ETW video settings guide (more coming)

[IHV]

Nice guide. Tho put up some example pictures for Anistrophic Filtering and Trillinear, the difference is huge. I cant belive your guide and CA guide says that you cant see difference. Trillinear is blurry as hell, even AF x2 gives much much better picture. I use AFx4 as any further isnt needed for my eyes.

[Stierlitz]

Ati cards cant enable AA and HDR at the same time its apparently a limitation of the tech.

I think you are misinformed in this case, since Ati were the first to introduce AA+HDR in "Oblivion" even before its competitor.

[splatterbrains]

I posted this in its own thread on the forum, but then saw this thread, and thought it might be a better fit here. I would try this before you try ANY other suggestion with regards to making graphics like you think they should be running on your machine.

This fix has helped both ATI and Nvidia users that have tried it.

***The information below WILL NOT fix problems with bugged fleets, save-game crashes, end-of-AI-turn crashes, etc. However, if you are getting bad performance or rendering glitches, it MIGHT fix your problem (but not guaranteed)***

Here's one thread where it helped somebody with an Nvidia GTX2xx card: http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/53754

I am running on a really low-spec PC (explained later) and was having a lot of problems with performance in this game. Then, I read on an unrelated site about ATI Catalyst Control Center that, some games use CCC to make their "auto-detect" settings the first time you run them. I don't even know if that's true of ETW, but what I am about to post has "fixed" graphics issues on high-end systems in ETW for several people to whom I've made this suggestion. I don't really know "why" (I have some theories, which are in the post below, but they could be way off base and I doubt a specific answer could come from anywhere besides a game developer).

Anyhow, before you start messing with all kinds of driver updates, worrying about your power supply, or anything else, read the following and give it a try. Made the game run as "normal" as it's going to run on the machine I've got (except the sound issues I'm having, which seem to be identical to the issues everyone else is having on high-end machines). Additionally, after I did the stuff mentioned in the rest of this post, I was able to move my overclocking settings on my GPU/memory back to where they had been and got some further FPS increase over the improvements I already got at the factory speeds (I'd overclock my CPU, but I have a !#%%-bag Intel motherboard with a locked out BIOS that won't let me touch ANYTHING regarding the cpu/memory timers/voltages/etc.):


I own an ATI card (Radeon 3850 512mb AGP) that is bottlenecked like a from a slow processor (Pentium 4 2.26 ghz, which doesn't even meet the minimum system requirements).

After messing with things a LOT, this is what ended up making the game run well for me:

***EDIT - YOU MAY WISH TO TRY STEP 2 BEFORE YOU MESS WITH STEP 1, AS ONE PERSON REPORTED THAT'S ALL THAT WAS NEEDED TO FIX THE ISSUE. HOWEVER, BEFORE DOING STEP 2, I WOULD STILL SUGGEST THAT YOU SET ALL THE 3D SETTINGS TO "APPLICATION PREFERENCE" IN THE DESKTOP UTILITY SOFTWARE THAT CAME WITH YOUR VIDEO DRIVERS

Step 1:

Uninstall everything related to GFX hardware/software on your computer. This includes, but is not limited to: The drivers, the desktop utilities for the drivers (in the case of Radeon, it's Catalyst Control Center), any sort of "tweaking" applications (RivaTuner, etc.)

Then, reinstall ONLY the drivers and the utility that the manufacturer (in your case, Nvidia), that the manufacturer provides with the drivers. In the utility, make sure all the 3D settings are set to "application preference" or whatever.

If your computer prompts you to reboot, you need to do it before going to step 2.

Step 2:

Then, go into C:\Documents and Settings\Username(your windows logon)\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire\Scripts

***EDIT: THE "APPLICATION DATA" FOLDER IS A HIDDEN FOLDER IN WINDOWS XP. YOU MUST SET THE FOLDER CORRESPONDING TO YOUR WINDOWS LOGON (on XP it's C:\Documents and Settings\Username ("username" will actually be the name of your windows logon ID. I'm not sure about Vista) TO SHOW HIDDEN FILES AND FOLDERS

***ANOTHER EDIT: THE PATH IN VISTA FOR THE FOLDER WHERE THE GAME'S CONFIG FILE IS LOCATED IS THIS - C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Empire\scripts


Open the preferences file in notepad. On the line that says "gfx_first_run false", change it to "gfx_first_run true" (without the quotes). Then try it and see what happens.

I'm not guaranteeing it will fix your problem, but it did for me. I have it running at 1680x1050, all detail settings at "high", unit size "small", and hardware shadows enabled. I get about 20-30 fps in battles that involve the maximum amount of units (except naval battles, where it's more like 15 fps - ugh)

Anyway, I was having a lot of problems after I installed the game, and spent a LONG time working on it, before that worked.

It seems that having things set in an external utility (like anti-aliasing, mip map detail level, texture detail, etc.) caused a lot of problems when I went into the game, even if I had the game settings matched to the settings that I had in Catalyst Control Center.

I don't really know if it will help you, but it's another step to try, beyond the cookie-cutter "update drivers, try older drivers, post your dxdiag" stuff you get on this board, a lot of the time.


Additionally, since doing this, I have been able to update to the latest version of the Catalyst drivers and Catalyst Control Center with no problems with game performance fps-wise or rendering problems in the 3D engine (artifacts, distortions, or any other problems - I don't have any of them)

I was also then able to install RivaTuner and apply the overclocking settings I previously had on my video card.

Now, if only I could make my sound and bink videos work right, lol. I wish they'd used the DivX codec, ha. Games I play with that NEVER have problems.

***FINAL EDIT

ANYBODY WANT TO DONATE A NEW/USED MOBO, RAM, AND PCI-E VIDEO CARD TO ME?

[GODzilla]

Step 2:

Then, go into C:\Documents and Settings\Username(your windows logon)\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire\Scripts

I have only two questions:

1.) What does it do? I usually like to understand what I'm doing.

2.) Any reason why step 2 wouldn't work without step 1?

[splatterbrains]

I have only two questions:

1.) What does it do? I usually like to understand what I'm doing.

2.) Any reason why step 2 wouldn't work without step 1?

1) It re-detects all the hardware in your computer (except for your sound, which I believe is detected independently every time you start the game)

2) I just posted it the way I did it. In fact, one of the Nvidia users who said this "fixed" their problems indicated that they just went to step 2 without doing step 1.

[DiabloDon]

1) It re-detects all the hardware in your computer (except for your sound, which I believe is detected independently every time you start the game

Thanks btw, seems to boost my fps a bit. So, True = re-detect / False = keeps the settings you've made.

Does that mean that you actually re-detects the gfx card (change script to "gfx_first_run true") everytime before play and set your gfx option anew since it saves back to "false" when you quit the game??

[aqua]

oh my god ...sorry for the double post...really it wasnt my intention....sry again

[Yojimbo]

trying to update this but the game keeps crashing whenever i change a setting. please ca go bankrupt.

[Demokritos]

I just made a major graphics settings discovery I thought I should share. I have an old computer rig with a PSU that only allows for GeForce 7600 or 8600 graphics cards at best. So my current 7600 GT card on Windows XP (DirectX 9) first restricted me to medium video quality settings - which, TBH, gave a worse show in battle mode than M2TW (where I could max every setting). But thanks to a tweaking tip for the preference file of ETW (courtesy of DrWizardPHD), I could suddenly use ultra settings all over the board. What a difference in quality that made! But, despite all graphics effect boxes now being tickable, I still couldn't see real depth of field effects, HDR effects, or the same kind of proper flames from the firearms like those of some posted pics from other players in this forum. So I gathered I could not play the game truly on ultra.

Now, the anti-aliasing options inside the game was limited to "4x" for me (no higher setting was visible). Then I remembered that in the 3D settings for my graphics card, there was a higher option than that. So I changed the anti-aliasing setting in-game to "None", changed the anti-aliasing setting in the control panel for my graphics card from "Program controlled" to max ("8xS"), and finally enabled "Supersampling" with regard to "transparency" here, too. Low and behold - suddenly the depth of field, HDR, firearm flames etc were all there! Suddenly I got the whole designed package of entertainment from this beautiful game (well, Vista and DirectX 10 ought to give a little more)! Maybe there are other people who miss out on this show unnecessarily, just like I did before when relying entirely on the in-game video settings.

Edit: just noticed other people have discovered the same thing. Oh, well.

[upsettingshorts]

Unit detail is wrong. Its most important characteristic is it determines the distance at which sprites replace 3d models. On low, it's absurdly close.

[Yojimbo]

Updated guide with more info from testing and pics for AA. Especially unit detail. I was totally wrong about that setting. It's one of the most important ones. AF doesnt have pics becaue theres virtualy no diffrence in its settings

[Little Legionaire]

Fellow friends,

Despite all my experiments my visuals still way so bad.
(1GB ATI 4870 HD)

I can't enable AA for game. Checked Catalyst, checked the game options.
No way!

What can i do for max visuals and max quality. I just can't figure it out and what to do.

Any helps shall be appreciated,

P.S.: Good to see you again dear Godzilla. You old guard

[Beeeno]

Nice discussion !! + Rep!!

[highskilledsibby]

Thanks for this guide, Forlorn. And special thanks for the link to the "Asulogics Disk Defrag"-Thing.

[F@32]

So, is there a trick to have different faces/textures of soldiers in the same unit on ultra high settigs?

[GODzilla]

So, is there a trick to have different faces/textures of soldiers in the same unit on ultra high settigs?

Actually yes: Keep it on ultra. On ultra there should be - slightly - different faces. Though I admit it looked way better in the preview screenshots, which showed not only different mustaches, but also different facial forms.

[hiho TW]

feild of vew makes it blury the further away from an object you are, this works on the campaign map also. but im not sure it might be something else =/ i have dote test but thats what it seems to do. nooby out

[Graphic]

It's not the bugs, it's not the "insufficient video memory" crashes, it's not the broken features. No, none of that is ruining the game for me. If anything is ruining the game for me, it's the wretched performance.

In battles with full armies, the game struggles to stay in the 20's with most of the settings put down to medium (which makes it look ugly as hell). I'd kill someone just for a constant 30fps, though even that is pretty pathetic.

In my opinion this game doesn't look that much more amazing than M2TW (campaign map excluded), yet it runs like total dog crap. Have CA mentioned optimization tweaks as part of their plans? How the hell did the game go from 4 minute load times and perfect performance in the demo to fairly decent load times and horrible performance in the retail copy?

I upgraded recently, and the demo ran better on an 8800 GTX than the full game does on my current GTX 260 Core 216. WAAAAAAAAAAAAY better. I'm totally mind blown how this could be. I can't even pull 60 fps on low. This is stupid.

[sqirelmaster]

any reason why you skipped over shader models and vertical synch?

[♔KillZoneGB♔]

It's not the bugs, it's not the "insufficient video memory" crashes, it's not the broken features. No, none of that is ruining the game for me. If anything is ruining the game for me, it's the wretched performance.

In battles with full armies, the game struggles to stay in the 20's with most of the settings put down to medium (which makes it look ugly as hell). I'd kill someone just for a constant 30fps.

I would nearly kill, i wish there was some way to run mods from a U3 drive, so much faster than my HD.

(This Pic might not give empire justice, but it sure beets 4fps before the texture mod)



^^^^ Total war re size graphic mod.(WIP) 606meg RAR - Needs a Host (1 File)

Saving roughly about 60% Video memory, less access time for HD.

Windows defender/security centre, hardware shell and firewall services stopped.

not bad for a single core amd 3700, 1gig, xfx 9600gt, 4gig ramboost U3 Drive OS Vista 64 Ultimate(tweaked)