When Empire: Total War was release, many players encountered serious problems with the game and the performance was low - even on high-end systems. With patch 1 and 2 the developers tried to fix bugs, but in many cases the improvements made things even worse. In our test with 14 CPUs Empire: Total War used two CPU cores at most. Now Sega released a new update that integrates new units, finally introduces multithreading and is said to deliver a noticeable performance benefit. For more information see: Empire: Total War - Patch 3 with multithreading support.

Empire: Total War Patch 1.3.0: More Fps
Since Empire: Total War doesn't allow saving in combat we launch the extremely challenging navel battle "Mediterranean Sea” and record the framerate for 30 seconds as soon as all ships are visible on the screen. This procedure is repeated three times. From those results we take the average and compare the final values. As usual this is a worst-case scenario.

With patch 1.3.0 dual- and quad-core CPUs are really utilized and the performance is increased noticeably. The Core i7-920 gains about 60 percent more fps and the CQ2 Q6600 even 96 percent. AMD's Phenom II X4 940 BE, which wasn't really happy with Empire: Total War up to now, receives a massive benefit from the multithreading support and runs 99 percent faster. The older Athlon 64 X2 6400+ is also to double its performance just as the single-core Athlon 64 4000+ - it seems like those are the effects of the additional optimizations.

Empire: Total War Patch 1.3.0: Conclusion
In a nutshell: Due to multi-core support patch 1.3.0 is a must have in performance questions. And since it is applied via Steam you will get the update anyway.