Problems with TOW2

[dividebyzero]

Just purchased last night and spend 3 hours downloading. Installed this morning and applied the latest complete patch.

Game is unbelievably slow-like watching a slide show-when it doesn't lock up completely.

I'm running Vista 64 , SP2, Athlon 5000+, 8 gig ram, Radeon 4890X2 1 meg DDR5

[Schrullenhaft]

I don't have a specific answer for you on the bad performance; just some suggestions on what to possibly try.

Are you using the lastet driver for your Radeon ? If so you MAY want to downgrade the driver to Catalyst 9.7. Some TOW1 users had a problem with the 9.8 Catalyst and by downgrading to the 9.7's they went away. However this problem involved screen corruption in the 3D portion of the screen rather than performance issues.

You may want to disable Crossfire mode to see if you get better performance running on a single GPU. However most Crossfire/SLI issues are lockups, screen corruption or other issues rather than performance issues.

Double-check your settings in the Catalyst Control Center for the 3D settings. You may want to reduce some of the anti-aliasing settings or anisotropic filtering settings to see if they make much of a difference.

While your 4890X2 is powerful enough to probably run the game at "all settings maxed", there is a possibility that some of the DirectX graphics calls that TOW2 utilizes are not fully optimized by ATI/AMD. Future Catalyst drivers might address this (if they don't accidentally break something); though I don't know if there is an actual problem that can be addressed by updated video drivers.

One other thing to check is to make sure that you don't have too many utilities and programs loaded up while trying to play TOW2. While you have 8Gb of RAM, your CPU can still be "distracted" by other programs running in the background. Minimizing these interruptions involves trying to load as few utilities, etc. as possible. Even with multi-core CPUs Windows doesn't utilize other cores as effectively as most would desire.