An Investigation into the Graphics Settings of Total War: Shogun II

[G. Ward]

Dear fellow Total War players, & citizens of the internet,

I am playing Shogun II on my P.C.

My specs are as follows:

CPU: i5-4690 @3.50GHz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 750ti 2GB of VRAM
RAM: 8GB

I ought to have more than enough power to run this game.
I think, however, that I might be held back by V-RAM. Is this possible? On YouTube, there are people who can run battles reasonably smoothly, which would slow my P.C. to a crawl. Also, if I zoom-in on a mass of troops, my FPS dies. Ontop of this, in some really huge battles the units "stutter" i.e. the fps stays high, but the actual animations for the soldiers (i.e. walking, running, reloading & firing, sword-fighting) lag a lot.

Also, which setting are most GPU intensive? And, which settings are most CPU intensive?

Are there any settings which are surprising in how much/little they affect performance?

Do you find that dead bodies annihilate your fps (they do mine)?

Do you find any difference in performance between Shogun II and Fall of the Samurai?

Do later Total War games perform better than Shogun II?

Thanks a lot, I suppose that -- with this thread -- I am trying to create discussion about the graphical-settings of Shogun II.

[izzi]

If it's battle related, than it's more your GPU than CPU. I must say that if you have a card with more VRAM (like 4GB GDDR5 or GDDR6), this will help you a lot. If you like performance more than quality, than lower your specs in the graphic options (especially turn of everything to do with shadows and such. They eat most of your frames) and do a benchmark with those specs. See how much frames you get. Off course, the game is build on a 32bit engine and that has surely it's limits. Like it can only use max. 4GB of VRAM and RAM (so your stuck with that). But if i was you, buy a new GPU (like a GTX1060 or 1070 with at least 4GB GDDR5 or so).

[G. Ward]

Thanks very much. See, it's these sorts of things that I don't know about. I didn't know, for instance, that the game was built on a 32-bit engine, which has limits.

Thanks for enlightening me. I ought to have got the 4GB model of the GTX 750ti. Oh well. I'll have to upgrade sometime then.

Thanks again.

Take care.

[Leonardo]

I'll have to upgrade sometime then.

I strongly suggest that you upgrade your RAM and having only 8 Gb RAM aren't enough if one wants to play with decent FPS.

My specs are these:

i5 (forgot what model it is, but all I know it's an old model) 2.5 Ghz
same video card as you have
32 Gb RAM

See the difference. Even if I have a slower CPU than you have I don't have lags in-game while you might have lags in your game, because I've 3 times more RAM than you have regardless how much free diskspace there is.

[G. Ward]

I strongly suggest that you upgrade your RAM and having only 8 Gb RAM aren't enough if one wants to play with decent FPS.

My specs are these:

i5 (forgot what model it is, but all I know it's an old model) 2.5 Ghz
same video card as you have
32 Gb RAM

See the difference. Even if I have a slower CPU than you have I don't have lags in-game while you might have lags in your game, because I've 3 times more RAM than you have regardless how much free diskspace there is.

Really?!

I had no idea the Total War games were so RAM intensive. Izzi seems to think that Shogun II can only use 4GB of RAM (in which case I should be fine).

But I'll definitely check my RAM usage.

Thanks for the input.

[Leonardo]

What Izzi is talking about is what makes a 32-bit game a bit laggy sometimes due to the fact that 32-bit Windows cannot allocate more than 3 Gb RAM and that's something the Morrowind community are suffering from.

Especially, when one is running a lots of textures mods and other visual improvements in Morrowind and on top of that Morrowind is a very CPU intensive game.

Until somone discover the 4 Gb patch (note this is not about any TW game), which is allowed to use for Morrowind, so now anyone are using the 4 Gb patch every time one wants to play a heavily modded Morrowind.

Here is another comparison of why a 64-bit game are superiour to a 32-bit game.

32-bit: Skyrim Legendary Edition (a lot of crashes e.g corrupt gamesave when using a lots of mods)
64-bit: Skyrim Special Edition (more stable even if one has a corrupt gamesave in a modded game)

The same thing also applies for S2TW too, except the 4 Gb patch of course.

[izzi]

Can't allocate more than 4GB, that's the limit in a 32 bit system. 8GB RAM is now in 2019 - 2020 kind of the minimum of playing. But not if you are playing on a 32bit engine. So in this case, it doesn't matter. In battles it's especially VRAM that is important. You can manually add more VRAM to the max of 4GB (but you need to specify it in the preferences.txt in your script folder. This helps a ton by the way.), as S2TW automatically sets it to 2.9GB. Also, for a CPU, the best is to have a 4 core processor that has a high clock speed (and by that, i mean 4 physical cores, not 2 cores and 2 threads. The engine isn't programmed to use threads). What funny is, when you benchmark the game on 1080p (highest), the game sets it automatically to shader version 3. So you need to set your graphics options manually and test it.

Also, as a modder, it's best that you mod the game as efficient as possible by using less textures and unit parts for the game and the unit parts low poly count (with LOD's off course).