Choppy Audio, some display issues, mouse lag

**donbaloo** · August 08, 2013, 10:11 PM

Hi folks! So I just built a new PC and found my old copy of Rome Total War and wanted to give it a spin. After installing (its V 1.5) I start it up and max out all settings. I just assumed with the game being older I should easily be able to run it maxed out. But maybe not. I ran all the settings up, selected 1920x1080 resolution, ticked widescreen. Immediately had some noticeable cursor lag on the menu. I ran it anyway and in the game cutscene I was getting some minor graphical issues, major audio issues (audio cut out for a second every 3 or 4 seconds), but no real noticeable fps problems. Once at the map audio was fine and everything looked great but the cursor lag was still there.

So do I still not have the specs to run this game on max, hooked up to my 32" HDTV?
Windows 8 64bit
i5-4670 (Haswell) 3.4GHz
8G Ram
nVidia GeForce GTX 760 (2GB)

**donbaloo** · August 08, 2013, 10:36 PM

Good grief, pulled a total noob. Could have sworn that I got the latest graphics driver but alas, I had not. Updated the driver and everything is rockin' now. Sorry to have cluttered the forum with this.

**irishron** · August 09, 2013, 05:57 AM

I think we all have pulled one like this at least once. Me, too many times. Glad you got it working. Welcome to the forum.

**donbaloo** · August 09, 2013, 07:43 AM

Can't figure out how to edit posts, but that should have read "must have mods".

**donbaloo** · August 09, 2013, 07:42 AM

Thanks irishron! So are there any must have more for the game that are just haves? I've never had the opportunity to wrap up the vanilla game so I want to stick to the vanilla campaign. But if there's anything that's too good not to use and everyone considers it a must have these days, Ill consider it.

**irishron** · August 09, 2013, 08:09 AM

The favorite mods have been Roma Surrectum, and II, Rome total Realism and Europa Barabarorum. I liked Terrae Expugnandae.

**donbaloo** · August 09, 2013, 11:01 PM

Well dang, booted back up tonight to play and I'm back to the same issues. Anyone heard of this happening before? Worked great last night, but now I'm back to video artifacts, choppy audio, mouse lag. What's going on?

**donbaloo** · August 09, 2013, 11:31 PM

Well, I did some searching around the net and found a page that had some troubleshooting tips on it:
http://erado.totalwar.org/survival/check/
I didn't follow any of the pointers about setting graphics to lower settings (since I knew my rig could handle it last night) but the one thing I did do was the first recommendation. Went into the preferences.txt file and changed the SAFE_REFRESH to TRUE. That was it. It fixed it.

Can anyone tell me what Safe Refresh is? Why was mine defaulting to FALSE?