Tips to Improve Performance?

[minispace]

Does anyone have any advice on how to get M & B Warband to run more smoothly?

My frame rate is very good at the start of every battle, but it slows to a crawl when my army actually clashes with the enemy. I've tried running in a lower resolution, disabling corpses and rag-dolls, reducing the size of battles, and setting other graphics options to their lowest setting.

My specs:
WinXP SP 3
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz
4GB DDR2 1066 RAM
GeForce GTS 250 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 Video Card

Is there anything I can do to improve performance? Let me know if a quad core processor or new video card would help--I'm looking for an excuse to upgrade!

[Adorno]

My specs are a bit lower than yours:

WinXP SP3
Core2Duo E6600 2.4 ghz.
3.5 GB ram at 667 mhz.
Geforce 250 GTS

and yet I play with battle size 190 and most graphic settings on high,
and the game runs fine.
I have antialiasing off, resolution 1680x1050, shadow quality on low. 40 corpses, 5 ragdolls, HDR low. The rest is maxed out.

What is your battle size, and do you have a billion programs running in the background

[minispace]

I was running into this problem even at the lowest battle size--30 or 40, and I usually have very little else running in the background.

I found out what was causing the stutter. I turned off Warband's blood effects and the game went back to running smoothly. I can even max out all the other settings and it still runs way better than before.

I've found similar reports at the M&B TaleWorlds forums, so if anyone else is having this problem, disabling blood is an easy fix. And with no more slide show, I'm having even more fun fighting!