Multicore Support in Total War games

[Incendio]

I need to ask those who are familiar or have enough knowledge about CPU usage in Total War games, how CPUs are performing in Total War games? I took a look at some recommended specs of a variety of Total War titles: Empire, Shogun 2, Rome 2, Attila and those are easy to meet but the truth is that the game performance is usually not good enough with similar systems. For example, for Rome 2 Total War the recommended CPU is 2nd Generation Intel Core i5 (or greater) which is about 3 GHz but is this CPU good enough to play Rome 2 with the highest settings and decent fps? In my experience, to achieve that, I always needed to exceed the recommended settings and even I struggle to have a decent performance. I found some comments in other places claiming that most Total War games do not use more than 1 core but if this is the case why the recommended settings state dual core processors? Then to have a good gameplay with decent fps do you need a single core with more than 4 GHz?

[Daruwind]

If you want benchmark thread(s):
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...TW-performance

I´m not an expert in HW but a few general points:

1) you want multicore because even if game use just single thread, the other threads will handly background, OS, any other running program.

2) especially older games have some kind of performance maximum which you can´t surpass even with next gen HW

3) some games are more laggy and poorly optimized than others

For example, I have OC i-7 7600K, gtx1080-ti and 32GB DDR4 ram.

-Empire is still laggy especially in prolonged siege battles
-Attila´s performance is still poor

-While ToB is running quite good
-Wh1/2 are probably the best due to being 64bit as all others are merely 32 bit.
-older games use fraction of my VRAM..
-I run almost all games at highest possible settings except Attila where I put some lower to like medium/high.

[Odinarius]

32-bit Warscape engine games are very much single-threaded.