With these specs, should my perfromance be better?

[EarlofWarwick]

Really, the attempt to procure the hardware needed to run this game has proven quite frustrating.

Here's what I want to play w/regard to settings:

Huge unit size
Medium-low unit detail
low grass
low veg
medium textures and shadows
low building detail
1024X768

Here's what I have:

P4 3.2 ghz
3 gigs ram
geforce 8600 gts 256 mb vram --and yes, my drivers are updated.....
plenty of hd space

Even with these specs, and even when I set my card settings to high performance( vs. quality or application-controlled)) I still have lags in battles with full stacks, and it becomes nearly unplayable with full stacks and reinforcements.

Given the specs CA lists, these should be enough to play the full campaign without these game-killing slow-downs, which happen just when a campaign gets good. WTF!!!????

If these are not sufficient, what kind of rig would I need to have big battles with no lag?

Is CA being honest about the specs needed to run these games?

Jeeeze!

[Titus Terrasidius]

You should be well able to play it with those specs man; thats weird. Maybe something else running on windows? Do you have Vista? Becasue i do and i had similair lag problems, turns out though that stuff was running in the task bar, i never thought it would affect performance so i had never bothered to switch say msn complelty off, but its turns out if i switch off absolutly everything else like msn or windows sidebar (vista) i get much better performance, try doi that anyway even if you dont have vista.
Other tha that i cant think of anything, like i say, you shouldnt have any problems, you have more RAM and a more powerfull card than i do and mines runs like a dream on high graphcs, heres my set up:

Vista home premium
geforce 7900gs 512MB PCI
2 gig of RAM
like you plenty of HD space.

Good luck mate, I know how **** it is when something that should work on a pc doesnt.

[EarlofWarwick]

thnx, Titus. I've tried optimizing... maybe it's time to have another look, though.

[Dick]

Are you on XP? There *may* be some mysterious problem that I've never really understood that involves using more than 2GB's of RAM and windows XP.

[EarlofWarwick]

Ooops. Did I say 3 gigs...it's only 2. How did that get into my head.

Yes, I've got xp.

Please don;t laugh, but do I have a dual core processor?

my system info reads as follows:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.20GHz
Version: x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 4
Speed: 3192 MHz
Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.20GHz
Version: x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 4
Speed: 3192 MHz

Isn't there some kind of issue with that?

[Heavy_]

not surprising, check out my specs and you will get a taste of how truly painful it is

- quad core 2.4 ghz (overclocked to 2.7)
- 2 gigs of 800 mhz ram
- 7600 gs 512mb video card
- 500 gig hdd space

although one thing i do suggest, is to go to your windows task manager then go to processes, find Med2 right click on it and set the priority higher. It will give a warning before you do so. But I've done for a year now and my computer is ok.


P.S. Rome runs amazingly, so I suspect it has something to do with my video card

[DrIstvaan]

Also, I've heard somewhere that lower settings can actually cause slow-downs for some cards? Have you ever experienced this?

Yes, in some cases it is possible. And it doesn't only depend on your video card. Altough in most cases lowering settings indeed raises performance (it is logical...), some games aren't optimized well; they may not be optimized to specific settings on specific configs, and then a higher setting, which HAS been optimized, will run smoother on your specific configuration, than a lower, non-optimized one. Weird but true.