Ok, thanks I will accept the prize for having the longest title in a post.
Now to my point. I play Rome and Vae Victis on my laptop which has a very underpowered graphics card, but a pretty good monitor. Up until recently, playing Rome was a great chore because my framerate was waaaay low, even if I lowered my resolution substantially. So I figured it must be all those fancy shaders moving stuff about on the screen.
I figured the great culprit to be the sea waves, which look funky but make the game go sloooooow. So I did the following. I edited the water.fx file in the gfx/FX directory and replaced:
VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VertexShader_Water();
PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShader_Water();
with
//VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VertexShader_Water();
//PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShader_Water();
i.e. I commented the lines out.
The game now runs great, fast and lean even though I get an ugly white background where the lovely ocean used to be. I thought I would post this here, in case anyone wants to improve their Rome experience on old hardware. If someone knows how to program these and offers a solution to replace the water with a plain non-animated variant, that would be the icing on the cake; as it stands though I am pretty happy I can play this on my laptop.
Oh, and before I forget, also disable the trees from the in-game menu options. That speeds things up considerably as well...
Now to my point. I play Rome and Vae Victis on my laptop which has a very underpowered graphics card, but a pretty good monitor. Up until recently, playing Rome was a great chore because my framerate was waaaay low, even if I lowered my resolution substantially. So I figured it must be all those fancy shaders moving stuff about on the screen.
I figured the great culprit to be the sea waves, which look funky but make the game go sloooooow. So I did the following. I edited the water.fx file in the gfx/FX directory and replaced:
VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VertexShader_Water();
PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShader_Water();
with
//VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VertexShader_Water();
//PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShader_Water();
i.e. I commented the lines out.
The game now runs great, fast and lean even though I get an ugly white background where the lovely ocean used to be. I thought I would post this here, in case anyone wants to improve their Rome experience on old hardware. If someone knows how to program these and offers a solution to replace the water with a plain non-animated variant, that would be the icing on the cake; as it stands though I am pretty happy I can play this on my laptop.
Oh, and before I forget, also disable the trees from the in-game menu options. That speeds things up considerably as well...