Upgrading advice.

james08 · 26 May 2016 at 15:34

Hello. I've had somewhat of a shocker. I recently bought Total War: Warhammer and I must have not read the specifications properly as it runs appallingly and looks even worse.

My RAM and OS are fine. It seems to be down to my Graphics card and CPU. I have an AMD Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC 4096MB and an Intel Core i5-4690K 3.50GHz (Devil’s Canyon).

What would be the best way to go my CPU? Stick with Intel or go for AMD? As for my Graphics card I'm pretty lost as to what I should go for. I don't really have a limit to what I can get, I just don't want to spend loads on something when a cheaper one will be as powerful and run games just as well.

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Admiral Huddy · 26 May 2016 at 15:35

Who much RAM do you have? What res are you playing at because in most cases the 290 should be fine.

pastymuncher · 26 May 2016 at 18:52

Nothing wrong with the cpu either. Skylake is a very small step in performance over Haswell and certainly not worth changing. There must be something else wrong with your system. Do you have the latest drivers etc?

james08 · 31 May 2016 at 16:27

I have 8GB (2x4GB). Playing it at any res seems to cause issues. I think when I first booted it up everything was automatically on the lowest.
I thought that my drivers were updated but it would appear not seeing as the start up screen for the game says I don't. Where would you recommend looking seeing as I must be getting something wrong!

pastymuncher · 31 May 2016 at 16:54

Latest drivers for the motherboard will be from whoever makes your board and you can get the latest gpu drivers from Nvidia.

JTrickle · 31 May 2016 at 17:02

That CPU/GPU should kill that game at anything under 4K or 144hz.

I think when I first booted it up everything was automatically on the lowest.

Is it defaulting to the onboard (on chip) Intel GPU?

Cern · 31 May 2016 at 17:21

JTrickle said:
That CPU/GPU should kill that game at anything under 4K or 144hz.

Is it defaulting to the onboard (on chip) Intel GPU?

How could it default to the onboard GPU when this outputs to a different set of connectors on the motherboard backplate?

Anyway, as others have said your system should be fine for this game. It's likely a drivers issue. Total War games are notorious (in my experience) for not being very well optimised at launch and taking a long time for things to improve via game patches and driver updates (often several months).

if you Google you'll see lots of people reporting problems with this game, even on high end systems.