 8800 series was bleeding edge when this game came out. And, in any case, this card is factory overclocked to begin with.