Getting the best out of Medieval 2.

[SpinDizzyMR]

Hi there.

I am wishing to get some extra performance out of Medieval 2 total war, I'm just asking here to see if there is anything I can do and whether it's worth it.

I have a Athlon FX dual core 5000+
A Radeon 3850 with 256 meg of memory
2 gig of 800mhz DDR2 memory

This is under Windows Vista Ultimate

Now, I've heard that Vista Ultimate is a memory hog like no other, and 2 gig of memory is not enough, yet I remember playing Medieval 2 on XP and have seen no real difference at all, maybe they are exaggerating or maybe I'm hitting some kind of different performance bottleneck first.

I can currently field around 4500 men before it becomes jittery.

I would like to be able to field 6000 and delighted if I could use 7000.

Changing graphics settings up or down makes no difference whatsoever.

I see two options, I can Crossfire two 3850's, although I've heard crossfire doesn't do much, it'd give me double the amount of accessible video memory.

Other thing I can do is I have room for another 2 gig of ram.

Any thoughts?

[Double A]

Ditch Vista for 2000. Vista sucks. Its slow and firewalls are more like ice cream stored in hell.

[Monsieur Alphonse]

If you are running Vista 32 bits then more than 3 Gig of Ram isn't an option because Vista can't use it. Settings that improve performance are turning V-sync off and using lesser quality shadows.