What's slowing me down? RAM? 9600Pro?

**carlisimo** · December 03, 2006, 11:27 PM

I'm about to buy MTW II. But RTW ran "ok" at mid-high settings and I'd like to know what my bottleneck is.

Basically my specs are:
Athlon 3000+ (2.16GHz)
1GB RAM
Radeon 9600 Pro
6+ empty GB on C:

Upgrading the motherboard and CPU isn't something I feel like doing right now. I could do RAM, or I could do the video card. Maybe both but I'd rather not. I suspect it's one of those two...

If it's the video card, then I'd like advice on what to replace it with, keeping in mind I'm limited to an AGP slot. $250 at most. If it's RAM... I currently have two 512MB chips, and one free slot. I don't much about how to configure them if I'm adding more... any tricks I should know? Thanks in advance.

**Cortoisis** · December 04, 2006, 04:41 PM

It's probably not RAM since I have the same amount and I can run the game great. It might be your graphics card....

**DarK_RTW** · December 04, 2006, 08:18 PM

7600GS for $140 USD will do fine. It's got to be almost twice as fast as the 9600

**nicotine** · December 04, 2006, 10:41 PM

Why don't you load up the demo and see how it runs? I believe it has the full gamut of settings for you to experiment with.

**carlisimo** · December 04, 2006, 11:32 PM

Well I have purchased the game... all it took was a tough day at work and that "I need a break!" feeling. Loving it so far! The videos are back!

And the battles do run at a sort of low (but playable) framerate at low/medium settings. So I will be doing something about, most likely the video card. Thanks for the tips, I'll look into that 7600GS.

**nicotine** · December 05, 2006, 02:10 AM

Originally Posted by carlisimo

Well I have purchased the game... all it took was a tough day at work and that "I need a break!" feeling. Loving it so far! The videos are back!

And the battles do run at a sort of low (but playable) framerate at low/medium settings. So I will be doing something about, most likely the video card. Thanks for the tips, I'll look into that 7600GS.

Upgrading your video card may or may not affect that since MTW will benefit more from CPU and/or RAM upgrades. CPU moreso than the RAM. It is a highly CPU intensive game.

**Karlos Vandango** · December 05, 2006, 03:15 AM

processor and video card

**Hypocrite** · December 05, 2006, 05:12 AM

Processor won't slow you down that much. AMD Athlon 3000+ is quite capable processor and upgrading that to make a significant change would be too expensive compared to the gain you would get.

The graphics card if definitely slowing you down. I have a ATI Radeon X800 with the same processor and can run the game with high quality without problems. I would suggest you look for a entry-level graphics card upgrade, for example nVidia 7600 GT or 7900 GS. But don't spend too much on the graphics card because then your processor can get in the way. I would say $ 200 is quite good amount of money to spend.

Also remember that your motherboard is likely using AGP card slot for the graphics card. Most of the new graphics cards are PCI-E type. So you have to find a new graphics card which is using the old AGP slot, this can be a bit tricky. But I wouldn't suggest upgrading your motherboard yet.