Empire Total War – Graphics Work Shop
Tuning your Graphics Settings
ETW is built on a brand new rendering engine, internally code-named “Warscape”. The Engine is DirectX9-based, supporting both Shader Model 2 and Shader Model 3 graphics hardware. Supporting Shader Model 2 hardware has proven to be very challenging, requiring scalable content, SM2-optimized alternate shader paths, and a host of careful optimizations to squeeze out the most from SM2 cards. The result is an Engine that scales down to hardware ~4 years old – no mean feat for a game of this complexity.
The focus of this article is on tuning your graphics settings, so I won’t go in-depth on Engine features, unless doing so helps communicate the impact of each setting.
So let’s talk about the Settings UI. Keen players will have already noted that the In-game graphics settings UI (i.e. the UI shown when in a battle or the campaign) is a subset of the Front-end graphics UI, with some options missing from the in-game UI.
Here’s a handy table showing you where these wee beasties live.
Graphics Settings Availability
Option:
Resolution – Front End and In-Game
Windowed - Front End and In-Game
Vertical Sync. – Front End and In-Game
Gamma – Front End and In-Game
Brightness – Front End and In-Game
Shader Model – Front End
Texture Quality – Front End and In-Game
Texture Filtering – Front End and In-Game
Anti-Aliasing – Front End and In-Game
HDR – Front End and In-Game
Shadows – Front End and In-Game
Hardware Shadows – Front End and In-Game
Volumetric Effects - Front End and In-Game
Depth Of Field – Front End and In-Game
SSAO – Front End and In-Game
Distortion Effects – Front End and In-Game
Unit Size - Front End
Unit Detail – Front End
Trees – Front End
Grass – Front End
Water – Front End and In-Game
Sky – Front End and In-Game
Building Detail – Front End
Ship Detail – Front End
Particle Effects – Front End
The reason why some options are missing from the in-game graphics settings UI is due to internal engine limitations – in some cases we don’t retain enough internal data to switch settings on-the-fly in-game e.g. for buildings on low quality settings we discard the highest level-of-detail for buildings at scene load, making it difficult to reload efficiently with high Building Detail setting.
So let’s look at each setting and review how it impacts the game.
Resolution (List)
As you all probably know already, the more pixels you draw per frame, the more GPU-power you need, so as a general rule, pick the lowest screen resolution that you can.
The minimum resolution we support is a humble 800×600, clearly this resolution is of no interest to most gamers, but if you’ve got a SM2 card with barely enough texture memory to meet the min spec (256MB) then you may find that playing in 800×600 rez gives you a much smoother frame rate. For most folks though this low rez is of little interest.
Windowed resolutions are pre-picked, full screen resolutions are determined by your graphics hardware. Out of the Box we’ll run in full screen and default to your desktop resolution. We support all common widescreen formats.
Top Tip: Most monitors have a ‘native resolution’, a resolution at which the screen pixels map 1-to-1 with the elements of the display. At this resolution, running in full screen, your game will look crisp; at other resolutions the display hardware will need to scale pixels to map onto the screen elements, which may impact the crispness of the resulting image – though typically you will only notice this on UI text. So have a dig around for details of your monitor and see if you can see any difference at the monitor’s native resolution.
Windowed (Check Box)
I strongly recommend that you run the game in full screen always, you’ll generally get better performance versus windowed mode, and your graphics card will have exclusive access to the available video memory, not such an issue on Vista, but generally recommended and very significant on XP.
If you do run in Windowed mode, then kill off any other DirectX apps in case they’re stealing precious video memory resources.
Vertical Synchronisation (Check Box)
When you are full-screen, enabling this option limits the frame rate to the monitors refresh rate, avoiding tearing that you may see with this option disabled. My recommendation is to run with this off, as the tearing is usually only occasional and minor, and you should get higher frame rates with this disabled.
Gamma/Brightness (Sliders)
These are standard controls that allow you to balance the game’s colour response to better match your monitor or personal preferences.
Shader Model (Drop-down, Shader Model 2, Shader Model 3 (Low), Shader Model 3 (High))
In short, a card that supports Shader Model 3 is capable of rendering many instances of the same geometry very efficiently, compared to Shader Model 2.
If you have Shader Model 3 support then don’t use Shader Model 2; Shader Model 2 is slower, less efficient, and visually less pleasing. If the two Shader Model 3 options are disabled, you have a relatively old graphics card that doesn’t support SM3 – if you can find spare cash then a wise investment would be an upgrade to a SM3 card – of which there are many options to choose from. I won’t make any recommendations as it’s a matter of budget and personal preference.
We’ve provided two flavours of SM3 for your enjoyment. The Shader Model 3 (Low) setting runs the high performance Shader Model 3 instancing path, but does so with a set of light weight Shader Model 2 shaders, so you benefit from the enhanced performance of instancing, but with less visually complex detail across-the-board, so you win on fame rate – sometimes by as much as 8-10fps, depending on your rig. The Shader Model 3 (High) setting runs with instancing and our high quality shader path, which delivers the most realistic in-game graphics, but uses the most GPU horsepower.
Texture Quality (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
This is a key setting both in terms of visual fidelity but also for your texture footprint.
By setting this to anything but Ultra you are telling the engine to throw away detail from the texture maps. A Texture is comprised of a set of 2D images, from the highest detail e.g. 256×256 pixels in size down to the lowest detail – 1×1. Each level of detail is known as a “MIP”, and each MIP Level is a power-of-2 smaller in each dimension e.g. a 256×256 texture has 9 MIP Levels: [256x256,128x128,64x64,32x32,16x16,8x8,4x4,2x2,1x1]. The highest resolutions are seen close up, the lowest resolutions far in the distance. Your Texture Filtering setting determines how the hardware interpolates between MIPS.
So, with this in mind, each Texture Quality level corresponds to throwing away one or more MIP Levels. At Ultra you see the best textures, nothing is thrown away. High settings causes the highest Level to be discarded – the [256x256] level in the example above. Medium discards 2 levels e.g. [256x256 ,128x128] Low discards 3 levels.
Discarding Textures in this manner can free up considerable video resources, but comes at a cost of visual richness – as the lower MIPS can look blocky and very SNES-like.
Texture Filtering (Drop-down Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic 2x, Anisotropic 4x, Anisotropic 8x, Anisotropic 16x)
This setting impacts how your graphics card interpolates a texture across the surface of an object in 3D space. In short, the higher the setting, the better the quality of the resulting interpolation. Of course, like chocolate, there’s a price to pay for over-indulgence, as the higher settings can hit your frame rate.
I recommend that you stick with Trilinear unless you can personally see a qualitative difference in the game visuals when you turn on Anisotropic. The positive visual impact of Anisotropic Filtering is most visible on the Terrain, so the way to figure this out is to run a land battle and look at the terrain in Trilinear vs Anisotropic – with Aniso. on you should see visually cleaner terrain textures, if you don’t see a difference, then leave this option on Trilinear, which modern hardware can handle with little performance hit.
Anti-Aliasing (Drop-down, values None,2x,4x,8x,16x)
Anti-aliasing is the first setting that I recommend you should tweak to claw back performance.
Anti-aliasing has a big impact on game visuals as enabling it causes the hardware to smooth out the edges of images on screen, so otherwise jagged lines become softer and less noticeable.
The 2x, 4x notation, for simplicity, can be thought of as the additional size of the texture required to enable the effect. e.g. 2x means a texture twice the size, 4x four times etc.
Depending on your other settings turning on AA can have a major impact on your video memory footprint. At 4x setting any full screen render targets are 4x the size in each dimension, which equates to roughly 16x the video memory required, per anti-aliased surface.
HDR – High Dynamic Range Lighting (CheckBox)
This is a big button to push – by which I mean that turning on HDR has significant impact on the performance of the game, especially if you’ve also chosen to enable Anti-Aliasing.
If your hardware supports HDR, and not all hardware does, then you can benefit from the enhanced lighting that enabling this setting provides. HDR delivers ‘bling’ by simulating the eyes response to bright lights – these areas of over-brightness, e.g. the sun glinting from a raised sword, cause a sudden flash of bright light that bleeds into the surrounding area – much the same way as bright light seen through a window appears to bleed around a window frame. The effect is cool, but subtle.
HDR is very spendy on video memory, especially if you’ve also enabled Anti-Aliasing, so spend some time to get the optimum setting for your PC.
Shadows (Drop-down: Off,Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
Rendering shadows of all objects in the scene requires us to render them from the light’s perspective into a texture, which is then sampled when computing occlusion for any object in the scene.
The Quality setting controls two factors, the size of the shadow-map texture (which on the highest setting is 2048×2048, on lowest is 512×512), and it also impacts the range over which the shadows fade out in the scene: 1000 scalemeters on Ultra, 100 meters on Low ( the playable area is 2Kx2K meters).
Shadow artefacts are very visible on the lowest setting – mitigated somewhat by turning on Hardware Shadows.
Hardware Shadows (CheckBox)
Enabling this option causes the engine to use hardware-accelerated texture sampling to improve the visual quality of shadows – effectively softening the edges, and reducing visible blocky artefacts. This works on most recent ATI & NVIDIA hardware, and should be enabled if it’s not too costly on your frame rate.
Volumetric Effects (CheckBox)
A catchy name for a family of graphical effects in the game, which all require a separate render pass for all screen objects to compute and record their depth in the scene. Yep, that means rendering all the scene objects twice per frame, once to record depth, then again to render the lit scene (and a third time to compute shadows!). Clearly this has a significant impact on performance – though the depth pass is heavily optimized and comparatively light weight.
Why do we do this? Well, once we have the depth information we can do cool things. Think back to most games you’ve played where these cool explosions are spoilt by the hard line the particles make with the ground. With depth information at-hand we can alpha out the edges of particles when they intersect with surfaces – leading to a very soft edge with no VPL (Visible Particle Lines).
Building on this effect are Depth Of Field (DOF) and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), both of which require a readable depth buffer to work their magic.
Depth of Field (CheckBox)
This effect simulates the focal range of a camera, objects inside the focal distance are sharp, objects outside are blurred.
You’ll see this in action in the Campaign and also in Battles, where distant objects are out-of-focus. I personally find this very useful, as it helps me focus on the action, and particularly on the campaign map leads to a nice table-top-gaming feel. This is not to everyone’s taste, so take it for a spin.
SSAO (ambient shadow) (CheckBox)
SSAO stands for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. This is very much a high end feature, it’s the most computationally intensive of the in-game effects, but the results add significant realism to the scene.
Simply put, enabling this option – which is enabled if Volumetric Effects are enabled, and your card is beefy enough – causes the engine to compute local shadowing of objects in the scene.
Imagine you are looking into a white cardboard box in daylight. The inside corners of the box will be slightly darker than the sides, because the sides effectively shadow the corners as light bounces around on its merry photonic journey around the box.
So that’s what SSAO simulates, and the results are instantly noticeable in-game, where subtle shadows appear under objects grounding them to the scene, and shadows appear in the folds of soldier uniforms and in the nooks and crannies of buildings.
In short it’s a big switch that you should throw if you can. The results are a much richer scene, with noticeably more realistic lighting.
Distortion Effects(heat haze) (Checkbox)
This full screen visual effect simulates the effects of drinking 6 pints of Sussex – also creating a hazy distortion affect around heat sources.
It’s relatively cheap to implement too, so you’ll notice the effect on explosions in game, especially the concussion impact of grenadiers doing their stuff – where a shockwave of distortion ripples out from the impact. It’s all very satisfying, and quite cheap to enable.
Unit Size (Drop-down: Small,Medium,Large,Ultra)
This is one of the key settings that you should play with to tweak your performance. Unit Scale is more than just a graphical effect, as it affects the campaign game as well.
Simply put, the lower you put this setting, the fewer soldiers are used to represent your units. As rendering hundreds or thousands of units is one of the trademarks of Total War, and our primary performance bottleneck (closely followed by trees & grass) you should spend some time playing with this setting; and I apologize for this being available only in the Front End (technical limitations), which makes playing with it very time-consuming.
Unit Detail (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
The close Banjo-playing cousin of Unit Scale, the Unit Detail setting has a huge impact on the game’s performance and visual look.
Units in ETW are hugely improved over Med2, each unit can have variants of each body part modelled- torso, legs, arms, head, hat, cross-belts, hair, cuffs, face hair, and hands. It’s a huge number of variations to render and a challenge to efficient instancing.
The higher your Unit Detail setting the more variation you will see in your units, from coarse level detail such as two chaps with different coloured tunics, to fine detail such as different beard styles close-up.
There are literally hundreds of unique animations for each unit, and Unit Detail setting impacts how we cull out these variations with distance – as units recede into the distance we start sharing their animations, so we have less unique animations to render.
Trees (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
This setting controls the distance at which those lovely 3D trees turn into billboards. Rendering thousands of 3D trees is very costly, and so arriving at a good setting for Tree quality can have a big impact on you frame rate (and enjoyment).
The lower this setting, the closer those pesky distant billboards become. The sharp-eyed observer will spot that each tree has a number of discrete levels of detail (3 to be precise) that it transitions through on the way to billboards, which helps smooth the transition.
This setting also covers shrubs, which have 3 levels-of-detail, but never render as billboards – you’ll notice that they “fizzle out” as they recede into the distance, disappearing long before the trees billboard.
Lowering the setting also causes as to cull far billboard trees from the outfield (the area outside the playable area) which helps keep frame rates up.
Grass (Drop-down: Off,Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
Grass adds texture and richness to the scene, and the higher you can set this setting, the further away from the camera we draw grass – it’s that simple. Grass clumps are rendered as camera-facing billboards, and pick up the colour of the terrain they sit on.
A note on over-draw as relates to Grass and Trees
When you’re low down to the ground, looking through the grass, or looking through a clump of trees, your frame rate will suffer due to “over draw”, where many screen objects are visually overlapped and the same screen pixel is written to multiple times.
This is going to hurt your frame rate. We do what we can to alleviate this with sorting and culling, but this is only going to go so far. If your rig can handle Volumetric Effects, then enable it because doing so accelerates the process of culling out objects that would otherwise render on top of each-other – I won’t bore you with the details of how/why.
Water (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
This setting affects the campaign map sea surface rendering as well as rendering of the sea in sea battles, and the river surfaces in land battles.
The 3 features that this setting controls are reflection, refraction and foam effects (sea battles only).
Setting Reflection Refraction Foam
Low Off Off Off
Medium Off On Off
High On On On
Ultra On On On
Note that you only see foam effects on sea battles at high wind settings, so to experiment with the impact of enabling foam, start a custom sea battle with gale-force winds.
Sky (Drop-down:Low ,Medium,High,Ultra)
At Low setting the sky is rendered at scene load to create a classic sky cube rendered at 512×512 resolution. With this setting, clouds are pre-rendered into the sky cube and the sky has a rather grainy old-school look.
At any higher setting than Low the sky is rendered using a high resolution pre-computed sky cube overlaid with high res clouds, the resolution of the sky cube and clouds goes up with quality level, to a max of 1024×1024 per face at the highest resolution.
Building Detail (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
All that geometry in those Star Fort battles and Town battles can put quite a strain on your graphics card. By dialling down your Building Quality you control the maximum level of detail that we load for each building, and you also control the distance at which buildings lose detail.
Like tress, buildings are created with a number of detail levels (typically 3), the lowest detail level being basically a box with some gross detail. Dialling down this setting causes us to throw away detail levels, and decreases the distance to the lowest detail level – making that boxy-building more noticeable.
This setting is perhaps misnamed, it should read “all non-animated objects quality” – but you can see why we decided to simplify the name. The setting effects farm props such as carts and hay bales, as well as buildings.
Ship Detail (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
This option is currently not wired in, as of the first release, we will be wiring this in as part of a future patch.
Particle Effects (Drop-down: Low,Medium,High,Ultra)
This setting controls our Particle System, which I mentioned earlier in the context of Volumetric Effects. When we talk about Effects, we’re talking about the smoke, dust and fire effects that add so much atmosphere to a battle.
On low quality settings we limit the total number of particles emitted, and we reduce the emission rate of particles. Put more simply you see less dense smoke. On the lowest setting you will probably notice particles disappearing when they hit the budget, otherwise the culling with quality is not that noticeable. Rendering particles introduces loads of over-draw (which I mentioned earlier in the context of grass & trees). Loads of overlapping particles means lot of overdraw, so play with this setting to fine tune performance.
Appendix: a note on Presets – Automatic, Low, Medium, High, and Ultra
The five preset configurations are selected to give a simple coarse-level performance tuning.
The Automatic Setting sets your graphics to a very conservative configuration, which are the settings selected the first time you run Empire.
The higher presets will only be available if your hardware has sufficient video memory.
Wrap-Up
I hope that you all found the above walk-through useful, and it helps guide your tune-up session. There’s no single right way to approach performance tuning, as different rigs can perform quite differently. I leave it to the enthusiasts on the forums to formulate and share strategies that may work for others.
Regards,
Richard Gardner
Graphics Lead, Empire Total War. The Creative Assembly
Comment # 1
I want to buy this game, but I am not sure if I can play it with this grafic card ATI Radeon 9600, is it posible to play this game with it?
Posted by Fikret on March 5th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Comment # 3
Thank u guys! Now I know how to get the settings right!
Posted by BartjeBijker on March 5th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Comment # 4
nice information but to be honest the game still runs poorly on my half decent PC , I’ve played CA games from the beggining and loved them . Unfortunetly this game remains unplayable to me on a dual core PC on XP with an 8800 card . Performance in this game is a disgrace and i’m very dissapionted.
Posted by billy on March 5th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Comment # 5
This is a great guide for people like me that spend the $$ on a nice computer, but have no idea what the settings do. Being a little OCD I have spend a few hours on the settings. This listing will cause me to spend a few more, however it will be worth it.
Posted by Jim Pond on March 5th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Comment # 6
can some one please tell me if this game will run on a dell dimension 5150 iv been trying to find out for ages
Posted by tom on March 5th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Comment # 7
Can i be denmark in Empire Total war?
Posted by Mads Søndergaard on March 5th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Comment # 8
Excellent guide, I wish I had known this stuff before.
Posted by Blaise Wong on March 5th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Comment # 9
Mark,
Learned a lot from this guide, that will help me with other games too! Thanks.
I’m enjoying Empire Total War now. So far I’m impressed. Please pass my complements on to the entire TW team!
While it looks like graphics are well handled, I think a lot of us would like to know if there will be improvements to the AI soon. I’ve had several encounters where I felt bad winning the battle because the AI kept running around in front of my lines as if it kept changing its mind on what it should do. I even cornered a squad against a fort corner once and it stood there and let me take it out from a few yards away without even firing a shot back at me.
Anyway, thanks for the guide. I’m looking forward to further improvements to the game. This one looks like a game I can see myself dusting off for years to come, after I’m done conquering the world now of course.
Posted by Scott on March 5th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Comment # 11
Hey, i have got a proble with rendering the text i have lowered the settings but still the text is scrambled is there any patch to sort this problem out? http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b234/Sarephim/weirdtext.jpg shows the scambling.
My comp specs are:
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T9400 (2.53Ghz, 6MB, 1066MHz)
4096MB (2×2048) 1067MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
512MB ATI Radeon HD 3670 graphics card
320GB Free Fall Sensor (7200RPM)
Any help would be usefully, thanks.
Posted by Michael Smith on March 6th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Comment # 12
Oh my god that is one of the most useful posts i have ever seen, this will not only help me with empire but for many other games. This honestly should be celebrated, the fact that you gave us all these options in the first place and then explained how to use them should be applauded. If only other publishers (GTA IV ROCKSTAR YES YOU!!!) would do this the world would be a better place!
thanks again
nathan
somerset
Posted by Nathan on March 6th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Comment # 13
The game is awesome truly the best game ive have ever played and by far the best total war franchise to date. The naval combat is hard to get the hang of orinally because of the detial however once you have mastered this combat there is SO MUCH you can do and the variation of boats was somthink which i enjoyed and the scale was not disapointing there are cases where you can fight with alot of ships. The land combat was just untoucheble truley amazing being able to go in buildings and smash them down hide behind walls and all these little Perks which come with the land combat really made the game diffrent from the rest. Finally the campaign map has so much detail i almost felt like i could explore the world on my screen. Why this game was only 1% better than Rome Total War i have to idea because it is simply so much better and i loved it basically lol.
Posted by joe whiting on March 6th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Comment # 14
Is there a console with easily implemented more detailed graphics commands? In Crysis for instance i had great success reproducing the high end settings for relatively little cost.
Posted by Dangerfield on March 6th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Comment # 15
How do I configure two different resolutions one for the campaign and for the battle?
Thanks
Posted by Miguel on March 7th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Comment # 16
It is possible to change the font size in the campaign map?
Posted by Miguel on March 7th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Comment # 17
Very handy info on graphics boys, thank you
Posted by pattyboy999 on March 8th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Comment # 18
I have a nvidia gforce gtx 260 graphics card which I was lead to beleive is quite good however I have still had white flashes on the screen and once I had a message saying out of video memory and the game shut down. I have all the settings on high which were preset however I’m desapointed that with this card I cannot set it to ultra and seemingly having problems at high. Can you explain what sort of grpahics card is needed for ultra? Does it exist?
Posted by Chris on March 8th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Comment # 19
What PC system is out there that fulfills all the requirements to enjoy Empire Total War with all settings ticked and the best graphics?
Thanks John
Posted by John Simonon on March 8th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Comment # 20
i’m about to buy a 1GB nVIDIA 9500GT 1024MB PCI Express 9500 GT Video Card, and my question is, will that allow me to play Empire Total War Special Forces Edition using its full potential?? (as in graphics and all)
thanks
Posted by Han on March 8th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Comment # 21
Hello, thanks for this guide, ive been really looking for something like this.
However, i’ve bought my game pre-order on Steam, and I just can not figure out how to access the front end graphics settings? Could you give me a hint perhaps?
Thanks alot. Rasmus
Posted by Rasmus Hammer-Jakobsen on March 8th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Comment # 22
Can we assume that the game will auto detect the best settings? Mine seem to be set to seriously high straight from install and I am reluctant to play around as the graphics look great to me.
Posted by Wayne Edmonds on March 9th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Comment # 23
Excellent tips ‘n’ tricks – thanks Richard!
Posted by Mark Y on March 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Comment # 25
excellent post will now go and experiment:>
Posted by michael george on March 10th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Comment # 26
Good day. I have a big problem with Empire Total War. When it cames out I bought a original pc dvd relase on the relase date and after I installed the game it works without a problem. Now when steam downloaded a update (10.3.2009), the game is crashing every time I enter the battle scene and the game is unplayable, so I am very angry, because I cannot play!!!The game was running fluently, so I cannot understand where the problem is!I´ve read all forums and your technical support and all the advices are not working. I have optimal configuration for the game, so the fail is on your side (the game worked without a crash in past!!!) Please tell me how to delete that update or where can I download a patch, that could repair this problem!It´s a very good game, but the steam is ruining that game so far as he can. Could help me reinstalling the game ? Please answer me on e-mail. Total War player from Europe.
Posted by The Great on March 11th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Comment # 27
Please i need help! Both total war empire and war hammer dawn of war 2 are a problem! After a minute or two my screen fills with blurry colors and peculiar shapes! I dont know what to do! I am running a 2.66 intel core 2 duo with 4 gigabytes of ram, and an 9800 gtx+ with 1 giga ram! It is impossible for my machine to have a graphics problem! I am using windows xp 64 professional edition. Please contact me with instructions!
I gave a lot of money and frankly i have this problem only with steam powered games!
please help!
Posted by apogoiteusi on March 11th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Comment # 28
hey…..i have 2.00 ghz core 2 duo…….and 3 gigs of ram……windows vista….and nvidia geforce 9200gs…
i downloaded the demo of Empire: TW…..but it does not work smoothly….i tried the settings to low…but still give a lot of problem…..
any idea what should i do…
Posted by gurnoor on March 12th, 2009 at 6:12 am
Comment # 29
Hi,
Thanks for this and thanks for this awesome game! Unfortunately, I’m running it on my new notebook on lower settings and resolution (1050×768) than i would prefer, and am getting decent game experience.
Would getting an extra 2GB of RAM improve performance? or would it be better I shell out more $$ and upgrade my video card?
Thanks!
My stats:
Core 2 Due 2.4 GHZ
2GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS 512MB
Native Resolution: 1680×1050
HD: 320GB
Posted by Alex on March 12th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Comment # 30
Can you tell me if a ATI Mobility Radeon X600 is compatible for this game. The specs say that it is, as do my P4 HT 3.2 HP Pavalion. However, the graphics will not run in game only the sound. All directx , sound, gpu updates have been checked & the system & gpu settings have both been changed to ” performance”. Note also the game graphics options have been turned down to LOW & 800×600 res.
Posted by Victor Nuttall on March 13th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Comment # 31
What are the minimum system requirements for Total War? I could not find that anywhere.
RTS GameS I can play now are Praetorians, Civ III, Rouge States, Real War, Blitzkrieg, Sudden Strike.
I have a 6 year old notebook with a weak video card. Excepts from DxDiag.txt below.
Time of this report: 4/5/2005, 19:00:05
Machine name: N34AS1-XPHOME
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: SNC302EEH
System Model: SNC302EEH
BIOS: Version 1.00
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
Memory: 224MB RAM
Page File: 234MB used, 310MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: /PackageInstall
DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.2180 32bit Unicode
Card name: SiS 650
Manufacturer: SiS
Chip type: SiS 650 Rev 00
DAC type: Internal
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1039&DEV_6325&SUBSYS_51001584&REV_00
Display Memory: 32.0 MB
Current Mode: 1024 x 768 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: Default Monitor
Monitor Max Res:
Driver Name: SiSGRV.dll
Driver Version: 6.13.0010.2072 (English)
Posted by Charlie Roscoe on March 13th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Comment # 33
I have all the required settings and graphic drivers for Empire: total War but it still will not let me play it. I can install the game and get onto the main menu but when i continue from that and try and get into the campaign it simplt stops on the loading screen, but i can hea the game playing and i can select units but i cant seewhat i am selecting. Any advice for me on how i could prevent this from happening. Thank you
Posted by Sam Carnall on March 14th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Comment # 34
What Graphics card would you recommend for XP users?
Posted by Rich Canetti on March 15th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Comment # 36
ahh,what helpful notes have you brought in,
now i know what each and every graphic settings do,
thanks a lot man!
Posted by bulu77 on March 17th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Comment # 37
Hi – I have a good one for you!
I was running empire on a machine with a very high resolution and all was good!
Unfortunately I have had to switch monitors and it now won’t support the high res it was set at. The monitor simply shows when Empire is running “Out of Range” and I can’t see anything on screen. My desktop and other apps are all viewable so it’s isolated to the game setting
I want a way of scaling down the resolution – I have looked for .ini files and in the registry for a value with no luck!
Any advice anyone can offer would be great!
Cheers
Gray
Posted by gray on March 18th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Comment # 38
Hi, I would like to buy this game,but I am not sure if my system will be able to play it. Can I play it on my computer with all features.
My system is:
Mothrboard : MSI N1996
Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory : 2GB DDR2 667MHz
Graphic Card : ATI Radeon X1600 Series 512MB
Os: Windows Xp
Monitor: 19inch 1400×900
Thank you
Posted by Artur on March 18th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Comment # 39
I just bought the game and when i load it up everything works sound mouse but i get a black screen but my mouse is visible and i can hear it when it scrolls over the things i can pick but i can’t see it the only thing i am not sure about is the pixel thing… Any suggestions?
Posted by motley on March 18th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Comment # 40
Can you tell me if a ATI Radeon express 200 is compatible for this game. The specs say that it is, the graphics will not run in game only the sound. All Note also the game graphics options have been turned down to LOW & 800×600 res.
The sustem requirements are way to small to read
Posted by Bud on March 19th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Comment # 41
I have the game on a pretty low resolution for my computer yet when i play it takes a long time to load and none of the videos play smoothly. They are choppy and i end up just skipping them because they are to choppy to even watch. What can i do?
Posted by andy on March 20th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Comment # 42
Game runs pretty smooth for me. I have everything set on high with 4x AA, with ultra unit scaling.
core 2 quad 2.4ghz OC to 3.0ghz
4 GB of ram
EVGA 8800 GT
EVGA 780i Mobo
windows XP x64
And I would not recommend getting the 9500 series graphics card you’d probably be better off with an 8800.
Posted by Rex on March 20th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Comment # 43
i have over 3 times the reccomended system requirements yeat i have to play it on low settings or the ‘lag’ is unbearble, and as of yet i still have not seen the intro vid nore the vids between levles as they play at 1 or 2 frames per second?? the battles etc on single player seem to work ok but online however its just a nightmare, specialy with no chat for people to help me, its just fkin wrongs and the price of this game?? for the lack of support? whens the patch coming to sort all this out? cheers spliffy.
Posted by spliffy on March 20th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Comment # 44
I have a nvidia 9800 GT and the game Empire Total War is always crashing.
Neither Nvidia, Sega or Steam give me a solution
Somebody can help me?
Posted by Joao on March 20th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Comment # 45
I have so far purchased Empire Total War twice and it refuses to work. My system meets all of the requirements but when I install it ( So far I have done so nine times) the screen turns white and then the Empire Total War cursor comes up then it can’t respond! I have updated my drivers and installed all of the new patches (I think!)
Can anybody tell me if I’m doing anything wrong or not doing something that I should….
{Thanks{
Posted by Problematic Person on March 21st, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Comment # 46
Hey, im looking to buy a laptop but i want it to play empire total well but dont know which one to get . can u advise me on the best one to get ?
Posted by Iain on March 22nd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Comment # 47
same as the guy before me, i see the nouse and i hear the music but i cant see anything, just a black screen. suggestions?
Thanks.
Posted by jake on March 22nd, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Comment # 48
same as the guy before, i can see the mouse and hear the music but all i see is the black screen. help!
Posted by jake on March 22nd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Comment # 49
Hi I am having great troubles playing this game for any length of time on my xp 64 bit system after 5 mins it just freezes and i have several different colours and shapes flashing up on the screen I run a dual core 3 ghz processor and 2 nvidia 8800 in sli but this still happens on your lowest setting but my vista 32 bit which dosent een meet your minimum requirements can run it no problems do you have issues with 64 bit operating systems I’m beginning to think have wasted my money especially when I’m setting a 1900x 1200 monitor down to 1024×768
Posted by chris Nicoll on March 22nd, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Comment # 50
I am running Windows Vista. I have 3 gig of ram and 300 gig hard drive. I also have a NVIDEA gforce 7100 graphics card. My system should be able to play the game.
I have also checked to make sure I have all of my updates. The game loaded fine, but when I go to play it the sound and video is very choppy. I have checked all of the graphics setting and they are set to low (default). What can i be missing to try and resolve this.
Posted by ed on March 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 am
Comment # 51
Guys great job….its an amazing game but u let me down with the total awkwardness of steam and the totaly ramdom and constant freezes…..my PC doubles the requirements i even bought a brand new PC coz i am such a huge fan of total war but u really and truely let me down with the steam and the freeze ups
Ur best fan yet dissapointed,
Aidan P……..From IRELAND
Posted by Aidan P on March 23rd, 2009 at 12:27 am
Comment # 52
I have Mobility Radeon HD 3450 card, Dual AMD turion X2 64 processor and 2 gig of ram and running Vista Sp 1. The game runs fine on mostly medium graphics settings but the in game videos which i love and find one of the best parts of the game seem to be playing over and over again on top of each other and flickering this makes them unwatchable. Any help to fix these videos would be much approeciated.
Posted by Ben Ruddy on March 23rd, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Comment # 53
Could i play this game with:
Graphic card : Ati Radeon HD 4850 of 512 MB
Processor : Intel Duo 2 Core E8400
Harddisk space: 640 GB
RAM Memory : 4 or 6 GB
Windows Vista
and monitor : 32″
Posted by Joo on March 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Comment # 54
Hello, I’m having the same problem as Sam Carnell (#33) the game starts up fine (although the Video at the start is choppy) and with everything on the lowest it can be the load screen gets to half way starts flickering and the battle starts with the load screen still displayed, I can select units and give orders but not actually see anything, my computer meets the requirements but has the minimum graphics card.
I’m quite sure that a new graphics card might help but not certain, any ideas?
Posted by Shaun on March 24th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Comment # 55
Empire total war is only for computer experts.full stop.
Posted by richard leach on March 25th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Comment # 56
I am having problems with my total war, My computer meets all the requirements except the 2gb ram, I have vista not xp, can i run it in xp compatability? everything else works in the game except the movie cut scenes, which skip?
Posted by david smith on March 27th, 2009 at 7:39 am
Comment # 57
Hello I have major problems with my game, it crashes constantly in the campain,and all other places!!!!
Posted by claus Skjøth on March 27th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Comment # 58
i meet the graphic requirments but it wont let me play campaign or battles
Posted by aaron on March 28th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Comment # 59
Can you tell me if a ATI Mobility Radeon X600 is compatible for this game. The specs say that it is, as do my P4 HT 3.2 HP Pavalion. However, the graphics will not run in game only the sound. Note also the game graphics options have been turned down to LOW & 800×600 res.
Posted by Troy Brenes on March 28th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Comment # 60
Man I was so excited about this game. I loved the other TW games and hoped that this would be a good advancement on those. I’m enjoying it, and many things have been changed for the better, but I think there are still some pretty major flaws. The computer AI in battles often seems pretty poor, with comp armies often looking very confused. Unit movement around forts, bridges, houses etc. is also very buggy (especially the forts) which is a pity as this seemed pretty well sorted in medieval II. The naval battles are pretty dull as well – all you seem to have to do is keep turning your ships one way then the other (unless im just being thick). Why is there no south-east asia or australasia? And why no slavery (i’m not a neo-nazi or anything, but these games are meant to be historical)? Also it keeps crashing and seems quite slow running, even though i have a pretty decent pc. BAH! (it is a good game)
Posted by jimboberoo on March 28th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Comment # 61
Worst playable game from this company so far,drops to dead screen all the time,lfails to desk top on a regular basis,,very upset about the lack of a patch so far,,,VERY
Posted by Brad s on March 28th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Comment # 62
I have bought the game about a month ago and it is a very good game. However, there is a tendency for it to slow down severely or crash often whenever it is doing something related to the navy, ocean, ports and the switch from the end of a naval battle to campaign map. Yet everything that has to do with land battles, buildings, cities, and land campaign maps has virtually no problems at all.
As far as I can tell, I am playing it at the lowest possible setting with nothing running in the background and it still runs into those problems despite the patches via Steam. The specs on my computer is not great but definitly above the minimum with:
Windows Vista: 64bit
Intel Core 2 Duo 3.00 GHz
4 GB of RAM
GeForce 9300 GE 256 MB
and more than enough space on the hard drive
A answer to this problem would be grateful. Thanks if you are working on a new patch for this.
Posted by Albert on March 29th, 2009 at 5:39 am
Comment # 63
Before Empire total war was released i decided to download the demo to see how well the game would run. I have 8400 Nvidia Geforce graphics card. However the pc i use is a laptop and games are usually not optimized for laptops. I played the demo and it ran really slow. Does this mean if i decide to buy the game it will run just as slow as the demo?
Posted by Unknown on March 29th, 2009 at 5:52 am
Comment # 64
I just bought the game and when i load it up everything works sound mouse but i get a black screen but my mouse is visible and i can hear it when it scrolls over the things i can pick but i can’t see it ,, any help?
Posted by alex jones on March 30th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Comment # 65
hi
i just bought the game and starts very slow and if i press “Esc” my computer restarts. This are my system is :
2 processors running – Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz
Cpu speed 3.00 GHz Performance Rated at 5.40 GHz
Ram 2.0 GB
Microsoft Windows XP Professional (Build Service Pack 32600)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 MB 7300 LE (GeForce 7300 LE)
Vertex Shader Ver 3.0
Pixel Shader Ver 3.0
Posted by erick on April 2nd, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Comment # 66
just updated video driver, still crash. never seen such a bugly game. i’ve been playing for a month but i still can end one match. there is always some bug that stop the game. and i can’t do anything
Posted by ome on April 3rd, 2009 at 5:50 am
Comment # 67
Does this engine support SLI or quad core?
Posted by overclocked on April 4th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Comment # 68
I ahve got this: Integrated NVIDIA® GeForce® 7100 graphics solution PCI Express® 2.0 x16 graphics card support (low-profile) PCI Express® 2.0 x1 slot
I have got this game and it’s not working at all on my PC, my mates tells me it’s the graphic card however I am unsure of which one to get in order for me to play the game, can you help please.
Posted by Diana on April 6th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Comment # 69
I have got this: Integrated NVIDIA® GeForce® 7100 graphics solution PCI Express® 2.0 x16 graphics card support (low-profile) PCI Express® 2.0 x1 slot
I have got the game and it’s not working at all on my PC, can you help please.
Posted by Diana on April 6th, 2009 at 1:56 am
Comment # 70
This game looks good when it works, I have a gateway quad core, 3g ram and now a ati 3450. This game will not run reliably at all, I will be in a battle and it will crash my computer, I click on a fleet carrying an army the game stops working. I’ve beat it twice now with England and Maratha, but they were painful, with all of the restarts and problems.
Posted by James Brown on April 6th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Comment # 71
CAMPAING MAP + BATTLES LAGS #379 [url] [-]
Posts: 3
03/22/09 09:51:50
(1) Operation System: Windows Vista™ Édition Familiale Premium (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1 (6001.vistasp1_gdr.080917-1612)
(2) Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GX2
(3) RAM: 4GB
(4) Processor and speed: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.4GHz
(5) Are you able to start the game? Yes
(6) Are you able to play battles, or does it crash? I am able to play battles
(7) Does your game crash at a certain turn every time? Not for now..
(8) Are you having an issue with saved games? No
(9) Are you receiving memory leaks at any time during your play session? (Lag spikes for such things as selection your ships / fleets / ports / armies / anything) Yes
(10) Are you having any other issues that make the game unplayable? No, but especially the campaign map and battle problem is annoying and spoiling the pleasure of playing such a nice game
(11) Please list any and all other issues that you are having: The campaign map is not sliding smoothly but a bit jerky. Sometimes during the battles, some units are slowing down, other are gliding in slow motion, but no walking or running.
(12) Have you modded any of your files? No
(13) Where did you download the game from? Physical DVD copy, Or from Steam? Physical DVD
(14) What version are you playing? English? German? Etc etc English UK
(15) Is your software original? Yes
Here below is dxdialog report. Do you think, those video lags come from my PC or are going to be fixed by the next patch or update?
Thanks in advance for your prompt answer.
Best regards
Charles
Posted by charles tahar on April 8th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Comment # 72
I just bought the game and when i load it up everything works sound mouse but i get a black screen but my mouse is visible and i can hear it when it scrolls over the things i can pick… Any suggestions?
Posted by Gustavus on April 10th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Comment # 73
I have been playing this game for some time and I’ve come across this problem. When I have the view (during a battle) zoomed out to the fullest, I notice the soliders become extremely pixelated. Can you explain what is causing this? I have the graphics set to Ultra and my machine has the following specs – Intel (R) Core (TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33Ghz 2.33Ghz, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 9800GT, 1 GB.
How do you explain why this is happening? Are there driver issues with my computer? If you are unsure of what I mean, I will email you a screenshot, just provide one.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Posted by Lindsay Gelle on April 11th, 2009 at 2:40 am
Comment # 74
Hello, Just like comment #39 I have sound and mouse pointer on screen, but black and white lines rolling upward. I was playing it ok, but painstakingly slow on my previous machine: 1 gig ram, athlon 64 proc, and xp os. Realizing i was underpowered for this game and games to come i had a custom built machine im using now but i cant get video…
the new machine has 2 SLI connected video cards (evga 285 overclocked 2 gig ram each), a pentium i7 quad core (3.2 Ghz) processor, and using XP pro 64 as my os. I get the feeling that its the NVIDIA driver thats incompatible… i know this beast of a machine is qualified, i just dont know what to tweak. I would be grateful if you could offer some advice.
I’m a die hard fan of all the Total war games going back to Shogun Total War. They are always my favorites. btw, any chance of going back to the Japanese civil wars?
Posted by Robert Handley on April 12th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Comment # 75
I have bought the special forces edition and have the required specifications on my pc and the load is easy enough but the actual game refuses to play and jams on the load screen. I have tried the demo seperately also and that too jams in the same spot. Any help would be appreciated???
Posted by comment on April 12th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Comment # 76
I have bought the special forces edition and my pc has the required specfication. The load is easy enough but the game itself jams on the loading screens and refuses to work. I do not think it is anything to do with the special forces edition as I have also tried with the demo and I am experiencing the same problems. Any help would be much appreciated??? & Why Oh Why do you have to use steam to play the game instead of the disc alone. Regardless of whether i can get this game to work i will never purchase another that requires steam.
Posted by Frank on April 12th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Comment # 77
i have a windows xp will that work for this game or do i need to get a new computer.
Posted by mike on April 15th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Comment # 78
When i try and play there is no text on any of the menus in game or at the beginning. The game itself runs fine. Any solutions?
Posted by Josh on April 19th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Comment # 79
how do i get directx9 for my computer
Posted by gary witchell on April 22nd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Comment # 80
WOW awsome game, i absolutly love it. However, i have real problems with turn times, the game seems to take 2 minutes to go to the next turn, and its REALLY anoying. I dont know what it is, but for some reason my dual core CPU only runs at 50% while loading the turns and during battles. ive turned down graphics and it doesnt seem to help, my drivers are all updated.
Specs:
MOBO:ALiveNF7G-FullHD
Processor:2.50 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
Memory:2GB DDR2 667Mhz
Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Os: windows XP
Moniter: 19 inch 1280 x 960
could be my specs, but im not sure. Just let me know if any ideas. Thanks again for kick-ass game,
Cheers
Posted by ANXiETY on April 26th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Comment # 81
Hi, I see that some player got bad performance experience. I have the same (almost) config as one of you folks. I don’t play games with lag so I always take the time to make it as beautiful as it can be withtout lag. My config is : Core 2 Duo 3.0, 8800 GTS, 2 gigs RAM, etc.
(for example TQ mean Texture Quality and H mean High)
My settings are : 1280/1024, Shader 3 (low), AA None, Textu Tril, TQ : H, PE : H, UD : H, BD : M, SD : H, Shadows : L, US : Large, Trees : M, Grass : M, Water : H, Sky : M.
I never got lag (exept in siege, i’ve noticed a slow down when Cam is going up)
Note : Shados cost a lot, AA cost a lot, Grass… cost a lot.
Hope it help someone.
Posted by JR on May 2nd, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Comment # 82
This is why I’m buying an Alienware X58…
Posted by Freddie on May 28th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Comment # 83
Hello guys, i have not a big problem, but a it’s a problem. I know that playing against those indians, those without body armour and those feathers on their head an campaign battle, it start to laggs, i know i have to lower my settings and i did and it worked etc. But i can play higher against britain or france or any other country, so i know now it’s because of the indians who make me lag, or at least slower my monitor enormous. But the biggest problem for me now is, that footsoldiers and horses from a far distance don’t walk but glide, and if i zoom in they start to walk or run, even on every settings very high, perhaps it’s a setting or something but it’s freaking my out, you just see a army gliding to you and you see it well, you notice it and its freaking you, because i have purchased a new computer and i have all the requirements i need, i can play on very high etc. But the soldiers glide from a distance and they don’t walk and that distance isn’t that crazy far…. Someone who can help?
Posted by MijdrechtNL on July 31st, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Comment # 84
hey i jus got the game i installed it and what not but when i try to play it this screen comes up sayin i have to wait to days to play it cus of steam is there anyway to bypass this or something because i had to make a steam acount when i installed the game
Posted by jesse on December 25th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Comment # 85
Hi Guys, Whenever i start Empire the screen goes black, the cursor appears but then it comes up with a message saying it is not responding. So if you guys know what to do the please, some advice.
Posted by Charle on December 27th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Comment # 86
Hi, I have just upgraded and installed a new graphics card. I had bought Empire Total War around the same time I was upgrading, so never tried in with my old card. It is a galaxy gt 240 (GeForce 200 Series) with Nvidia. I managed to get through the Steam issues and the game does run fine performance-wise. The problem I have is with the buildings and all the inanimate objects disappearing in both the campaign & battle maps. I looked into rolling back the driver as I have read on a few forums about issues with the newer drivers, but my graphics card won’t support any driver older than 195.62. Is there any patch, settings etc. that can help me here? It just looks terrible and empty when you are trying to storm a fort, but there is no fort, or trees, or warehouse, you can’t see any buildings at all on the campign map, it is all just missing. Please Help!
Travis
Posted by Travis on February 15th, 2010 at 9:40 am
Comment # 87
ati radeon hd 2600…
How do I get the Radeon 7500 driver for Windows Vista 32-bit? Can anyone tell me more about ati radeon hd 2600?…
Posted by ati radeon hd 2600 on February 17th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Comment # 88
I have a nvida GeForce 7800 GS video card is it good enough to run empire total war and if not what would you reccomend
tom
Posted by tom collins on February 24th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Comment # 89
My game is installed, however, when I play it I have two problems.
Problem 1 – When I’m playing in general, such as on the map screen, whenever I try to move my view somewhere (E.G France to russia) the movement is jumpy, same with the sounds.
problem 2 – Whilst in gameplay, the text is weird symbols that don’t mean anything, they’re just little blurs, yet when I’m in the game’s menu e.t.c, the text is fine.
Any Help?
Posted by Sean on April 5th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Comment # 90
Guys is there a solution to the black screen at the beginning problem? (noise and mouse still works) I just got the game and thats my problem 
Thanks in advance!
Posted by neil sullivan on April 6th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Comment # 91
will my intel celeron t3100 1.9 ghz dual core run this game? It has a good benchmark on Passmark Software but i am not sure if etw will take advantage of the dual core or if it will just try to run on one of them, in which case it probly will not work. If it does, it has a higher benchmark than a lot of cpus that will run it so it should run anyway. I have just bought the computer and am wondering if I should fork out on the game.
Posted by g.collis on April 8th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Comment # 92
I have a similar problem as some of the above posts. I have more than all the required specs and the game used to work fine, no problems AT ALL. Then, around late September, early October 2009 the game would run for about 5 minutes and the screen goes black and I get a “no signal” message on my monitor. The music continues but is stuck on the last tone that was playing when the game froze. The only way I can get out of it is rebooting my computer. How could this happen for no reason when the game used to work for hours on end? I made no changes at all to my computer. Any help would be great, as I have spent a lot of money on the GeForce 9800 GT graphics card, etc. and love this game, but it is unplayable, and has been for months now. PLEASE email me if you know how to fix this.
Posted by Adrian on April 18th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Comment # 93
adrian hey umm i have the same problem with world in conflict, this generally happens to alot of the new games coming out recently, they work for a while then stop.empire total war doesn’t even work for me now at i had almost the same settings that you do. i reccomend taking your pc into a shop and asking them to clean it and restore some memory. this is most likely a problem with your graphics card o the amount of video space on your computer.
Posted by charles on June 13th, 2010 at 2:46 am
Comment # 94
Hey it seems I have had the problem as you guys with Empire total war, napoleon total war and NWN2. The only difference is that adrian says that it continues music wise on it’s last tone. For me the monitor dies (no signal) and the the music goes about 2 secs later. I have noticed this problem got worst and worst, however seems to have hit rock bottom now. With yours do you notice that it accumaltes? If I reboot it and run say ETW again it crashes quicker, and next time it crashes even if I just stay on the desktop. The only way around this was to leave my computer off for about an hour so it could somehow sort it out. I have noticed that lowering the resolution helps signifcantly, but not enough. Can you fix this problem without taking it to a shop? How do you free up video space? Any help is very welcome
Posted by Tula does the hula on July 12th, 2010 at 5:49 am
Comment # 95
The strange thing is, I’ve taken it to best Buy twice and let the geek squad look at it. They always say there is no problem and don’t know what’s causing the crash. Very strange! Since I’ve tried everything else, I think I will downgrade my graphics card one notch and hope this works! If so, I will post and let everyone know. Thanks for the feedback.
Posted by Adrian on July 27th, 2010 at 12:50 am
Comment # 96
will ATI radeon 4250 work well with this game ?
Posted by Codey on October 3rd, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Comment # 97
Hi I keep getting this problem when every time I play ETW or any other of my steam games after about 30-60 minutes of playing my computer goes to a black screen and the only thing you can see is the curser. I’d be really grateful if anyone could help.
Thanks.
Posted by Lex on October 7th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Comment # 98
whats all this problem i bye ETW 27euro and dosent work and i have good computer with direct x11 and shader markv2.1 i didnt understand why all this about now i stop playing with computer and i play with ps3
Posted by ramzi on November 1st, 2010 at 7:28 pm
Comment # 99
hey i have a problem? i turn on my game and everything works sound and mouse, but the screen is just black. i just bought a new graphics card and a new power supply and really do not want to buy any new things can someone help me please?
Posted by koby on March 27th, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Comment # 100
hello, i would need some help with my problem, i installed the game and when i get to some game play, i cant see any thing, i can get the main screen but no game play, the screen will flash diff. colliers, slide around and i cant see any thing, please help me with this problem.
Posted by Brendan ODriscoll on September 27th, 2011 at 2:53 am
