What to buy if you want massive number of men in battles? a GPU? or a CPU? or MEM RAM?

[Yumi]

What will i buy for me to have awesome realistic battles that includes around 6000-12000 men per side (two armies).
I have a specs of:
MEM - 4gb memory ddr4
CPU - AMD A8-9600 3.10 GHz, 10 compute cores 4C+6G
GPU - AMD Radeon R7 Graphics mem - 80 mb ddr4.
will it need improvements on CPU? or do i really need to improve my VRAM?
or SYS RAM?

I currently set my settings to med - high and is still struggling (5-15) FPS, on large (2 army battles).
I set unit size about half (80 men) but still cannot play smoothly. (around 20 FPS), reduced to (around 10 FPS) if in siege battles.

anyone? any tech wizards help me decide what gears to buy? thanks in advance.

[Garensterz]

your 4gb ram and AMD R7 are the problem. Upgrade to 16gb ram and upgrade to a video card comparable to a (I'm not good with AMD cards) GTX 1060 or a 1070. Also to take note is, total wars are not good with performance, so whatever rig you have there, you won't get that sweet smooth 60fps on huge battles.

[RoninSan]

If you are on short budget go for GTX 1050ti and an extra 4GB RAM stick (preference of the same model for dual channel).

[Daruwind]

If I remember correctly, up to WHs all TWS are 32bit. So they can adress only 4 GB of data of RAM + VRAM anyway. So you want more than 4 GB or RAM ...8 perhaps so you have spare RAM for rest of system, Windows...and then as good CPU/GPU as you can get.

[herne_the _hunter]

Get a discreet Graphics card as mentioned but it doesn't have to be new. But you will also need to change your CPU as well as that is the weakest link. The A8 9600 has weak single core preformance as it is using the old architecture of the previous AMD generation of chips.

As you are on the AM4 platform change your cpu to a Ryzen. Even the 2200G or 2400G apu have much stronger performance than you present chip. If you went with those APU you would need more memory to utilise the onboard graphics of those chips effectively so with that money get a GPU instead.

So yes you need a new cpu and a dedicated GPU

[Yumi]

Uhm. ok thanks for helping. I already bought Geforce GT 710 1gb and i can play 4 full stack armies (4000 vs 4000 or around 100 men per unit.) in high-very high settings. but still lags if i activate a mod that enhances smokes and particle effects. so far so good if i dont use that mod. later on im planning to buy 4 or 8 gb ram and planning to convert portion of those ram into dedicated vram.

[Magnar]

TW games need max single core CPU permormance. 3.1ghz prob aint gonna give you the size you desire. Also consider OCing your cpu. Im play with a 4ghz cpu OCd to 4.4ghz personally

[Daruwind]

Yup, same as Magnar, 4.4 GHz on CPU, 16 GB RAM and it is usually full because I ran a few background programms for modding usually. And GTX 1080Ti...and yet performance is little dependant on game. Empire has famous siege lag, Attila is sluggish as whole, WH1/2 are on contrary quite stable and high FPS...

[Yumi]

So TW games are CPU intensive... ok.. so what resource does tw games consume if you want to have as many men in a single battle? is it more on CPU, RAM or GPU?

[Daruwind]

You cannot add one resource and keep others two down. Each time something else will be bottleneck....If you get 4+ GHz CPU while having low RAM, system will be limited as lot info will be written to HDD and read back....4 GB RAM is real minimum these days. Get as well at least 8 or 16...and if your GPU is really 80mb VRAM then probably this is also a bottleneck. Can you write exact model? Because R7 i´m looking at have like 1-2GB VRAM at least..If you increase number of units at battlefield, GPU has to draw them...CPU is doing math. Point is, all TWs before WH are 32 bits applications, they can overall adress only 4 GB of RAM+VRAM so what you want is having like 8GB (4GB just for TW and 4 for Windows + everything else in system) + whatever VRAM you can get like 1-2 GB.

[Yumi]

ok got it. 8 gb ram 1 gb min vram and 4 ghz cpu.

[Garensterz]

4gig ram is a minimum? I thought 8gb was already the minimum since Windows 10 already uses almost 4 gigs of ram usage. What I would advice to yumi is go for a PC build that can compete with games for atleast 5 to 8 years, because upgrading every piece of hardware for every year will cost you much more than building one that can sustain for years.

What I suggest is:

-A GTX 1060 or 1070 GPU, or any comaprable gpu's for both.

-A CPU (as said by Magnar & daruwind) with a powerful single core performance. Go for an overclockable CPU, ryzen is a good example of a cheaper OC'able CPU (3.8hz to 4hz+). Or if going for Intel, look for CPU's that has a "K" version on it. It basically means it's not restricted for overclocking.

-A motherboard that supports multiple ram slots, 2 slots would be enough. Going for a single RAM stick is much less efficient than a dual one.

-A 16gb of RAM (If you play games with higher textures, or overall graphics, RAM usage will also go up)

Another tip. Install a software that monitors PC hardware performances such as msi afterburner (with rivatuner). With this tool, you could monitor your gpu, cpu, ram, etc. usage while you're playing games. And this will help you see what bottlenecks your hardware.