Empire Total War Performance

I'm trying to run Empire Total War on my rig (specs in sig) and can't seem to get the naval battles to run at a decent FPS.

I want to keep it at 1920x1080 if possible but no matter what I turn down, I just can't get it above 25FPS. I've tried tweaking a few times but it takes so long to apply the newly chosen settings that I couldn't be bothered to try yet again.

Anyone with a comparable GPU care to share what settings you use and which ones impact performance the most?

 

screen resolution. Turn it down. GPU can't handle this. Also, from my experience in Empire, naval battles are very taxing on your computer.

 

i run it native res but no aa, medium shadows, med particles, high water, high sky, high grass, everything else ultra.

your card should handle it

 

oh and no ssao...

 

Thanks - I'll try that. Although I swear I turned down shadows and it didn't help much.

How about HDR? And all those other boxes below the main settings? No ticks I assume?

I appreciate the help.

 

Isnt it possible to turn down that damned (but pretty) water quality?

 

Empire is poorly coded.

Ensure that you have the latest patch as one of the patches addressed issues with the Sea battles.

I have sli in my machine and i can run all on high with no AA at 1920x1080 and it runs fine.

I wouldnt want to do the same with a solo card tho tbh

Bare in mind that the performance differnce between 280's and 285' is only 5% if that

 

Wow, an RTS game that doesn't play well on the latest GTX 285M and i7 system is one poorly coded game. Inexcusable and stupid.

 

Actual in game difference can be as much as 10/15% - it's just the synthetic benchmark scores that show that small increase. Justin from XoticPC did a comparison earlier proving that.
I have the steam version so assume its been patched all the way - the last total war game I had was Rome and that ran pretty well on lower end machines so I assumed this would be as well optimised. Guess not.

Really don't want to turn down the water effects... Hmmm.... Guess it's medium settings for me.

 

What settings did you try? How many ships?

I tried with everything on high, no AA and in the Navy battles I get from 35 fps, sometimes 50 fps, occasionally 80 fps. It never drops below 30 fps. 45 fps most of the time.

 

hdr set to on
turning down shadows seems to help me a lot.
my vsync also set to off since f dont get a lot of tearing.
ive played 2vs2 (ai) on this setting and there is really no slowdown so much in land.

 

its not really an rts more like a tactical game and if you see the thousands of units on screen and the sheere detail and beauty youll understand why you need the highest specs for this game.

 

i play with high settings on water and sky.
1vs1 (ai) with defult number of ships.
no need to go medium man unless your doing 2vs2 or 3vs3 with many many ships.
you could also o/c your card a bit if you want. and fwiw the 285 oc's quite well i hear.
the game has been patched and its quite optimized graphically now. another patch regarding the tactical ai will be coming out soon they say.

hope that helps man

 

Its a bit off topic but may i recommend Medieval 2 Total war ? Its pretty too, and to my experience just better.. With mods

 

If you can, disable SSAO. It is absolutely murderous on the GPU.