Hi guys,

I just upgraded my PC and decided to reinstall Stronghold 2, expecting to get an improvement in FPS over my previous system configuration.
Both computers had: Phenom 9950 black, 4GB 800MHz DDR2 dual-channel, 60GB Corsair Force SSD. The old machine had a 512MB 7900GTX, the new machine has a 1GB GTX560 Ti Gigabyte OC.
Considering the game came out in 2005 the system is overkill, yet I'm still getting lag at certain parts of the game.

I'm playing at 1920x1080, all settings to the maximum including Anti-aliasing (8x) which I don't expect to be an issue on the above specification, but as soon as I build a moderate size castle (the sort you'd expect to build on most maps) the FPS as displayed by FRAPS drops from 40 into the high 20's. At one point simply building a church dropped my FPS by 5, and as soon as I tell 100 archers to move somewhere it goes into the low-20s. This is only on mission 6? (the one with monks under siege by wolves), so I don't know what to expect once the maps get bigger.

I can play C&C3 at the same res with all settings max and 8xAA without the slightest hint of lag, it hits the 30fps limit regardless of what's going on.

I read about multi-core processors being a hindrance to Stronghold 2, is this true? If so my upgrade to an i5 2500k in a week or so should improve matters, but I'd like to make it more playable if possible.

Any advice or shared experience would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Andy

Problem solved simply by disabling real time shadows, everything else maxed out and not a flicker below 40fps all the way through.