Civ 4 getting slow? Help?

Biohazard

Biohazard

Biohazard

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29 Aug 2003
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Hey guys, need to get this sorted as it be ******* up my karma.

Playing Civ 4, its normally fine up until the point where I reveal the whole map - then it grinds to a halt (not quite but you get my drift) and can take a good couple of minutes to process a turn (note, I only play on massive map otherwise whats the fun)

Specs

2.66 @ 2.88 P4 533 (144fsb?)
512Mb PC3200
100Gb ATA 133
Leadtek Geforce 3 64Mb

My question is, which is the weakest link? Personally I doubt its the AGP, with the amount the HDD activity light is blinking I am thinking up the ram to a gig? failing that get a small rapid SCSI for it?

I just want to have the game play smooth when it comes to stealth bombers and nukes!

advice?

:)


oh and a side note, does anyone have a release date on the expansion pack?
 
I get slowdown on my 2.5Ghz Opteron // 2Gb Ram // x1800XT // 250Gb Hitachi SATA HDD.

I'd say upgrading to a gig would benefit hugely.
 
play on smaller maps or upgrade i reckon. you're gonna get slow down in the late game due to the amount of info needing to be processed, especially on huge maps, and so if it is taking ages to process a turn then that's why. the question is does it happen on smaller maps at that stage of the game?

nin9a
 
I'd rather upgrade than play little games to be honest, yeah it is the largest map and I tend to go for large land mass so by the end there is some 75 cities - I hate small maps! :(

What do you think would bring the best benefits for Civ (ram upgrade is already planned);

HT processor
or
SCSI I/O (I have a 10Gb 10K drive only need card)
 
Upgrading your date storage wont help. The processing operations that slow down the game when you end a turn are all performed in RAM/CPU cache so a faster HDD system wont help much if at all during this.

I personally dont mind the slow down during the late game, as I use it to think through strategies, plot and scheme ect ect. :cool:
I have however turned off "Show enemy moves" but this wont greatly decrease the time needed for each turn to be processed.
 
There's very little point going SCSI, as if you are having to access the HD frequently, you are screwed anyway.

My recommendation is to check your peak commit charge in taskmanager, if it exceeds 512meg RAM then you will definitely benefit from more memory. Personally I would add a 1gig stick of PC3200, and overclock your cpu a bit further.

Depending what chipset you have, you may also be able to run the memory asyncronous from the CPU. On my P4 system I use a 3:4 FSB:RAM ratio so that the FSB is at 150 and the RAM at 200 (PC3200).
 
I'll have a look in bios tonight although I'm not holding my breath don't think 845i is that advanced lol. I'm sure I can get it touching 3Ghz its never complained to me once after months of 2.88 but to do so I really need better cooling and an abit mobo (soft menu mucho missed)... all in the pipeline.

Yeah its already above that commit charge wise I have been trying to watch what its doing! I know I need 1Gb. I'm suprised that no one recommends SCSI would help loading times and data fetching?!? :confused:


PlatinumFX - lol I have my master plan normally from 1200AD onwards ;)
 
Try this it may help a little

Open the civ 4 .ini file found in my docs/my games/ civ 4

Scroll down to "allow some memory savings" and set memsaver=1

PS. you need the patch for the option to be there.
 
Biohazard said:
I'll have a look in bios tonight although I'm not holding my breath don't think 845i is that advanced lol. I'm sure I can get it touching 3Ghz its never complained to me once after months of 2.88 but to do so I really need better cooling and an abit mobo (soft menu mucho missed)... all in the pipeline.

Yeah its already above that commit charge wise I have been trying to watch what its doing! I know I need 1Gb. I'm suprised that no one recommends SCSI would help loading times and data fetching?!? :confused:
Click to expand...

My motherboard is only i845E chipset too. I think the option is called "DRAM H/W Strap" or something like that, basically you set it to "Low" and that allows you to set FSB:RAM ratio to 3:4.

Trust me, if your peak commit charge is exceeding physical memory than by far the biggest improvement you can make is to add more memory. Yes, getting SCSI would be better than nothing, but it would still be a waste of money because the improvement would be negligle compared to that from getting more memory. It'd be like, I don't know, say you've got a water pipe that's leaking. You could wrap a really expensive silk cloth round it to reduce the leakage somewhat, and still have a problem, or you could get the pipe properly repaired/replaced.

Loading times etc do benefit from improved HD performance, but they only happen pretty rarely. If you are short on RAM you will be getting far more disk access than you should be, that's the crux of the problem.

In the meantime you might like to free more system memory by closing down ALL background applications, i.e. shutdown unnecessary services using services.msc, remove unneccesarry apps from startup tab of msconfig, and turn off your browser, mail client, music player, IRC/ICQ/MSN/AIM, antivirus, firewall etc etc - basically make sure you have nothing in taskbar or systray except civ4.
 
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memory is a given, SCSI is coming after that as last time I used it opposed to IDE the performance increase was noticable. I close as much as I can in task manager

cheers for the advice
 
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