Curiously low performance...

[St!gar]

Hi. I'll get straight to the point. I'm experiencing fairly low FPS in this game, which I find curious, seeing as my gaming rig can run the much more graphically intensive Medieval 2 -and Empire Total War games on the highest settings and resolution with very little slowdown, rarely dropping below 30 FPS in even the most insanely massive battles. In your average battle in XIII Century, however, the FPS usually rarely goes above 15 when there's a decent amount of action on-screen, and in one relatively large Custom Battle even went as low as 8 FPS - in other words, unplayable - something I have honestly never experienced in any game I have for as long as I've owned a computer, and that's not even an exaggeration. The FPS seems to drop in particular when there are units in hand-to-hand combat.

So I was wondering if this is a well-known issue with the game? In all the discussions I have read regarding the game on various message boards, I have so far not noticed anyone remarking on the FPS, which leaves me wondering precisely what the deal is. Is it my particular hardware, perhaps? Poor optimization? Is it one graphical feature in particular that tends to induce slowdowns that I should know about?

Just to get it clear; I love XIII Century: Blood of Europe - or, that is, I really want to love it. Because that's what it deserves. If only the Total War games payed that much attention to the gameplay in the battle sequences, we wouldn't be stuck with the mess we have now. Unfortunately, the dizzyingly low performance of this game is the one thing that has prevented me the most from enjoying it. Because of that, I have hardly played it since the day I bought it off Steam, months ago. And that's a shame. And such a waste.

My specs are:

Radeon HD 4870 (Latest driver.)

4.5 GHZ CPU

4GB RAM

Windows XP

Can't remember any more.

Anyways; could anyone kindly shed some light on this, if they have any answers? Any tips on how to improve performance? I have a rig that runs Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2 and Empire: Total War flawlessly on max settings, yet it seems to have met its match with this game, which, honestly, doesn't make sense.

Thanks in advance.