nwg

Hi Folks,

Well, after being pretty disappointed overall with the speed of this game I read a recent sega/CA blog explaining the various settings. Its made a big difference! Getting 15-25FPS using ultra size units in 1v1 (versus AI) games on the following system:

Intel P4 3GHz/HT (yes, a single core P4!)
1GB RAM
AGP 8X Nvidia 7600GS Graphics, 256MB

What makes a difference?

1) Defrag your hard disk. This game will thrash your older system and you need to keep it mean and clean to work properly. Defragging my disk reduced in-game lag significantly because the time it took to load new textures was far reduced (plus, with only 1GB RAM there was a lot of swapping).

2) Don't run other stuff in the background. I left my Anti Virus up, but thats it (and steam of course, no getting around that).

3) Start with LOW quality graphic settings. This turns almost everything off and it looks like rubbish. The trick for me was to reduce Texture Quality to low and make unit detail Medium. This stops you getting that horrible mix of cartoon characters and decent looking soldiers inside the same unit at close range. For me, this did the trick, the game looks more uniform now and doesn't lag too much

4) Texture filtering should be trilinear unless you have an extremely old graphics card. Trilinear should prove faster than bilinear and look a -lot- better on a modern card

5) If your card is roughly 2-3-4 years old its probably going to work faster with Shader Model 3 (Low) then with Shader Model 2. Check your card first of course, but don't go SM2 here unless you have to as it will actually slow you down

6) If you can handle games on Small, Medium or Large you should be ok. I can barely deal with Large and prefer Ultra - it works though with the settings described here.

Seems like CPU power is pretty easy to indicate - as CA themselves have mentioned, it looks likely that 2.4GHz Intel Core2 (single core) as a minimum is probably about right. I've got a 2.1GHz Core2Duo and its a little slow, so guys, don't buy a 2GHz Quad core, it won't work as you expect.

Graphics cards are going to be the hardest to describe I think. Maybe the table below will help (I copied from a post of mine over at the NBC forums)



Hope this helps some guys n gals like me who have a low to mid range system.

Cheers,
M.

unbelievable that worked with my poor graphic card tonight! Moopere thanks mate!!!
I was hopeless and played a SP hmm it was not that bad like yesterday than we had a 2v2 with gunner,DJ,CL and i managed to play that too. It was not so good, a bit laggy but playable. At least i can join some games lol. 3V3 , 4V4 seems impossble for now.
So, i updated graphic card drivers from windows, changed texture to low but unit detail to high and shader model was 3 (Low), i changed it to 2 and selected large. We ll see tomorrow but better than yesterday

Yeah, I'm pretty happy about this myself as I had almost lost all hope. One thing, your 8400GS is very likely to be a SM3 card, in this case you should get better results by using SM3 (Low) rather than SM2.

In "Large" mode you should be fine. Large is too small for me though so I just -had- to get it working somehow in "Ultra" mode - seems okay, though of course there is no beauty but at least it works.

Cheers, M.

no way, i tried SM3 last night but was unplayable. with SM2 i even tried ultra it works.

Oh, righto, well, there you go. Good info to have. I should put this info up on the NWG wiki in the Empire section, seems like stuff others would find useful.

So, you are running on Ultra... fantastic news. I notice that the standard game only increased unit size from around 120 on Large to 160 on Ultra... still, its a better and bigger game this way.

Regards, M.

Some factions have 200 men (line inf) in ultra scale.

All this tec stuff is Greek to me so i tend to steer clear of it.
I have had some lag in one or two games right at the end ??
Why would this be with a lot less models in the field ??
I guess there could be any number of reasons for lag ?