Medieval II Total War on XPSm1530 performance analysis and screens

So... I have spent some time with quick battles on Medieval II and am happy to report that the game runs quite well, even on Windows Vista 32 bit. I have tried a variety of tweaks to the "high" graphical settings on skirmish mode (antistropic up, anti-aliasing down) with a "normal" unit count, and have it running on full res (1440x900) at around 20 fps. I can get it higher on lower settings (or when I am not actually looking at the units), but for a slowish moving RTS this framerate looks fine to me. I also want to note that only once have I seen full CPU usage in-game, with it mostly floating around 2/3-3/4 usage of one core, which suggests to me that the real performance bottleneck on my system lies in the GPU, not the CPU. I found this a bit surprising, pleasantly really, as it justifies my decision to go with the T8100. I'll still probably upgrade to the 9500 in a couple years when the price comes down (and my warranty ends), but it would seem to me that there is no reason for such a CPU on this game.

I made some screenshots for you, but I can't seem to upload them. They are in .bmp format. Any suggestions?

 

try imageshake

 

Try putting 10.000 units in a single skirmish


awesome game by the way. It really is one of the best RTS games I have ever tried.

 

agree,it is really great

 

what are your framerates like with high detail and 1280x800? i love total war games but i would hope to play it at atleast 30 fps average.

 

I saw a marginal boost in fps when I tried running it on 1280x800, but it was nothing really visible imo. I think it still averaged below 30. That is NOT to say it looked bad at all. I have noticed that fps drops even more during larger battles I've played on the campaign, but nothing too bad, really. Even in really large battles the game is still more than playable in my experience. I would highly recommend it to anyone with a similar system to my own.

I may give screens a shot again sometime when I'm less tired...

*edit: I haven't tried this, but if you really must have 30+ fps you should be able to do it. Turning off all anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering might work. Also, note that I have things a lot of people don't care about like plants and building graphics turned up all the way.