What to upgrade for Rome Total War 2

[arbruehl]

I am currently looking into upgrading my XPS, but I'm not sure what I need due to previous problems with the Total War titles. For example, In the past it has told me it cannot send reinforcements unless I scale back my settings. If I punch everything to low it still cannot filter in units until some from the main group die. Basically, it will not let me have all the units at once like you are supposed to be able to. Is this something a new graphics card can help with? Currently I have a Dell XPS 435t with an i7-920 intel core processor, 8bg of ddr3 sdram, 640 gb serial ata 2 hard drive and a ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. I'm not sure if others have had these issues, but that was one example.

 

[firestorm09]

I'm guessing it's your graphics card, try upgrading it to something more recent

 

[arbruehl]

I'm guessing it's your graphics card, try upgrading it to something more recent

That's what I was thinking since everything else seemed adequate, but wanted to make sure. Thanks.

 

[dssdghthd]

Rome Total War is a CPU intensive game, not GPU intensive. I have an i5-2500 and I can't even run the first Total War game on max settings.
Don't go around spending your money based on the guesses of some random people on a forum who don't give their answers one second's thought.

 

[firestorm09]

Yes but if you look closely at his post you can see that he has an i7-920 which althought is first generation, it's still very capable and has great performance and then you look at his graphics card which is not so new. What I recommend doing is overclocking your processor, then get a aftermarket cooler for $30~$50 and upgrade your graphics card for $150~$250

 

[Supernova1138]

I don't think he's going to be able to overclock. He has a Dell OEM system, and they lock down the BIOS so you can't do any overclocking. Honestly, I would just wait for the game to come out and then look at upgrades when we see how the game performs. Odds are it will be more CPU bound than GPU bound.

 

[firestorm09]

I don't think he's going to be able to overclock. He has a Dell OEM system, and they lock down the BIOS so you can't do any overclocking. Honestly, I would just wait for the game to come out and then look at upgrades when we see how the game performs. Odds are it will be more CPU bound than GPU bound.

Agreed

 

[arbruehl]

I agree that it is likely more CPU related, but with the gap between the i7 and my current graphics card, I thought perhaps I could upgrade the card. Also, I've read I can alter a setting in the games script to "unlimited" which may alleviate the example I originally posted. Graphics wise, I can handle everything not being on max for the sake of max units. I appreciate everyones input on this.