Attila Computer & Hardware Recommendations

[Totalheadache]

I said it already that this or next year will UNLEASH a lot of GPU power, like DirectX, 3D VRAM on GPU die, DDR4, next gen CPUs etc. so this is probably why CA bother to put the limits beyond anything buyable at the moment.

The combination of ALL these technologies I am currently aware and informed of, will certainly double or triple the performance of existing games!

cmon double or triple since when mein herr? 50% more or less....

unless u know something I dont...

[alQamar]

cmon double or triple since when mein herr? 50% more or less....

unless u know something I dont...

Well perhaps, but I know you are usually very much informed. I just browsed some tech sheets where nvidia gives some early tech specs about the benefits of 3D VRAM and how it actually works.
Then we have some good figures about what DX 12 does actually deliver (in its not final state). These two technologies alone will considerably revolution gaming, not just evolving it, except they really go the wrong way to sacrifice the cash cow and ship it in slices. I very much doubt this will happen as the developers need more ressources but given the market situation and the sheer domination of Intel and Nvidia, it might happen they won't unleash all at once.
Then we have DDR4, which is still at the beginning of the cycle so costs and speeds, and much more interesting the next gen RAM, which will start a whole new cycle of RAM memory (by 2016/2017) also in terms of performance.
We'll see.

[craziii]

"here and now" is about as stupid as it gets in a thread like this.

who here wants to spend 350$ on a gpu just for 1 game? who here builds a 1000 to 2000$ gaming pc just for 1 game? who?

just to clarify, I am talking about 290x lightning(best after market cooler there is) vs 970 not 290. 290 can be had for as low as 230 - 240 right now.

[alQamar]

who here wants to spend 350$ on a gpu just for 1 game? who here builds a 1000 to 2000$ gaming pc just for 1 game? who?

Believe me based on the Rome 2 HW recommendation thread a lot people do this, while 2000$ builds are considerably rare.

[Jopel]

Believe me based on the Rome 2 HW recommendation thread a lot people do this, while 2000$ builds are considerably rare.

LOL I agree, build my whole setup (see sig) for Rome II alone

[Huberto]

Okay guys REALLY need your help here! I got 400-450 euros (450-510$) to spend and improve this PC for Attila. (My friend has a windows 64 bit install so that wont cost anything if thats an issue)


Intel core 2 QUAD CPU Q6700 2.66 Ghz

3 GB RAM

ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series

I would be soooo happy if someone could help me with this, as I want to enjoy Attila at the speed Rome 1 had.. Or am i just better off selling this PC and buying a new one with the extra money?

That's an old rig. I doubt you could get more than $50 for it. Might consider donating it to a worthy cause. $500 is tough to build a gaming rig -- if you could find $300 more you could do it, assuming you have a decent monitor. I would take your situation to the basement section of this forum and ask there.

[SPARTAN VI]

Believe me based on the Rome 2 HW recommendation thread a lot people do this, while 2000$ builds are considerably rare.

Same, I may play a ton of different games, but I upgraded for Rome 2. Everything else is secondary.

[Copperbad]

total noob alert. Thank you so much for making this resource available. I look forward to getting all I can out of my system on tuesday. Would you mind looking over my hardware real quick?

My rig:
MOBO: Asus Z97-A
CPU: Intel i5 4690K with Noctura NH-D14 cooling unit.
GPU: EVGA GTX 970 4G
RAM: 8gigs crucial Balistix
PSU: Corsair CT500W
HD: WD 1TB 7200 (I have an SSD for my OS)
SCREEN: Acer S231HL LED

It's my assumption that this should be able to handle the crap out of Attila, it runs Rome II pretty well. What do you think is the weakest link?
What's the final take on the GTX 970 debacle? Am I really going to see performance dips above 3.5 VRAM usage? Would you recommend returning the card? If so, what would you replace it with?

[craziii]

Same, I may play a ton of different games, but I upgraded for Rome 2. Everything else is secondary.

if that is the case I stand corrected If rome 2 is what matters most to you, than a nvidia gpu makes the most sense since this is the case, you need to attach some disclaimers on your recommendations, like this is for rome 2 or total war series only, not for general gaming.

[SPARTAN VI]

"here and now" is about as stupid as it gets in a thread like this.

who here wants to spend 350$ on a gpu just for 1 game? who here builds a 1000 to 2000$ gaming pc just for 1 game? who?

just to clarify, I am talking about 290x lightning(best after market cooler there is) vs 970 not 290. 290 can be had for as low as 230 - 240 right now.

The "here and now" statement came up a few times, so I'm not sure to which one you're referring. I addressed the "here and now" statement in terms of the in-game settings since CA decided that the extreme quality is meant for future hardware.

if that is the case I stand corrected If rome 2 is what matters most to you, than a nvidia gpu makes the most sense since this is the case, you need to attach some disclaimers on your recommendations, like this is for rome 2 or total war series only, not for general gaming.

It really comes down to price. Nvidia hardware only has the edge in Total War when AMD's offerings at that price bracket aren't competitive. AMD may be behind right now, but either side is always a price drop away to remain competitive when its competitor inevitably leap frogs over them. If you can find a R9 290 or 290x under $300, there's really no other choice, else the GTX 970 is still a solid performer.

total noob alert. Thank you so much for making this resource available. I look forward to getting all I can out of my system on tuesday. Would you mind looking over my hardware real quick?

My rig:
MOBO: Asus Z97-A
CPU: Intel i5 4690K with Noctura NH-D14 cooling unit.
GPU: EVGA GTX 970 4G
RAM: 8gigs crucial Balistix
PSU: Corsair CT500W
HD: WD 1TB 7200 (I have an SSD for my OS)
SCREEN: Acer S231HL LED

It's my assumption that this should be able to handle the crap out of Attila, it runs Rome II pretty well. What do you think is the weakest link?
What's the final take on the GTX 970 debacle? Am I really going to see performance dips above 3.5 VRAM usage? Would you recommend returning the card? If so, what would you replace it with?

My final take on the GTX 970 debacle: VRAMgate is overblown from a performance perspective. The card was designed to only use 3.5GB of VRAM, so games will only use that allotted 3.5GB and it will use it beautifully. Should a game exceed this constraint, you'll see performance degradation, but so would EVERY card when its exceeded its VRAM allowance. What we were seeing out of the DOS synthetic benchmarks were end users forcing the card to dip into the last 0.5GB, which is slower than the 3.5GB partition AAAND not how the card was designed to work, thus the perceived performance degradation. That said, if the card was designed to use 3.5GB of VRAM, that's how it should've been marketed and advertised. I feel it's still dishonest to say it has 4GB, when it's not designed to use all of that VRAM. However, it's still a strong performer and I wouldn't hesitate to buy a GTX 970 right now if I had $350 to burn.

[craziii]

290 is 240$ right now bro 290x, the best one was 300$ it has gone back up in price since. you can still get other versions of 290x for about 280$ it is an auto win for amd atm unless you have some super strong blinding bias or plays total war games only

[Copperbad]

Ty for weighing in on the card. I did some more reading and have decided that I'm ok with owning the hardware. Bottom line is that it was a good card before the floodgates broke, and still is after. Though some of the tinsel washed away in the deluge... It's a shame that by keeping it i'm, in effect, supporting NVIDIA for misleading their customers. But I do also supported CA by playing Rome 2 so...yea.

If one of you tech-savy fellows has the time, would you mind weighing in on the hardware in my rig and giving me a rough idea of what I can expect out of Attila? I'm contemplating upgrading to a new screen, but i'm not sure if it's worth it at this point.

[craziii]

Ty for weighing in on the card. I did some more reading and have decided that I'm ok with owning the hardware. Bottom line is that it was a good card before the floodgates broke, and still is after. Though some of the tinsel washed away in the deluge... It's a shame that by keeping it i'm, in effect, supporting NVIDIA for misleading their customers. But I do also supported CA by playing Rome 2 so...yea.

If one of you tech-savy fellows has the time, would you mind weighing in on the hardware in my rig and giving me a rough idea of what I can expect out of Attila? I'm contemplating upgrading to a new screen, but i'm not sure if it's worth it at this point.

base on ca's own stickied performance thread right here, you can do max quality. just not extreme, fully max out. even a 980 sli can't run extreme max out with acceptable fps. the weirdest part is how the game is only using 50% of the cpu n gpu. with only 50% load, why such low fps? there is no bottle neck. crap engine or coding, take your pick. or deliberate! conspiracy

[Yerevan]

Is it confirmed that Attila is more demanding than CPU and GPU wise ?

[craziii]

Is it confirmed that Attila is more demanding than CPU and GPU wise ?

google for benchmarks of the game.

[Musteline]

So a gtx550ti won't be any good i guess, what do you think is the cheapest gpu that will be able to play games with 60fps 720p until 2018?

[craziii]

I think if you don't care about graphics and set it to the lowest. all you need is a decent cpu to make the game work. 550ti would still work on the lowest preset I believe. especially when you just want to game in 720p.

[Seifen]

Due to PS4 and Xbox One's slow start, we are not sure yet how these consoles will influence game development, it is too early to tell which GPU will last you a long while.
In general, I think it is a bad time to buy a 'futureproof' GPU.

However if you are thinking of buying a relatively cheap "bang for the buck" GPU that will play current games at high settings and good framerate, I would recommend a r9 280x* (around 180-200 euro where I live) or
if you must absolutely get a Nvidia card a 960* (prices start at around 220 where I live).

(I'll be using these benchmarks as reference: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...60,4038-4.html)
*The r9 280x was from the get go a 770 competitor and you can see from these benchmarks that, since the Omega driver (AMD's performance enhancing driver), the 280x is consistently performing better than the 770 and 960 for the most recently released games.

*The 960 is known to have a relatively small memory bus and 2GB of VRAM. What this means is that the 960 will start performing worse than its competitors at higher resolutions. This should not affect you as much however if you are only going to play at 720p.

I would like to mention that it would be wise to ignore the recommendations in the first post as they are outdated.
Lastly you should know that preview benchmarks indicate that Attila will perform significantly worse than Rome 2. If these benchmarks hold true, we are looking at 300+ euro GPUs for Attila at maxed settings with playable framerates (playable: 30fps).

[Musteline]

I think if you don't care about graphics and set it to the lowest. all you need is a decent cpu to make the game work. 550ti would still work on the lowest preset I believe. especially when you just want to game in 720p.

Here is the thing, in rome 2 i could play with custom graphics, in a mixture of high and medium, while taking off useless effects like shadows and , and fine fps, but when there were big battles, with lots of soldiers in a blob, the animations would stutter, while the fps would still be mostly fine, but it would look so ugly i couldn't play.
I need a new gpu for witcher 3 too, still have to find the money since brasilian prices are higher than in usa, i guess my i72600 would do fine for one more year or 2, so i need a gpu that can have fighting power until 2017 or 2018, do you think a gtx970 would survive until then?
EDIT: a gtx970 is 576 dollars while a r9 280x is around 384.

[craziii]

I am 100% certain 970(3.5gb fast ram + 500mb slow ram) will not last till 2017 or 2018 for general gaming, but 980(costs about 550$ us dollars) will. So does a 290x though. 3 AAA games already released with 4gb vram requirements for high graphical settings. people would falsely tell you that if you game in 1080p that you don't need alot of vram, but the texture settings is what eats it up not just resolution. If you can, I highly recommend waiting till start of summer, end of Q2 2015 for the release of amd 3XX cards. even if you must get 980, it would push down the price to 300$(usd) or less.

witcher 3 min requirement is i5 2500k + 660 gtx 6gb ram. is your cpu a k version where you can oc it to 4.4 ghz or higher? cuz if you can oc it to 4.4 ghz, should be easy with sandy b cpus. it would last you till skylake cpu is out. for gpu, how is the price difference between 280x vs 290 in your country? in the usa 280x is 220 vs 240 for 290. 20$ for 30% performance difference. I would 1000% go for the 290.

about the lag in big battles. do you still have it in rome 2 emperor edition? patch 16? cuz blobbing is largely gone with formation attack and how units all stop dead in their tracks once they make contact with enemy units(which I hate very much) rome 2 already uses 4 cpu threads but still mainly uses 1 core, so single core ipc is very important. even if you have battles where you have 40 vs 40, a 4.4 ghz i5 sb cpu should handle it with no problems. I have no idea if unoced i7 2600 is the problem or your 550 ti.

wait 4 months to get the current top end cards at 40% discounts or splurge and buy the 390x in june! for 50% or more performance over 290x, about 40% over 980. I would wait. I have a 290 when I bought it during the holidays(at the time I had no idea 3xx were increasing performance by such a large amount) for cheap, but I would still 100% upgrade again in june if the performance is really 50% or more. 50% is my upgrade threshold.