STILL choppy Empire Total War

from Elemental Forums

My old P4 PC crashed so keeping to a budget I upgraded the components.  Nothing flashy but better.  AMD dual core 3.2 ghz, 4 megs RAM, TB of storage and an Invidea 8400 video card.  Wouldn't you know that the damn game still runs choppy even at low settings.  That should not be.  I checked the version and am running one version behind the most current 1.06 patch but steam will not update the stupid game.  I have no idea how to make it load the patch.  Very frustrating set up all around.

51,585 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Well... With 4 MB of RAM you are bound to have problems. xD

If you had 4 GB on the other hand...

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Not to mention that Nvidia knockoff GPU you're using!

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

the 8400 is whats slowing it down. thats a pretty old card by today's standards.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

yeah..typed too fast and did not read what I had posted.  4g ram and NVIDIA.  Anway, funny remarks aside, I am still surprised about the choppy response.  I will say that the card has 1g of onboard memory rather than 512 as some have.  In any event, will hopefully find a setting combo that will at least make the game worth my time.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't know if you know this but Empire: Total War isn't optimized very well. In my case I have a similar set-up to your, with less hardrive space and some ATI card with half a gig on it. Game runs good enough for ten turns. 10-20 gets choppy. Somewhere after that bugs start popping up and then the game hangs for a while. And then halfway through a long game Empire freezes at a specific number of turns and regardless of what I do before I click 'next turn', it still crashes. A lot of people had/are getting this problem so, you know, good luck and all but just know it isn't your fault the game's a bit of a mess.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

the 8400 is whats slowing it down. thats a pretty old card by today's standards.
                                                                

I don't know......I'm using a nvidia 7300GT and it plays it well (talk about your old cards).:omg:

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

At least you can play the game you bought.  If I want to play (gtx260) I have to revert to an years old video-card driver.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

your card is pretty garbage bro, and the game (especially in large battles) can get pretty intense, even though the models are old.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Yeah, I think I will get a better card.  dumb question but I wonder if I can keep this card in the box and then add a 2nd beefier card and have the two run in a series together to boost the processing power that much more?

Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top

Don't be in too much of a rush to get a new card; Empire is not going to be silky smooth unless you buy serious overkill. With that said, your card is pretty much at the low end.. did you scroungs it up from your old PC, by any chance? :)

Still, it's above normal minimum requirements, so if you want to hold on to it for half a year and then get an even better new card for less, that's an option.

As for Empire, I find it's finally a good game with 1.6+. VERY good, even. :)

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, it will be even better if Elemental starts being very good with merely 1.1 then. O:) ;)

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

With SLi mobo's you can add a second card (unlinked if they are not a matching pair) and set one to be a physx card only so your main one can handle the good stuff!  But I'm not sure if Physx is supported in all games.  A bit of googling may give a bit more info. 

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

With a card old like that, you're better off getting a single new one than trying to run SLI.

Reply #14 from Elemental Forums Top

I was not planning on getting a new PC until the old one died abruptly so I just picked this card up for $34 bucks so I could get the maching back up and running.  I have all the setting in Empire set to Medium and it runs fine enough.  I still can't figure out why Steam will not update it to 1.6 though.  Anyway, I will probably run it as is for awhile and then get a better card later...of course then I have to worry about the power supply, etc so we'll see.  Hey, atleast Elemental will run better now! :)