Specs for huge battles?

[Cyndro]

Hi there. What components does Warband stress the most when having gigantic battles? CPU? Ram? VRam? Also I don't need telling M&B isn't the most demanding game, I know that. I just need to take this into consideration because Warband and Bannerlord are absolute priority for me. I want to push as many soldiers as utterly possible while still maintaining a good framerate.  So please, discuss.

 

[homicuda]

GPU VRam usage depends on your in-game settings. But it still very low for all modern videocards. Launched 200 vs 200 custom battles to check CPU and Ram usage. It used only 700 mb of Ram and 50-70% on my pentium 4(20-35 fps).
But if you are going to buy something like i-5 2*** and higher/ amd FX 6*** and higher with Geforce 760/770 or with Radeon R9 270+ then you can put as much units as engine theoretically can make.
For example my main PC (i-5 4460k, 16 gb ddr3, geforce gtx 960) feels perfect with any in-game settings and any numbers of units.
In my opinion you should concentrate on CPU + GPU because Ram is very easy addable.

 

[Cyndro]

Ah, well that's useful information to know. The PC I'm building will probably have a Skylake i5 paired with 8GBs of DDR4 memory and a GTX 960 or 970. This should be overkill for anything unmodded. But how many troops could this push on the Battle sizer? Would higher speed ram benefit? (Say DDR4 2133mhz vs DDR4 3333mhz). You said there was an engine limit. Are you referring to the default 150sp/200mp battlesize? Or simply a max amount of troops on the Battlesizer before a guaranteed crash?

 

[Courtney]

I read somewhere that Warband is more dependent on CPU speed when there are a lot of soldiers on the field. However, it doesn't utilize multi-cores at all or very little. If that's true, it means that a single-core CPU at a higher clock speed will perform better in WB than a dual-core at a lower speed, assuming everything else is the same. I assume Bannerlord will address that issue.

 

[homicuda]

Ah, well that's useful information to know. The PC I'm building will probably have a Skylake i5 paired with 8GBs of DDR4 memory and a GTX 960 or 970. This should be overkill for anything unmodded. But how many troops could this push on the Battle sizer? Would higher speed ram benefit? (Say DDR4 2133mhz vs DDR4 3333mhz). You said there was an engine limit. Are you referring to the default 150sp/200mp battlesize? Or simply a max amount of troops on the Battlesizer before a guaranteed crash?

There are a lot of mods with increased battlesizer. I meaned guaranteed crash. M&B can't hold even the power of my i5. The engine is really to old and too weak. In one mod(Invasion Bosses, u can't find it here on TW) my system was loaded near 30% CPU and near 2 GB Ram but mod was laging as a ****. It was quite impossible even on a global map (Framerate was something lke 15-20 there). So your PC will be quite good for M&B . I can say even more - it will very good for the most part of games for 2-3 years