Weird Texture issue rome total war v1.5

[Zeno90]

I just ran a campaign of RTW for the first time in awhile and deep into the game (after about 100 - 150 turns all of a sudden) i noticed textures not being drawn during battles (eg corpses just shown as semi translucent grey blobs, shadows jutting out in weird direction) then also not being drawn properly on the campaign map (Forest not being drawn and random blackspots). I noticed that if i tab out of the game and back in the the refresh caused the graphics to draw correctly until the next battle on the battle map. I am including screenshots as examples of my problem.

System specs.
Windows XP home 32bit
3.4ghz i7 3770
3gb addressable of 32gb
AMD Radeon 6900 series with 2gb of Vram

If anyone has found a solution to this problem help would be greatly appreciated.

[irishron]

It's a memory issue with the game engine.
Playing with lower graphics settings may help for a while.
Running a program like Game Booster to shut down any nongame related processes may help some.

[Zeno90]

I reduced the graphical levels to the bare minimum 800x600 resolution 16bit color depth for battle and 1024x768 16bit for campaign and it did seem to fix the problem of the graphical corruption. However those settings graphically look like they are a few steps above doom 1. Is there a configuration file that would allow me to increase the polygon count by a few thousand or some setting that would allow the game engine to actually use more memory?

I built this installation specifically for gaming exclusively in mind. I have disabled all non essential service (eg spooler, dhcp, windows time) to reduce any system resources. I idle my system with about 10 system processes only taking up about 350mb (about 4% of available memory ). RTW adds roughly 250mb of ram usage with all the graphics turned all the way up which is about 6% of my available memory.

[irishron]

It's the way the game allocates memory, not your computer. I even doubt the game is even using all 2gb of your vram.

What may help even for as old as Rome is would be an upgrade to Win 7 64bit to get some breathing space for your graphics card if nothing else. To be honest a system like yours should not have an operating system with anything less.

By the way, the game was made when 1024 x 768 was still ubiquitous and even 1gb cards were still a few years away.

Go 64bit and tie into Skyrim with your system. This is a test, not RTW.

[Zeno90]

So the the game engine has some hard coded limit? Grrr. That makes memory leaks seem attractive. Just expand until all available memory is used and the system crashes.

I know Win Xp home 32bit is old for my system but i chose it specifically because I did not want to deal with the hassle of coaxing and tweaking wine on my linux distro for every game I own which sometimes seems to be the case for wine. Windows XP 32bit generally runs modern games as well as old 16bit dos games which is a plus for me. But all plans seem to go awry the longer you put them to the test.

Thank you for your help sir.