Recommendations for graphics settings.

[Christofferson]

Been having a touch of lag in the bigger battles, just wondering what I should set my graphics to in the advanced options menu. I know that turning shadows down is big for reducing lag as it's hard on your processor, so I have those at medium. Been running most everything on Very High or Ultra without much problems until I get to the bigger battles. Just trying to see if there's any tricks to easing up some load on my processor / GPU.

My specs are:
Intel Core i7-4770k @ 3.5 GHz
Gigabyte GTX770 4GB
2x XPG-V2 4GB DDR3-1866 RAM (8GB)

I have everything turned off on the right except for "blood effects" and I have my "unlimited video memory" turned on. I also have my texture filtering at 16x.

Like I said, I only get some framerate issues during large battles (10k+) and of course siege battles where the game lags as units get blobbed up. Although now that I think about it, that might be the problem in the larger battles as well. Are there any quick fixes I can make in my graphics settings to lower the lag issues without turning down every single thing when it starts to get choppy? I don't think my computer specs are the problem. Although I could probably try to OC my CPU to get a frame rate increase, except I'm worried about overheating issues as I don't have anything like water cooling.

[Zonac]

In my opinion you cpu is not the problem. however the ram is quite a bit low if you ask me.... sometimes when i play R2 and do a bit other stuff as well my ram usage increases to 9-10gb of my 16 gb ....
however if you are talking of armies with 4 stacks vs 4 stacks then nothing seems to help...^^

[Godz_Mercenary]

In my opinion you cpu is not the problem. however the ram is quite a bit low if you ask me.... sometimes when i play R2 and do a bit other stuff as well my ram usage increases to 9-10gb of my 16 gb ....
however if you are talking of armies with 4 stacks vs 4 stacks then nothing seems to help...^^

8GB is fine. The game only hits the 8GB mark (rarely) when the engine starts messing up because of path finding issues etc. Any non siege battles and my monitoring software shows less than 4GB used by the game in windows and just over 3GB on g card. To fix it when it does go crazy with RAM usage I just upped virtual memory setting from 64MB minimum to 1024MB minimum to use.

Anyway on my PC

8350@4.5
8GB 1866 RAM@ 2000oddMHz
R9 280x@2000 core/ 1700 mem

If I go below extreme@1080p my frame rates are actually worse as my graphics card isn't utilised properly so I have to tick everything apart from veg alpha. I find when I do that my graphics card is used 100% not just 60 or 70% and my FPS is stable. In the standard Rome 2 game I hit an average of 60FPS with 2x unit sizing plus 2 armies with full 20 stacks and that includes using graphic enhancement mods. But DeI is a different beast so changing settings won't change much performance wise no matter what you change as it's a lot to do with the battle combat mod they use, it causes performance fluctuations much like in sieges due to path finding going a bit weird when armies clash so it screws about with your CPU. I'm averaging between 35/40 FPS with DeI, that's a lot less than the standard game and that wont change much no matter what setting you change. I've tried believe me, even using the latest AMD Omega drivers. The engine in general is just flawed and the combat mod they use don't help.

And avoid sieges like the plague whenever you can.

EDIT: One thing I can suggest is to start the game then minimise it then open task manager (ctrl+alt+del), then find the Rome.exe process and set it to high priority, don't set it to real time though as it would defo make your PC unstable with a high chance of PC shutdown or game crash.

[TheOrangeProject]

[...] But DeI is a different beast so changing settings won't change much performance wise no matter what you change as it's a lot to do with the battle combat mod they use, it causes performance fluctuations much like in sieges due to path finding going a bit weird when armies clash so it screws about with your CPU. I'm averaging between 35/40 FPS with DeI, that's a lot less than the standard game and that wont change much no matter what setting you change. I've tried believe me, even using the latest AMD Omega drivers. The engine in general is just flawed and the combat mod they use don't help.

And avoid sieges like the plague whenever you can.

[...]

Not entirely true.

DeI doesn't, or to be precise: can't, change anything in matters of pathfinding or unit collision (in the very sense).

There are mainly two reasons DeI needs more loading time and stuff and both has been pointed out by Dresden and co. several times:

1. The amounts of scripts increase the loading times.

2. The other is to LOD related, too much to explain, there are some threads about this.

If you want to increase loading times, buy a small ssd for rome 2 only.
If you want to increase battle performance, either upgrade your rig, try some adjustments (nvida settings etc.), lower unit size and lower certain options (sufu) - my personal advice is to upgrade to windows 8. Even though i don't like it, it can give you some additional fps. Don't try things like advanced boot options and such, unless you 100% you know what are you doing (mainly because this is not gaming related option and more like a placebo thing http://www.eightforums.com/drivers-h...rocessors.html for example.) Edit: Of course, this not an offense against Krixux thread. There are withou doubt usefull tips in there.

[TheOrangeProject]

Take a look at my signature.

Gave me a ridiculous amount of fps in the benchmark and smoothed my gamplay.

Reason: It seems the case, that under the battle map is water - under every battle map.
(same goes for a bf4 map lol, don't know if this is in bf4 also the case for all maps)

[Christofferson]

Take a look at my signature.

Gave me a ridiculous amount of fps in the benchmark and smoothed my gamplay.

Reason: It seems the case, that under the battle map is water - under every battle map.
(same goes for a bf4 map lol, don't know if this is in bf4 also the case for all maps)

Lowering the water settings didn't actually change my frames at all in the forest benchmark. I have heard of this before, but I can't replicate this.

[Alu10]

Take a look at my signature.

Gave me a ridiculous amount of fps in the benchmark and smoothed my gamplay.

Reason: It seems the case, that under the battle map is water - under every battle map.
(same goes for a bf4 map lol, don't know if this is in bf4 also the case for all maps)

Not only water, particle effect drains alot.

[Krixux]

Here is my old threat that addresses some performanceissues:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...formance-Boost

Hope it helps.

[rjacko10]

Reason: It seems the case, that under the battle map is water - under every battle map.
(same goes for a bf4 map lol, don't know if this is in bf4 also the case for all maps)

I thought the water under the map was fixed by CA a few patches ago... I maybe wrong though.

It would be useful if CA could simple limit the AIs pathfinding orders to once every x seconds.

[xisheng]

All i did to remove the battle lag was set unit size to medium and unit detail to very high, rest is extreme, dei has bigger unit sizes, for example First Cohort has 300 men in it on large/ultra. On medium i constantly have battles between few stacks lets say ~7-10k men in total on the battle field and i experience 0 issues. My pc is mediocre at best.

[Christofferson]

I have been looking in to this and many people are having stuttering problems due to pathing issues. I feel this is an unavoidable occurrence that slows down the framerate of just your units, and not the camera, weather etc. I think it's an optimization issue with Rome II itself that Creative Assembly has yet to fix. This issue is more prevalent with siege battles.

[TheOrangeProject]

I have been looking in to this and many people are having stuttering problems due to pathing issues. I feel this is an unavoidable occurrence that slows down the framerate of just your units, and not the camera, weather etc. I think it's an optimization issue with Rome II itself that Creative Assembly has yet to fix. This issue is more prevalent with siege battles.

First, how big are your battles? Or what is a big battle?
As other pointed out, unit size above medium puts a lot of stress on the rig.

Sad to hear the water thing didn't help you - for me and a buddy of mine it helped.

You have to be more precise about your problem, because there are different kind of lags/stuttering in Rome2.

Siege stuttering: The stuttering seems to be independent from graphic settings, unit size, amount of troops which are alive and amount of units on the size. I have yet to see a workaround for this. Changing amount of cores etc. didn't do the trick.

Lag due to low fps: The standart case, first thing would be to reduce unit size, especially because you are using DeI.

Pathfinding, this seems to be more an issue in siege battles, it is shown while playing with an allied AI. Pressing Space shows that the AI giving commands in a fast rhythm. While that often stuttering is there.

[ostendadler]

Are you facing game lag or unit stuttering?

[KAM 2150]

In my case particle effecta can make this game unplayable so keep then low/medium.

[rpaulino1]

Guys, try Krixux's solution it helped smooth out my battles, but continued getting unit stuttering in large battle. So i found another thread and followed what he said and it worked. Now I have 5 armies at a time on the battlefield and its silky smooth. Here's the link http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...Remove-siege-s its thread #17

[Christofferson]

Like I said, after looking in to it I feel like my problem is the stuttering caused by the horrible pathing in this game. My camera doesn't slow down and everything else is working fine, but the units look like they're fighting in slow motion. I feel like this isn't a problem that's fixable through changing graphics settings. I did however go in to my preferences.script file and change my gfx_video_memory from "0" to what my video card's VRAM is in bytes, as the game didn't recognize it properly for some reason.

[Fedual]

Copied from another article on the totalwar forums, it is old but still helps me out with graphic settings.

Tested and worked by me !


Current version : Patch 1


Unlimited Video Memory : ON


Seems like there are several graphics option that will use GPU power instead of
CPU power if you set those options ABOVE "high" (very high to extreme) and thereby
reducing CPU burden and in return give you more fps.




Here are the 4 options that I mentioned above :


1. Shadow : set it on "Very High-Extreme" (put it above "high" so it will processed by
GPU instead of CPU)
2. Particle : set it on "Very High-Extreme" (same like above)
3. Unit Detail : set it on "Very High-Extreme" (same like above)
4. Building Detail : set it on "Very High-Extreme" (same like above)


Note : the most important thing here is you have to set those 4 options ABOVE "High" !




And here are several options that I recommend you all to be set like this :


1. Terrain : set it to either Low or Medium
2. Grass : set it to either Low or Medium
3. Trees : set it to either Low or Medium
4. Water : set it to Low - High
5. Distortion Effect and SSAO : should be unchecked (but still optional,
if you have good GPU it might be not a big performance hit)


Note : those 3 settings are really CPU heavy burden alongside Unit Size !




At least, this will help you guys to get additional fps until CA release patch 2

[Blasphemer.]

Copied from another article on the totalwar forums, it is old but still helps me out with graphic settings.

It helps me greatly, thank you mate!

[Satomi]

Hey guys, I'm very interested about the graphic settings which i'll can use. Whats my point... Im buying new computer and I would like to know, if there 'll be constantly 60 FPS on FHD.
So the specific is going to be like this :
http://www.morele.net/inventory/info/LerFad/ . Just want to have 60 fps minimum ...

[Christofferson]

Is there any indication that CA is going to continue to patch this game with the release of Attila just around the corner? I'd be skeptical to buy another Creative Assembly or Sega game if they just continue to forget about their previous titles in favor of releasing new entries to the series.. I mean c'mon, they've released multiple DLC's before the game is even fully optimized.