Life and Leisure. Tech and Toys.

The latest installment of Total War obviously looks gorgeous when you throw thousands of dollars of computer hardware at it, but what about those of us running on older rigs. Remember, this is a PC game so not every game is going to run as smoothly as they do on console systems. Which is why I have been converting to console games for some time now.

Problem

Out of the box when you run Empire Total War it does a look up of how much Video Card memory you have. On the box is also says the minimum-requirement in this department is 256mb. For those of you running 256mb Video Cards that do not support Shader Model 3 you will not be able to set your graphics higher than “Medium” in most of the individual graphics settings fields. For those running Video Cards higher than 256mb the setting “High” is available. For those who are running Video Cards that are higher than 452mb and support Shader Model 3 you will see “Ultra” available.

Solution

The way to override these limitations is to edit the gfx_video_memory file. This can be found at the location below:

Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire\scripts

Windows Vista

%appdata%\The Creative Assembly\Empire\scripts

The line in the file you’re looking for is this:

gfx_video_memory 0; # gfx_video_memory , Override available video memory (bytes) #

To unlock “Ultra” settings change it to this:

gfx_video_memory 536870912;

Disclaimer

1. Creative Assembly does not officially support this option, if you’re having video problems, or experience abnormally long load times, and you’ve set this option to a non-zero value, set it back to zero before proceeding
2. Don’t be tempted to set this value higher than your available video memory, doing so will cause longer loading times, and unpredictable behavior.

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