Is this right?

[shenmueguru]

I think something other than my hardware is slowing RTW down; someone pointed out before he had basically the same specs but had 10-15+ more frames than I did. I've tried this guide - http://www.stratcommandcenter.com/rtw/maximizepc.php and have set my graphics card settings to "performance" and mostly everything to lowest. Still, I get an average 15 frames (ranging from 5-25 with two large armies) I run adaware se, cacheman, and spybot search and destroy regularly. I suspect RTW should run better.

I've got a Celeron 2.6ghz, 512 mb ram, and a radeon 9250. Without buying new parts, is there much more I can do? Thanks.

[krazykarl]

the problem with netburst (p4) based celerons, is that they do not have nearly enough cache (even the newer celeron-d's fall short) for thier deep pipelines. I used to have a 2.2Ghz celery and the thing had no balls whatsoever. It couldnt mutitask without taking a serious hit, and it preformed only marginally faster then my old 1.2ghz T-birt athlon. You could try shutting off any background programs, ie antivirus firewall other stuff in the systray etc.... that would help you out a bit, but if I were you id replace that celeron with full blown P4 with a meg of cache.

[Aristocrat]

Sadly your performace is taking a hit from all parts there.
512mb of ram isn't enough, you'll notice a difference with 1gb.
Your graphics card means you cannot handle huge (or possibly) even large unit sizes, and your cpu, while being fast enough (more or less) for RTW is still a bottleneck.
A few things you can try are:
1. Turn off grass completely, turn off shadows completely, these are both major fps killers (as well as unit detail, you should turn this down though).
2. As said turn off any background windows tasks when playing RTW, it won't do too much, but I believe it helps.
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.(You won't like whats after this point).
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3. Buy more ram, it's relatively cheap these days.
5. Buy a better graphics card, a cheap 256mb one should show a marked increase.
6. Get a intel P4, anything around 3.0ghz or up. 3ghz are pretty cheap as well these days...though if you going to buy a new cpu I wouldnt spend the money on it.

Main advice is to get another 512mb of ram.

[Shuriken]

On the Total War site there is an article on how to speed up your game.

[Lee1026]

Repeat after me, Video ram have vitually no impact on performance. Video ram have vitually no impact on performance.

[Aristocrat]

I only said a cheap 256mb because the graphics cards themselves seem decent enough, and the word your missing is "yet".
But ok, he could easily get away with 9800XT or pro and see a marked increase, though Id personally get a XFX (cheap but decent brand) 6600GT (256mb version, not many around though).

Come to think of it, there are bad graphics cards out there with 256mb of vram (my bad), but they are better than his current one at least.

[Lee1026]

I have seen intergrated gfx marketed as having 256 ram. I have also seen the geforce 5200 with 256 ram. That would be certainly worse then what he got.

Plus, a geforce 6600gt with 128 will certainly perform better then a geforce 5200 with 256 ram.