Performance Help/Question...

[Hannibal's Bane]

Hi All,

I am a HUGE total war player. And my heart belongs to Rome TW more than anything, my most favorite game of all time (followed by Civ II). Been coming to these boards for a long time, but never joined as a user. So here I am.

But enough of that.

I recently got back into Rome with one of the steam sales for $5 (incredible value).

Before I stopped playing religiously in 2007 (got addicted to CoH) I played exclusively with the Rome Total Realism. So I did some research and decided that Roma Surrectum would be be my new drug of choice. I have to admit, what an incredible job these modders did with the engine. I'm blow away.

My problem is now performance. I had a game going where I had about 6000-7000 men, HUGE unit size, high detail, no grass, and everything else on medium playing at 1600X1200. My FPS's were consistently down in the mid20's and if I zoomed in, it was pretty pathetic.

I get really good performance on MII:TW, E:TW and Napoleon. And I understand it's not optimized for my system, but I think I should be better than what I had above.

I've looked up some similar forum postings and tried to tweak some graphical settings and OS settings and some other things, but not really any significant performance.

My current specs are:

• Q9650 @ 3.8 Ghz
• SLI 460 768 OC
• Win 7-64
• 8 Gigs of RAM

R:TW and to a lesser extent MII:TW is why I still upgrade my PC.I want to someday be able to MAX OUT everything. But years later, I feel I've only made marginal increases.

Any suggestion or tips would be very appreciated. Anyone with a similar setup that can help me along?

Also, using Steam as the launcher.

GO CARTHAGE!!!

[Hellhound1]

Hi there!

Rome Total War is about 7 years old now (maybe older)
The maximum it can handle is 1 1/2 - 2 gbs of ram.
It also only runs on a single core, meaning you lose 3/4 of your cores while playing!
If your experiencing issues, then you'll probably have to turn down your settings.

Hope this helps!
Hellhound1

[Hannibal's Bane]

Yea, I was trying to avoid having to turn down my settings. I mean the high settings exist for a reason right? At some point, the devs had to run it maxed out. Now I'm not looking at maxing it out but just running it with unit detail high and some other medium settings.

I throw other games on there from 7 years ago or even older and they fly. I understand it's not optimized for tons of RAM and 4 cores and SLI, but at some point wouldn't the horsepower of today just be overwhelming? Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Counter Strike, all those games have scaled up with my system. I would just think Rome would get a bit better. I was just wondering if I was missing some graphic driver or some other tweak.

[chris10]

I think playing on 1280X1024 will help to make performance better.
I have a i5 quad with 2,67 Ghz, GT340 512Mb DDR5, and 4GB DDR3 Ram on win 32 and run battles up to 3 stacks without major slowdown...anything more and performance goes down...
as Hellhound said...RTW will only run 1 core and adress 2 GB anyway no matter how much GB your system has.

Although your processor is a lot of Ghz and should do far better than what you describe...thing is there is infinite possibilities...software,drivers,hardware incompatibilitys with RTW...the possible combinations maybe go into millions...actually not all games run better on modern hardware...
certain ATI driver (dont remember which one) on a modern ATI card can convert RTW into a diashow for example...

Constantly running background processes like messengers,av programs etc.etc. are little performance breaker as well..

[Hellhound1]

The devs probably maxed it out on a single core with high speed.

Unfortunately, its the most the game can actually handle, and dont forget you've got 4 cores @ 3ghz. Good for newer stuff, not so good for older stuff. (a single core 4.5ghz would be bestest!)

##Edit

Did a quick google, found this:

If they both used the same architecture and instruction set, the Single core would be far far faster because access to any shared resources experience contention, therefore a dual core @ 4Ghz would only run at 80-90% of the single core at 8Ghz, because the single core has full access to all resources at any particular time

[Hannibal's Bane]

Thanks for the response. Maybe I'll try overclocking to 4 Ghz and pushing my cards a bit further. Looks like thats the most I can do then.

[Hannibal's Bane]

Thanks all. I'll try turning off some services as well and lowering the screen res and see what happens. 3 stacks would be nice.