I've been playing Medieval 2 for quite a few years now, and I've never really had a capable gaming rig and usually ran the game at lower settings. A few months ago I built a low end PC with a Radeon R7 240 and was able to run the game on medium/high settings 720p, and a couple days ago I upgraded my graphics card to a Radeon R7 260X.

Even now, with a R7 260X, an AMD FX 4300, and 8 Gigs of ram I'm still unable to run the game at max settings. Even lowering the effects and shadow settings, I am still unable to run the game without massive FPS drops during large battles. This PC can max out Empire, and run Shogun at Med-High settings with a better framerate than Medieval.

So my question is, is Medieval 2 really optimized that poorly? Is there any PC that can max this game out without horrid FPS drops? I've resorted to dropping the resolution back down to 1024x720, and unit detail down to medium, which is pretty disappointing because my new graphics card is much better than my old one, but it really doesn't run the game much better.