Choosing the best video card for R:TW

**Spurius** · May 22, 2006, 06:09 AM

Found this interesting -revealing even - review/comparison for video cards for Rome: Total War and other games (see the index for the rest).

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...27gpu2_32.html

Reading that your expensive SLI won't even do anything (!) in the current versions, makes you wonder if they adress that for M2TW, or a lot of people will be popping a lot of cash for absolutely no return value over a plain 'vanilla' card.

**Trajan** · May 22, 2006, 08:21 AM

Moved to The Basement.

**Juliuscivilus** · May 22, 2006, 09:22 AM

A good processor and a large amount of ram is way more important for a smooth game.

**Vanquisher** · May 22, 2006, 09:49 AM

That depends what game you are playing, normally for 1st persons and 3rd persons, you would need a good graphics card and the others don't matter too much. However, for many strategy games, you need a lot of memory and proccessing power. For RTW, though, i think that a good graphics card is important because of the quality of the 3D graphics. If you do not balance all three of the above though , you may "bottle-neck" your system, meaning one factor is slowing down the other. If you have a good graphics card or even two, you will need to make sure that your memory especially can cope with the speed at which the card is working, because in essence a PC runs at the speed of it's slowest componant.

**Incinerate_IV** · May 22, 2006, 03:04 PM

Its because Rome Total War isn't optimized for SLI. For a game to take full advantage of SLI they need to be optimized for it.

**Hadrian** · May 23, 2006, 01:52 AM

You can bet (we can only hope!) that M2:TW has been designed with SLI/Crossfire taken into account.The preliminary graphics look too strong for them to have omitted this technological advance in their design.Besides,they'd be just plain stupid to have overlooked this,wouldn't they?

(K,this is where ya'll make me feel better by nodding your heads and agreeing with me....)

Well,its easy to see why they don't use RTS games like R:TW for benchmarking! For one,they can't consistently duplicate scores because of the near impossibility of causing the same exact events to occur,and two,the abominable FPS averages!Those video cards were the top o' the line back then too!

**Timmius** · May 23, 2006, 04:41 AM

Originally Posted by Hadrian

Besides,they'd be just plain stupid to have overlooked this,wouldn't they?

(K,this is where ya'll make me feel better by nodding your heads and agreeing with me....)

**iKossu** · May 23, 2006, 04:51 AM

Nice comparison and it seems like my Radeon X800 XL does pretty well. Mine is AGP though, not PCI Express.

Originally Posted by Hadrian

SLI/Crossfire

Bad choice imo due to costs.

**OTZ** · May 24, 2006, 06:49 AM

Originally Posted by KonserniJohtaja

Nice comparison and it seems like my Radeon X800 XL does pretty well. Mine is AGP though, not PCI Express.

Bad choice imo due to costs.

Only if money is an issue. For some people, it grows on trees.

**Spurius** · May 23, 2006, 04:19 PM

So would it be a safe conclusion so far to say:

- a new mobo with faster processor and PCI-E, a gig or more RAM, with a reasonably priced GPU will give you the best chance of having a good time with M2TW

- until we know for sure the engine in M2TW is going to optimised specifically for SLI don't waste your money on one

- actually upgrading GPU-only is probably going to be a bummer (esp with nice-looking deals on cards that have more memory but actually lower bandwidth and throughput than your old one, with a bit of luck - read of one such case already)

Should we ask CA maybe via their forum or so, if they did optimise it? Could save a lot of people a fair bit of money and loads of deception to boot...