

Disabling this option may improve performance. Water Reflections - Enabling this option will generate reflections of game objects in the water when using the High or Very High shader settings.High and Very High provide the most realistic shadows but require capable hardware and will likely reduce performance. On or Low will provide simple shadows under most units. Shadow Quality - Depending on your system capabilities and Shader Quality setting, you will have anywhere between two and four settings available for Shadow Quality.Depending on your specific hardware, the Very High setting may provide better performance than the High setting. High and Very High produce the most realistic results, but can decrease performance. Medium increases quality but may reduce performance. The low setting provides the best performance on most systems but at the lowest rendering quality. The possible settings are Low, Medium, High, and Very High, though not all of these will be available on some systems. Lower settings will provide increased performance. Shader Quality - Higher settings for this option will provide more realistic lighting effects, improved water appearance, and overall greater detail.Setting this option to Off will provide the best performance. Depending on your graphics card, however, enabling this may cause a decrease in performance. Anti-alias Quality - Setting this option to Low or High will reduce the jaggy appearance around the edges of objects.Disabling this option, however, may increase performance. VSync - Enabling this option reduces visual "tearing" which can often be visible when scrolling.Bit Depth - Choosing 32 for bit depth will give you improved color fidelity and allow all available graphics settings, but can reduce performance, especially on slower video cards.Windowed Mode - Checking this option allows you play the game in a window, but can result in reduced performance.Whether this affects the performance on your system is most affected by the speed of your graphics card and your shader and shadow settings. Screen Resolution - Choosing lower screen resolutions can often result in better performance.

You can adjust these to find the right balance for your system. Some of these options will increase performance on lower settings, but will provide improved visuals or audio on higher settings. The options screen within the game allows you to customize your experience. There are a variety of anti-virus and anti-spyware programs that can assist you in detecting and removing these problems. In addition to compromising the security of your system, spyware and viruses may also use your system resources, causing other applications to run more slowly than they could otherwise. These applications compete for the same system resources the game requires to run, so shutting them down may allow the game to run more smoothly. You should consider shutting down any applications you are not actively using while running the game. Upgrading your CPU is sometimes possible as well, and if possible this will improve your performance. This may increase performance, allow more advanced effects, or both. Upgrading your video card is often possible as well. If you have only 256 megabytes of memory, adding more memory is often possible and is most likely to give you a noticeable performance improvement. You can contact your system manufacturer for assistance with this. If you wish to do so, upgrading your hardware is possible on many systems. Many components affect the performance of your hardware, but the most critical are your processor (CPU), memory (RAM), and graphics card.

Here are some tips for improving performance. Performance in Age of Empires 3 is affected by both your computer's hardware and various settings you can control within the game.
