Rome II

[Fetrik]

I can claim that the game ran fine for me until tonight but I hope to remedy that and have it run like butter once again.

My machine is only two years old however and no slouch.

I'm embarrassed to confess that my machine is now 3,5 years old.
Like my local computer store guy said there has'nt been much advance on the CPU / mem side. but you would benefit from a new gfx card.

[Gusington]

^That's always the first thing I upgrade, that's decent advice.

OK so I just quickly went into the game and unclicked the unlimited memory sharing option and immediately I was able to scroll around the campaign map again very smoothly which I wasn't able to do an hour ago. I didn't play a battle but I think that was the issue.

So maybe Patch 3 is making the graphics run more like they're supposed to as Nefaro said?

[Fetrik]

No, i Think the new patch is making you run more as Nef said...  :o

[Nefaro]

^Go for it...despite the pitchforks and torches brought out for Rome II in the last month by so many, I have really enjoyed myself...tonight's graphics stuttering made it that much more difficult to crash back down to reality.

BTW I just looked and I have 8GB of system memory, but only 1GB of video memory on my single video card. I assuming that 1GB video memory is what counts and its not enough for the Rome II video sharing option.

I would think that 1GB of VRAM enough for the battles in any current TW game, but then again their latest ones aren't very optimized.  As I said before, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the campaign layer is left using up RAM during the battles.  That or their battle graphics just plain run like shit.   Probably a combination of 'The Runs'.  :P

[Gusington]

Well at least it appears this can be somewhat remedied by turning off that sharing option.

That said, never had issues like this in Shogun 2.

[mikeck]

No, Shogun had much better optimization

[Yskonyn]

As said before; CA says that using the 'Use system memory' option often has a detrimental effect on performance.
I am not sure where this 'you need more than 1 GB VRAM' came from, but it sounds like a pretty weird statement. Sure, for Ultra textures you might, but to run the game decently on slightly lower settings I do not buy that 1GB would not be enough.
Game still runs smooth as silk for me. I have 1.5GB of VRAM.

[tgb]

I bought a new rig back in March - the best I could afford was an i3-3220 with 6Gb RAM.  Unfortunately it came with integrated HD 2500 graphics.  I'm planning to put in a new graphics card in a week or two after pay day, but in the mean time I installed Rome II for the heck of it.

Now by all accounts, it shouldn't be playable at all, but it runs just fine for me at 1440x900 resolution and medium settings. Granted, the terrain looks ok, but the units look pretty crappy.  Not a big deal, since I tend to play the battles zoomed pretty far out. Frame rate is a little slow, but not unbearable so.

Of course, I'm still in the second chapter of the tutorial, so maybe things will change when I get deep into a real game.  But by then I should have the new card in and running.

[Gusington]

At Patch 1 graphics were fine but the campaign map was slow choppy for me. Patch 2 came along and optimized graphics well, campaign map got smoother, but I got that weird graphic warning message...never got that before Patch 2. So I switched on the memory sharing option which got rid of the warning and everything was hunky dory. Then with Patch 3, with memory sharing on...everything sputtered to a halt, so I turned off the memory sharing and in a quick test it appears that I amback to hunky dory. Optimizing on the fly...

[W8taminute]

Funny you mention that Gus.  I turned on memory sharing just after downloading Patch 3 and noticed a slight decrease in performance.  Tonight I'll try turning it back off.

[Gusington]

Mine was a huge difference...went from awesome to terrible.

[W8taminute]

Interesting.  Turning on the memory share feature did eliminate that annoying message though.  Did you get that message again after turning off memory share?

[Nefaro]

No, Shogun had much better optimization

It still wasn't all that good.  Better than Rome 2, yes.

In my experience of owning Shogun 2 since it's launch, the gfx performance actually got worse for awhile in subsequent updates.  I dunno what kind of nonsense CA was doing to the gfx engine but it was evident that they were trying to shoehorn extra questionable effects in after the fact and making things worse.  Hell, one person on these boards couldn't even start the game at one point, due to this, and he wasn't the only one. 

I'm sure the CA gfx monkeys were still dicking around with the effects when Rome 2 was released, and the same situation had emerged.  New effects for the "new" sake, and poor performance resulting.

[Nefaro]

Funny you mention that Gus.  I turned on memory sharing just after downloading Patch 3 and noticed a slight decrease in performance.  Tonight I'll try turning it back off.

Perhaps it actually works as it should, now?  Compared to always lowering the effects unless you checked the memory thing. 

I got the impression that the auto thing wasn't really working at all before the latest updates.  Now it is?

[Sir Slash]

I've left my settings alone and get the graphics warning still after patch 3 but have never had a problem but haven't had any huge battles really. I see birds flying all over the sky and one time a herd of deer running along the shoreline on the battle screen and maybe this stuff stresses the resolution somewhat. There's a lot to see on the battlescreen some of which I think they could eliminate that might make things easier on old computers and old eyes as well. I would vote to get rid of that damned annoying "The men are wavering" guy if I could.