RTW and all its mods are laggin, even on low settings.

[knight of virtue and valor]

please help me good people of RTW. I have allot of memory, and a rig that can run crysis demo M2tw and ETW without a hitch, on high settings. so how is it that it lags more then it used to before I upgraded?

[Souka]

so how is it that it lags more then it used to before I upgraded?

We really need more info than that, otherwise we can't figure out your problem. What did you upgrade? What os are you running? Have you updated your video drivers?

[knight of virtue and valor]

We really need more info than that, otherwise we can't figure out your problem. What did you upgrade? What os are you running? Have you updated your video drivers?

I upgraded my vid card to 512 mb 9800gt. I can run crysis, so I should be able to run RTW, right?

[chaplain118]

are you running other programs alongside RTW?

[kurdt]

Well, you can expect some lag from a single 9800 GT 512mb, and quite a bit during larger battles, depending on your settings. You don't mention the rest of your specs (CPU, memory type (DDR2 or 3) and amount, mobo, PSU, etc.), but it sounds like you have a mid range system. I experience lag occasionally on large battles with a liquid cooled QX9770 @ 4.0ghz, liquid cooled EVGA 790i FTW DPWM, 4gb G.Skill DDR3 1600mhz 7-7-7-18, liquid cooled EVGA GTX 280 1gb GDDR3 @ 720mhz core/1512mhz shader/1269mhz memory clocks, Corsair HX1000W PSU and so forth with the game on all max settings. Here, it's easier to just post a link to my system and get that out of the way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CqYoJD7fbg(I assume posting a link to Youtube is alright?). I'm not posting that to brag, well maybe a little bit, haha... but mainly just to establish I have experience with the subject and I've built more than a few high end systems (less than 10 posts or not, lol).

The usual advice would apply... install the latest drivers for your video card, motherboard and sound card, too, while you're at it. Defrag your hard drive, scan and remove any malware, viruses or spyware with a good AV program and do a scan of your main C drive to check for errors/corruption. If this is a new build/upgrade, make sure you didn't miss anything like some mobo drivers or some other minor thing. Make sure your case has good air flow as overheating hardware will run poorly. If you have good ventilation in your case and feel up to the task, you can overclock your CPU and GPU (video card) to achieve a few more frames per second, but you will want to install a good monitoring program like Speedfan to watch your temps and do some research on your particular hardware to find what others have been able to achieve with similar setups and what temperatures you shouldn't go over. You will also want Prime95 for stress testing (to test the stability of your overclock), and a program like Fraps that will report FPS or frames per second, so you know how much real improvement you're getting in game.

Another thought: I find BI tends to run a bit smoother than regular RTW on my system. One thing to keep in mind, RTW isn't the most efficient engine out there... it's not that great at ultilizing the resources at it's disposal. It might be old, but that doesn't automatically make it play great on a system that might even play newer games without a problem. In other words, I don't know that RTW plays "perfectly" on any system, heh. Although, I wouldn't mind my pal Cableguy with his Triple GTX 280's and liquid cooled 4.0ghz i7 to give it a go, lol.

[Jingles]

Easy way to work it out.

If during a battle, you're getting a laggy framerate, turn the camera facing away from the battle itself, look at the sky or the floor or something, and see if the framerate drastically increases. If it does, then it's an issue with your graphics card. However, with your card, it probably isn't the case, as I've got a 9500GT, and I don't get any major lag caused by intense poly counts. At least not in Rome.

If it carries on lagging regardless of where the camera is pointed, then your CPU is struggling to process all the combat calculations going on in melee. This is directly proportional to the number of men you've got on the battlefield, and this sort of lag comes not only from the melee fights itself, it just lags in general when you've got X amount of dudes on the battlefield.

My immediate advice would be to lower your unit size to large (assuming you've got it on Huge) because RS on huge unit sizes is pretty hardware intensive to say the least. For me, playing on Large as opposed to Ultra makes the difference between a lag fest and an incredibly smooth performance.

[knight of virtue and valor]

thanks all, +rep.

[dvk901]

Have a look at the 'Good playing practices' advice in the RS Information' thread as well. There are many tips in there.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=100384

[Mediteran]

hey dvk, not to hijack the thread, but i have a question about the page file, i have 2gb ram, and xp. you said in that thread that page file should be 1.5x the size of my ram, but not more than 1gb? how much should i put?

[dvk901]

If you have only one hard drive.....make the size of the pagefile '1024MB' as both 'min' and 'max'. This will create a 'static' pagefile of 1GB in size.
If you have two hard drives (both internal) create a 512MB pagefile on each one. This shares the load of managing the pagefile.
Don't ever create a pagefile on an external drive.

[Mediteran]

If you have only one hard drive.....make the size of the pagefile '1024MB' as both 'min' and 'max'. This will create a 'static' pagefile of 1GB in size.
If you have two hard drives (both internal) create a 512MB pagefile on each one. This shares the load of managing the pagefile.
Don't ever create a pagefile on an external drive.

i have one, but divided into two partitions, so i guess i should put 1024 on only one partition of those?

thanks for your answer

[Thorn777]

I'm playing with a 1.8 Ghz AMD with 400 Mhz on huge settings and RS only lags a bit. I turn all other graphics on low though, except DS animations and unit detail on medium.