FPS How to improve it?

[Decebalus3]

How many frames do you guys get when you play the demo. I usually get around 20, sometimes even 10 when in battle.
MD2TW is one of those games where it plays pretty decent with 20 FPS.

Regardless if I play it on high or medium, I get about the same thing. The only significant increase occurs when I change to shader 1.

Any suggestions on how to improve it and get 25+ ?

Specs are : Pentium 4 2.66 GHZ
2 GB of ram
Geforce 6800 GT

[Nutsack]

Shades are the FPS killing factor in the Medieval 2: Total war demo, as far as i've gathered.
I could play on highest settings on everything as long as i brought down the shades, but if i brought up the shades the game got choppy.

[verena xeventus]

Shades are the FPS killing factor in the Medieval 2: Total war demo, as far as i've gathered.
I could play on highest settings on everything as long as i brought down the shades, but if i brought up the shades the game got choppy.

Are you referring to shader versions 1 and 2? If so whats the difference between the two? - Thanks. :hmmm:

[Miraj]

Question:

Whats more important for framerate, 3D card or CPU?

[H_man]

I have a RADEON x1900xtx with a AMDx2 4200+ processor and only get 13FPS on average and 24 with everything on lowest. How could 48 shader pipelines do this to me....

[cudakite]

Start with turning bloom off and shadows off. that helped me alot and the game still looked good.

[Decebalus3]

Yeah, but no shadows. But if thats the case, I can live without shadows. Bloom isn't that big for me.

Anyway guys, thanks a lot.

[Spiff]

Bear in mind of course the demo is stated as unoptimised, expect better hardware compatability and general performance in the full game.

[The Mongol]

Which demo are you talking about?

I'm assuming the old one which is based on a month and a half old beta so I wouldn't worry. They've made lots of optimizations since then.

[God-Emperor of Mankind]

Yes the new demo runs better then the old one.
But turning off shadows is a good way to increase performance.
Also tweaking the textures is also a sure bet.
Turning off banners will give you small boost as well.

[H_man]

I tried turning off ALL shadows from extreme and the performance increase was minimal, 5FPS at most. I'll trust your optimism and wait until the full version comes out, if the same terrible Framerates are found I'll really get angry at CA for supporting NVIDIA more than they optimise for ATI cards.

[Animosity]

hmmmm my ati radeon mobility x1400 runs the game fine. I dont think your vid card is the problem dude.

[Matty_P]

yeah, i've got a nvidia 7600gt and it runs smooth as honey

[Decebalus3]

Well to be honest with you guys, this game looks like it runs smooth at 20 fps. Its playable. Turning the shadows off, I get an increase of about 10 fps which is pretty good. So I might do that if I need to. Who cares about shadows anyway lol? And I hope they fixed the sounds. They sound like the generals were in a studio.

[Crimson Scythe]

Kill the bloom, first of all. Some people like the effect, but it's a matter of preference. I don't like it, so I turned it off. The performance boost was a bonus.

Second, as most people have mentioned, is the shadows. You have quite a few options with the shadows, so just tinker with the settings until you reach a good mix of shadows and FPS, or turn them off altogether.

I also tried changing the Anti-Aliasing for a small FPS boost. If you can live with the jaggies, turn it off. I have mine set at 4X, but I change it to 2X sometimes for another 3-5 FPS. If you have the shadows off, you might get even more, since your video card won't have to AA the shadows at all (I could be wrong here, though).

After those, try adjusting the grass or terrain detail levels.

Hope that helps.

[Masterul]

Hey, how do you check what's your FPS rate in TW?
Thanks

[Crimson Scythe]

Hey, how do you check what's your FPS rate in TW?
Thanks

Download a program called Fraps, and then let it run in the background while you play TW. You'll get a little FPS reading in the corner of your screen.

You can get it here: http://www.fraps.com/

[Byron Eastridge]

think he means shadows

with the old demo
everything turned down
16,326 men on the field
start out at 5 fps
end of battle fps was up to 21 with a little over 7000 men on the field still

[Matty_P]

well, it depends. (regarding the CPU GPU question)

graphics help the computer with overall graphics performance, but CPU helps with overall pc performance. depedning on your set-up, i would say that so long as you have a decent CPU, a good graphics card would determine the performance.

take the question to the basement, they'll tell you all about CPU bottlenecks and GPU bottlenecks and everything else you could ask.

[Miraj]

well, it depends. (regarding the CPU GPU question)

graphics help the computer with overall graphics performance, but CPU helps with overall pc performance. depedning on your set-up, i would say that so long as you have a decent CPU, a good graphics card would determine the performance.

take the question to the basement, they'll tell you all about CPU bottlenecks and GPU bottlenecks and everything else you could ask.

I posted a thread called "Upgrade Help...". Its essentially about this same question.

I have an average CPU of 2.66ghz P4. But my 3d card sucks horse balls. So I'm getting a new one. Will this drasitically improve framerates? Or is my CPU still too midlevel?