Empire: Total War on XP has to be lowest quality - but HalfLife2 can be on highest?

[CrossFireXT17]

Hey, Well I'm running Windows XP SP2 with Boot Camp 2.1 and everything seems to be working fine, but when I'm running Empire: Total War, I have to have the quality on the lowest possible setting. Where as with Half Life (well when I ran it in Parallels this time) runs on highest quality.

Is there something I can do? I didn't think Empire: Total War was THAT graphic intensive, especially if Half Life 2 runs fine.

any tips?

 

[nick9191]

What Macintosh do you have? Speed, graphics card, RAM etc.

 

[CrossFireXT17]

o yea sorry about that!

I have a 17'' Macbook Pro (early 2008). Intel Core 2 Duo (2.5GHz) - 4GB Ram, and a nVidia GeForce 8600M GT 512MB

 

[peskaa]

Half-Life 2 is old, really old. The engine dates from 2004, so I'd be expecting any machine made since then to be competent at the least at running it. A 2.5Ghz C2D, 4GB RAM and a 512MB 8600 is certainly fast enough to max it out and the rest.

Empire Total War on the other hand is a 2009 release (5 year gap right there), and is fairly demanding on your system. My tips would be to reduce the number of soldiers displayed in a unit and generally tweak the settings to reduce the stress.

I'm running E:TW on my Mac Pro (2.8x8, 4GB, 8800GT) pretty well - but then I've got a fair few more CPU cores, and a full desktop GPU to back them up.

 

[cathyy]

HL2 runs even on the Intel X3100 GMA. It's not graphically intensive at all.

 

[Keleko]

I found the biggest slowdown for Empire: Total War was the shaders version setting. When I changed to Shaders 2.0 from 3.0 I was able to up the detail some. I do use "small" units and pretty much medium settings for everything else, and it runs just fine that way. I picked small units because I rarely bother to zoom in to look at the details during a battle anyway. I'm too busy directing my troops to watch the fight up close.