How to run this game on highest detail ? (smoothly of course)

[The Despondent Mind]

On my old pc which had 2 GB RAM,Nvidia GeForce 210 (512MB) and an amd athlon dual core (I can't remember which one exactly ) .
I was never able to put everything on max ,huge units and have a 10.000 titanic battle .

Now I have 8 GB RAM,3GB Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Dual-X OC,AMD FX eight Core processor 3.50 .
And guess what I still can't fulfill my wet dreams .

I tried an 8000 men battle and the performance wasn't smooth enough .
Here are some highlights of it

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

And here's the whole album


Anyway my first thought was that mtw2 like rtw simply can't utilize new processors but then how can you play these two games on max detail ? Another hunch I had but it's probably BS is that it partially has something to do with resolution , it always seemed to me that mtw2 hates the 1366x768 resolution .

[irishron]

try it with Haswell i5 overclocked to 4 -4.5GHz? It is just an older version engine with the same limitations of the Warscape engine, trying to cram a ton of at once through one core of the cpu and not even really optimized for it.

Forget the graphics over 1gb, it will never use it. Too damn old. Everything is about cpu speed in one core, and the less Windows and third party BS you have running in the background the better because it has to be pushed through that one core with it even if you have eight cores.

[Aeratus]

Your framerates aren't that bad, especially considering that M2 is not a first person game. Only the first screenshot had below 16 fps, so maybe it was an anomaly.

As Irishron mentioned, the CPU is the bottleneck, not the video card. Also, the M2 engine isn't optimized for that many men on the battle field.

[Earl Dibbles Jr]

What I'm interested in is what the max settings actually are...I know how to get max unit detail, building detail, etc. I'm not sure about the other graphics settings though, could someone tell me what the max are for them as I have yet to figure out if I'm actually running everything on max haha.

[Aeratus]

The game engine max settings can't be achieved in-game. For example, totally disabling 2D sprites for all distances requires that you edit the game files.

[UndrState]

The game engine max settings can't be achieved in-game. For example, totally disabling 2D sprites for all distances requires that you edit the game files.

Oh? Anyone already have a mod that does this? Have you tried this and, if so, how well does it run?

Being between gaming computers right now, and looking forward to building one with an eye to get the best out of M2TW (above all other games) possible, I'm curious about who has got the best preformance at high settings and how they achieve it. My old comp, before it died, did not cope well with trees and close in melee, and that's kinda sad.

[Aeratus]

No mod is needed to do that. All you need to do is go to medieval2.preferences.cfg and set "unit_detail" to "highest." (In-game, you can only set this to "higher").

I did some tests on my system (i7 4770k 3.5 Ghz non-overclocked; GTX 780 EVGA superclocked; 1920x1080 resolution) and came up with the following results. Map is grassy flatland with no fog.

With about 8k men on the battle field, the max in-game settings range from 50-90 fps (prior to army engaging) to about 35-45 fps in heavy fighting. Minimum fps I obtained was about 25 fps in close-up view. Anti-alias did not reduce framerate to any significant degree.

With sprites totally disabled, the frame rate with all 8k men on a single screen view was about 17 fps, and in heavy fighting with almost all units engaged, the framerate dropped to 11 fps. When sprites are totally disabled, zooming in actually increases framerate, since the full detail of the unit is rendered regardless of the distance to the unit. The thing with disabling sprites entirely is that performance is heavily tied to the amount of men on the field. So if you're going to be fighting multiple AI stacks, then i7 4770k at stock clock isn't good enough to play smoothly.

With only 4k men, the framerate was about 35 fps prior to fighting. Note that this is still with max settings (sprites disabled; and highest in-game settings including max details and 8x anti-alias).

Also, the power usage on my video card was very low, even at 11 fps. Specifically the power % shown by EVGA precision X was only 28%, and the video card fans remained at minimum under the default fan profile. In contrast, unigine valley benchmark usually results in 60% power. This shows that the graphics card was not being strained and that only the CPU was bottlenecking the performance.

[UndrState]

No mod is needed to do that. All you need to do is go to medieval2.preferences.cfg and set "unit_detail" to "highest." (In-game, you can only set this to "higher").

I did some tests on my system (i7 4770k 3.5 Ghz non-overclocked; GTX 780 EVGA superclocked; 1920x1080 resolution) and came up with the following results. Map is grassy flatland with no fog.

With about 8k men on the battle field, the max in-game settings range from 50-90 fps (prior to army engaging) to about 35-45 fps in heavy fighting. Minimum fps I obtained was about 25 fps in close-up view. Anti-alias did not reduce framerate to any significant degree.

With sprites totally disabled, the frame rate with all 8k men on a single screen view was about 17 fps, and in heavy fighting with almost all units engaged, the framerate dropped to 11 fps. When sprites are totally disabled, zooming in actually increases framerate, since the full detail of the unit is rendered regardless of the distance to the unit. The thing with disabling sprites entirely is that performance is heavily tied to the amount of men on the field. So if you're going to be fighting multiple AI stacks, then i7 4770k at stock clock isn't good enough to play smoothly.

With only 4k men, the framerate was about 35 fps prior to fighting. Note that this is still with max settings (sprites disabled; and highest in-game settings including max details and 8x anti-alias).

Also, the power usage on my video card was very low, even at 11 fps. Specifically the power % shown by EVGA precision X was only 28%, and the video card fans remained at minimum under the default fan profile. In contrast, unigine valley benchmark usually results in 60% power. This shows that the graphics card was not being strained and that only the CPU was bottlenecking the performance.

Excellent answer! Very informative. I know it'll help me make my choices.

It's too bad the resources of the video card (and other processor cores ) can't be harnessed better, but oh well. Thanks again Aeratus!