Empire and SLI

**PhallosMaximus** · January 03, 2010, 01:23 AM

Hi All!

I am thinking of buying an additional graphics card in order to use SLI for running Empire (and Napoleon).
I have no problems running the game now on the highest settings, I just want some additional "horsepower" (we can never get enough, can we?).

Could people please chime in with their experiences using SLI with Empire, so I could make an informed choice?

Thanks

**MorganH.** · January 03, 2010, 04:55 AM

I have 2 cards running from Empires release and all,but as far as i can judge,having SLI enabled,Empires still doesnt support it!

**Rammstein** · January 03, 2010, 10:15 AM

Originally Posted by MorganH

I have 2 cards running from Empires release and all,but as far as i can judge,having SLI enabled,Empires still doesnt support it!

Its a driver thing if you use the right one it works, a working one is 195.62 (dont forget to enable SLI in the control panal after installing the driver)
With me it works ok, but the lack of VRAM on my cards is limiting the whole performance. 2 8800GT with Win 7

**MorganH.** · January 03, 2010, 11:56 AM

Originally Posted by Rammstein

Its a driver thing if you use the right one it works, a working one is 195.62 (dont forget to enable SLI in the control panal after installing the driver)
With me it works ok, but the lack of VRAM on my cards is limiting the whole performance. 2 8800GT with Win 7

ok thanks a lot,i didnt know that,ill give this a try then !

**PhallosMaximus** · January 03, 2010, 09:02 PM

With some games, SLI increases the framerate up to 80%.

What kind of increase can you achieve with Empire?

Thanks,

**Cameraman** · January 05, 2010, 01:51 AM

Only certain drivers allow SLI to work in E:TW. And many of the ones that do still have many issues. 181.22 seems to give the best performance and stability, but it's very old (released before the E:TW release, it was probably what they tested the game with). I've heard that 191.07 works fairly well but causes some UI flickering. The latest driver, 195.62 technically works with SLI but I have found the performance to be very poor and there is some UI flickering. The scaling obviously depends on what's going on in the game. But I'd say with 181.22 you should get about 80% scaling. However, you might just want to get a newer ATI card as they seem to work fairly well with the game.

Very curious to see how Napoleon Total War performs. If the NVIDIA issues continue I may very well get an ATI graphic card next time I'm looking for one.

**Hesus de bodemloze** · January 03, 2010, 10:17 AM

Moving this to Empires : Total War Technical Help. You might get more professional help over there.

Hesus.

**Shivendra** · January 11, 2010, 07:25 AM

Changing the hex value to 400005 makes the game flicker like

!!

**Cameraman** · January 12, 2010, 12:39 AM

Odd what driver version, operating system, and graphic card are you using?

**Shivendra** · January 12, 2010, 07:00 AM

I have Vista x64 running on 9500M 195.55 offical Nvidia..

**Cameraman** · January 12, 2010, 10:50 AM

Oh haven't tried this on mobile graphics. They often have issues of their own. Haven't tried it with 195.55 either.

I've had pretty good luck so far. I have had one lockup so far but I'm not so sure it was related to SLI. My antivirus scan had started up while I was playing a battle. The only side effect for me seems to be occasional flickering shadows.