Lag/stutter every few seconds (sometimes longer) during battles.

[ThePirateMan]

Lag/stutter every few seconds (sometimes longer) during battles.

Problem with both 1.3 and 1.5 (I tested 1.3 as I tried reinstalling the game)

No lag or problems and it runs decent/fast during menu and campaign screens.

It doesn't seem to be related to my video settings or the size or speed of the battle.

I haven't been able to correlate the frequency of the lag with anything but it doesn't vary a lot anyway.

Empire engine games run fine.

My computer:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This is pretty disastrous for my enjoyment of the game, so help would be greatly appreciated.

[irishron]

The cpu isn't the fastest and this game pushes every byte through it before your graphics card can use the info. It is actually bottlenecking your nice graphics card.

If you wish to see this game at its best, an Intel i5 overclocked to ~4GHz including battles. I have an AMD and I won't try competing with the Intel ones. I just didn't have another $150 at the time.

[ThePirateMan]

I mean my current processor is 3.6GHz. The lag has no correlation with battle size or speed, it seems a bit weird that it'd be a problem with the hardware not being powerful enough but admittedly I don't really know how it works. Were people not actually able to run this game smoothly on any setting when it came out?

A friend thinks it sounds like the hard disk is working too hard.

Is there anything else you think might be the case, perhaps relating to the hard drive? Trying out a new, better cpu is a bit out of reach right now.

[irishron]

If you don't have much free disc space and/or badly fragmented, possible but in this case I doubt it. To be honest, this issue is as old as the Total War series and how well the titles are not optimized and Medieval2 was never optimized. It still is not bad for n eight year old game written when single core cpus were still a popular selling item and what the game was written for.

Empire is a totally different graphics rendering engine so the two do not compare at all.

[ThePirateMan]

Do you think an FX-4350 would do the trick? From searching around and looking at cpubenchmark it does seem fairly high end while being much cheaper (though worse) than intel cpus. It does pass 4 GHz, but I hear intel cpus are generally just plain more well-made so maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way.

Thanks for the help by the way.

[irishron]

Intel is the better buy for total War even as old as medieval2 is. A first generation i5 is a better number cruncher for TW than the 4350 you're looking at or the 6300 I have.