Warhammer Low End PC Guide

Post by Eladarand

* Before reading anything here i am going to tell you first hand that you will need at least 2g ram to enjoy this game. Warhammer and your operating system are memory hogs. After you run out of memory your game will stutter and freeze up making it unplayable. Ram is easily affordable (about 30 dollars on newegg for a 1g stick), even a hobo could afford ram so there is no excuses!

* September 5th we received an update via patcher for the preview weekend +. There are no new video options unfortunately... All you can basically do is view the options more in detail so don't expect any lower settings available. A huge let down!

I have had a lot of people request a guide for playing warhammer on a lower end system (minimum requirements). I run a 2.2 ghz amd rated at 3200+, 1.5g ram and a radeon x1650 pro 512 mb video card. I am able to run the game fairly smooth, however RvR with minimum is not going to happen, so please don't expect miracles.
When you get into a lot of action warhammer is going to take about 1.2g of ram memory and you have to also take into account your OS and other programs that need memory also. I am by no means a computer expert, but i found some thing threw research and trial and error that help. If you have any tips feel free to reply and i will add them, or just feel free to comment on anything i have listed.

How to:

1) This is not obvious to everyone, but the first thing you should do is defrag your hard drive. I will not go into step by steps, you can research how to do these simple tasks on google. After a defrag you will see better performance with everything you do, whether it is in-game or out.

2) Get rid of unnecessary programs in your task manager, you can research threw google to find out which ones you need and which ones you don't. This will free up memory thus making warhammer a little more tolerable!

3) I discovered this basically the last few hours of the preview weekend. You might think running full screen is best for performance, but for some reason it really isn't. Set your game for windowed mode, and set the resolution to match your desktop. It looks exactly the same but for some reason it runs so much more smooth and i wish i knew about this to begin with.

4) Settings for ati tools (and yes i recommend using this program). In case you have no idea you are using direct3d.

* Set both texture preference and mip map detail to performance (no brainer)

* Some say vertical sync is better for performance, some say it is not. I suggest trying always off and always on to see if you notice a difference in performance. For me it increased performance by having it always on.

* Enable both anisotropic filtering optimization and trilinear filtering optimization (this will increase your performance by about 15% when both are enabled and it even makes the graphics look better while maintaining good performance).

* Disable catalyst AI (this is mainly a tool for better computers and will slow down older systems even more).

* Geometry instancing is optional, but many recommend leaving it enabled. It will not really do much, but it will give your hardware better support.

* Under standard tweaks you will see force mip-map filter. This will boost your performance by making distance objects easier to render, however the graphics will look different. If you can get use to the change in graphics i recommend this setting.

5) The driver you choose for your video card is very important. For me the best choice is omega drivers, for some it is the official up to date drivers from ati / nvidia. I recommend trying both to see which you like more.

6) Set the 2 whole video options we actually get to high fps and self only. Please god lets hope there is more options for video by open beta.

7) You can choose to set your resolution to the lowest available, but for me it looks too blurry. I rather lose a few fps and have a clear looking game. All personal preference.

Thank you for reading, this is mainly information on ati systems but perhaps some of this info can help out the nvidia folks too. My gameplay was extremely choppy but after doing these steps i was able to play the game excluding features like RvR. If you want to do RvR you will have to buy a new computer or upgrade, no question about it. The coding is pretty rough in warhammer, people around you really eat up resources. Perhaps they will improve on this in the future, and you can always hope we will actually have video options by open beta.

Remember, trial and error! If i can do it you can also .