Which computer do you think can play this smoothly at max. settings?

[Incendio]

This is a mod for Empire Total War: Russo-Turkish War mod, and the following video was recorded 6 years ago:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4AC0HhWmXg

Which computer do you think can handle a battle like this on max. settings and good performance? The idea is to play these kind of Empire Total War mods with a good fair amount of units and soldiers. I am still saving money for the next computer.

[z3n]

Even the lowest tier of graphics cards (e.g. a 960, 1060 or 2060), would be able to handle it. This is due to the fact that technology progresses so rapidly that a 2060 is the equivalent of the older 3 generations titan.

https://technical.city/en/video/GeFo...Force-RTX-2060


The only advantage higher end cards have is in their VRAM, which ensures they're future proofed enough to last 4 generations roughly. (after 4, you either have to downgrade quite a few settings or upgrade).

You'd want a half decent processor too (I5 or so), as well, but the rest of the components don't really matter aside from those two for ETW.


Note, here the same concept as graphics cards applies to an extent; however higher end processors e.g. an i7 are semi future proofed for 4+ generations. A 3700k for example could stick get around the block, since it's an i7, especially at a higher resolution (1440p or 4k).

The only concern you might have is that while the 3770k enjoyed being unchallenged by AMD; now that AMD is being implemented into game consoles (8 cores), cores may start to matter a little more and thus you may be forced to upgrade slightly earlier than the 3770k has to. Assuming you buy an i5 or something in that range.


That said about Intel; I'd also argue that the AMD cpu's are a pretty good deal (if you ever want to stream, or do work on your computer). They're not that great at gaming as games still don't fully utilize cores using vulkan etc, but they're not terrible. They're actually decent enough from the benchmarks I've seen, and have the advantage of using motherboards that don't force you to always upgrade, although you may run into a slight issue with voltages if you don't get a higher end motherboard that can handle the potential higher voltage of a new generation of AMD CPU, let's say Zen 3 or 4.

At this rate, I'd seriously consider an AMD CPU paired with either a XX60 graphics card (if you're looking for a budget build); and misc components, the others don't matter that much, as long as your RAM isn't from a suspicious company and your HDD or SSD has a warranty and isn't from a no-name, and motherboard is decent (again not a no-name chinese one).

[Incendio]

Thank you for your advice z3n. This video is from 2013 so I guess the author may have had a cpu no better than AMD Phenom II X4 965 Quad-Core (or Intel equivalent) and a GPU no better than Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 (or AMD equivalent) at best. I can even appreciate some lag in his video and he said in the comments he couldn't play at max. settings.

I am not a tech savy, but I would like to see a benchmark comparing an AMD Phenom II X4 with the modern Intel i7 CPUs, just to give me an idea about the potential of improvement I can achieve nowadays. I also think that a low tier RTX card can make this job efficiently, paired with a strong cpu.

[z3n]

In large part it is probably because TW has always had terrible multithreaded and multicore programming.

Intel is favoured due to it's higher clock speed per core. His AMD CPU likely held him back quite a lot since his graphics card was quite good, not necessarily a Titan but it was a decent mid range card.

Basically with Nvidia this is how their naming scheme works

XX50 (lowest tier)
XX50ti (lowest tier)
XX60 (lower tier)
XX70 (mid tier)
XX70ti (mid / high tier)
XX80 (high tier)
XX80ti (highest tier)
Titan (highest tier)

Intel is like this for now:
i3 X300
i5 X500
i7 X700
i9 X900

And a k is added onto the end to denote the processor is overclockable (this is good) e.g.

i7 X700k
i9 X900k

Overclocking means increasing the voltage on your CPU via the BIOS to around 1.3 or 1.4 (assuming your chip is average at best), while increasing the clock speed by at least 200mhz. This can result in large FPS gains of over 15 (I had this gain in a heavily modded skyrim).

So it can be worth it, if you're already spending the money. As long as your motherboard isn't too bad.



I'd go with Intel to be very safe about Total War specifically (but for general gaming purposes AMD Zen 2 isn't a bad choice, if you're streaming). However I imagine a higher end chip of Zen 2 probably wouldn't do too badly.

Bottom line: keep in mind it won't really matter what CPU you choose, ETW is extremely old and will be grumpy regardless of your CPU and it's clock speed. I have a 8086k with 5ghz on each core and M2TW still gets finicky, even though this is faster than any other CPU from back then.

[Incendio]

Interesting the fact you mentioned that even with a strong and modern CPU, Medieval 2 Total War doesn't have the performance you expected. What do you think about that? What could be the reason?

[z3n]

TW code is poorly optimized for thousands and thousands of units fighting it out at once. The engine has an inability to cope with such large numbers of physics, animations, and mechanics (especially AI) calculations. It doesn't scale properly and will create strange microstutters if you zoom in, I would guess the reason is that it maxes out a single core completely at certain points creating that issue but I can't be absolutely certain. As normally that behavior is based on the GPU but some people see it when CPU utilization hits 100%. I would say they don't do some calculations when you are zoomed out but start them only if you zoom in. I can't really be certain, I just know it's not really possible for such an old game to come anywhere close to maxing the GPU even when mods increase the polycount of unit models (costs GPU) and texture resolution of units (textures cost VRAM but also have performance impact via the initial draw calls)


Long story short, due to poorly optimized code unable to work at scale, even with very good hardware there will be slight microstutters not necessarily due to GPU but rather CPU. It's an odd type of lag unable to fully quantify but it is discernible as a CPU issue rather than GPU. This ioccurs mainly due to the fact that older TW games especially either have entirely non existent multithreaded code or very poorly implemented multithreading. This means all calculations generally occur on a single core and can result in extreme competition over the processing power of that single core and the games various calculations constantly begging for the full attention of that single core.


Also as an aside I forgot the XX50 and XX50ti. I'm not sure if RTX generation even has those but they are the traditional absolute bare bones discrete nvidia card. Note that the 2060 Super seems to get beaten by the similar priced RX 5700 XT. I would buy the RX 5700 XT just to stick it to Nvidia (raising the price of their cards is silly) and because it's faster for the same price and RTX 2060 isn't powerful enough to use RTX itself. RX 5700 XT soundly whoops the RTX 2060 Super at basically every game. I apologize for not pointing that out immediately as I am much more interested in the higher tier performance and price of graphics cards as I try to upgrade rarely.

[Love Mountain]

Which is the optimal strategy in my opinion. Upgarding every year from mid-tier to mid-tier is a pretty good Bang for Buck, but upgrading to the best single card GPU every 2-4 years is optimal, IMO. A 980 TI was released in 2015, 4 years later today, it's probably 10-15% slower than a 2060. So, not bad. A 2080 Ti RTX will probably last a very good 3-4 years as well. To be fair, the pricing has gotten absurd in recent years. The last generation when Nvidia prices actually made sense was probably during the 6xx generation.

[Condottiere 40K]

Gaming computers should be based around the best graphics card you can afford, then balanced by an acceptable processor and an optimized monitor to take advantage of that delectable picture or frame rates.

If you have the time, next year should be game changing for graphic cards, with Radeon ramping up seven nanometres, nVidia following suit and the introduction of Intel cards probably setting off a price war; plus Play Station Five and whatever Ecks Boxes Microsoft are cooking up.

Game developers, unless heavily bribed by nVidia, will probably optimize around Radeon graphics.

Actual processor speed for modern variants factors in less, especially if the games become optimized to take advantage of multiple cores and threads, though the bare minimum now is four cores.

Onboard graphics will be interesting once Advanced Micro Devices starts Navi at five nanometres.

[z3n]

Gaming computers should be based around the best graphics card you can afford, then balanced by an acceptable processor and an optimized monitor to take advantage of that delectable picture or frame rates.

If you have the time, next year should be game changing for graphic cards, with Radeon ramping up seven nanometres, nVidia following suit and the introduction of Intel cards probably setting off a price war; plus Play Station Five and whatever Ecks Boxes Microsoft are cooking up.

Game developers, unless heavily bribed by nVidia, will probably optimize around Radeon graphics.

Actual processor speed for modern variants factors in less, especially if the games become optimized to take advantage of multiple cores and threads, though the bare minimum now is four cores.

Onboard graphics will be interesting once Advanced Micro Devices starts Navi at five nanometres.

While I normally completely agree he is asking about total war specifically. TW likes to do a lot of calculations on the CPU and clock speed is king for that (unless a game is good at multithreaded code, which is very complex and hard to write) especially in older TW games which generally rely on a single core.