Possible Fixes for "Failed to Initialize Renderer" Startup Error

[74Stag]

I am also having the "Failed to Initialize Renderer" Problem. I have tried all the suggestions including the Pak file and using old and latest drivers but still no joy.

My card is not an ATI however, I have a Geforce3. I can't seem to find much info about this problem with regards to Nvidia cards.

Am I the only person having this problem with an Nvidia card?

[JohnUghrin]

Originally posted by 57%
Has the steps provided in the first post worked for anyone? I've tried and tried, and it does not work. I have the Radeon 9550.

None of it has worked for me. Same card.

My installation generally just won't run. (I get a civilization4.exe task...but no game.)

On the 5% of tries that do actually load, most of them totally put my computer into a coma. The screen dies, the computer becomes unresponsive, and I have to hard reboot.

I must say I'm very frustrated and disappointed in this release. I generally have avoided computer games and companies that have this totally ridiculous and unneccesary "download the patch" practice. This is the first time any of Sid's software has given me this kind of grief. This franchise was just about the only thing keeping me gaming on a PC.

[Targonis]

Here's a new one that I ran into. It's not the "Failed to Initialize" problem, but the sound driver on the laptop I have as a second machine over here was causing the game to drop to desktop while loading.

Debug log indicated that the problem was with the XML parsing, which made me thing it was a similar video driver problem. BUT, on tinkering, and reading messages online, it turned out that the sound driver was the source of the problem. By having sound playing(Media player playing an MP3 file) while loading Civ 4, I was able to get into the game, but then I had some other crash to desktop issues that I'll work on tomorrow.

So, it seems that sound may be just as big a source of these issues as the video is.

[planetfall]

Fix failed. I may need a new graphics card.

Is there a list of cards that work with C4 and cards that do not work with C4?

[Rhuarc]

I know everyone is doing this, but I just wanted to post up how I fixed this Render bug. All I did was update to the latest drivers. (5.11) It seems that these drivers from ati were released only yesterday. Once I updated the game started up and ran smoothly.

Also, on a different computer the game would run, but the wonder movies were stuttering badly. I switched over from the official ati drivers to the Omega drivers and this fixed the problem.

Just my 2 cents worth. Good Luck all!

[townecoa]

Can't work in any wise

My video card is ATI 9550 (128M, 128bit, 350MHz/500MHz).

system is WinXP SP2.

DirectX 9.0c

The driver of video card is Catalyst 5.11 Windows XP.

I have try the tool "PakBuild".

But game didn't work. Error is "Failed to Initialize Renderer".

I am beyond hope. Could you help me? Please.

Email: townecoa@hotmail.com

[meghanwithanh]

Originally posted by 74Stag
I am also having the "Failed to Initialize Renderer" Problem. I have tried all the suggestions including the Pak file and using old and latest drivers but still no joy.

My card is not an ATI however, I have a Geforce3. I can't seem to find much info about this problem with regards to Nvidia cards.

Am I the only person having this problem with an Nvidia card?

I have an Nvidia card too, and am (at least mildly) relieved to hear I'm not the only one having the renderer error. Mine's a Geforce MX4000.

I know I'm really late jumping on this bandwagon, as most posts on this thread are dated in October, but I'm wondering why there hasn't been any follow up. Did I miss something? Did a patch come out? Did people just give up? Please, someone tell us what's happening....

[Laze]

I have Saphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis.
Have tryed all the helpingstuff, but still not working!
Starting to get sick of trying...

[jdchambe]

Originally posted by meghanwithanh


I have an Nvidia card too, and am (at least mildly) relieved to hear I'm not the only one having the renderer error. Mine's a Geforce MX4000.

I know I'm really late jumping on this bandwagon, as most posts on this thread are dated in October, but I'm wondering why there hasn't been any follow up. Did I miss something? Did a patch come out? Did people just give up? Please, someone tell us what's happening....

there was a followup and a solution, which to my knowledge worked for everyone who was having the problem back in October. I don't recall which thread had the solution in it though. But the solution was to unpack the game's *.pak file and then rename to the *.pak file to something the game wouldn't recognize.

sorry. I don't remember enough about the details to say more than that.

[JohnUghrin]

Originally posted by Laze
I have Saphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis.
Have tryed all the helpingstuff, but still not working!
Starting to get sick of trying...

Someone somewhere said you download the patch as a separate file and install it. Have you tried that?

[hoosier31]

GeForce2 MX/MX 400 needed OLDER driver

I spent the last few days getting Civ IV to work on my Dell Dimension 4400 with has an GeForce2 MX/MX 400 64 GB card. I'll post all of the details below, but the part I want to note is that the lastest driver did NOT work for me. In fact, I had to use an OLDER driver in order to get Direct3D to work properly.

I had to use ForceWare version 78.01 to get things to work, which is ONLY available at this link (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html).

Details --------

System specs:

System: Dell Dimension 4400
Pentium 4 1.6 GHz
768 MB RAM

Video:
GeForce2 MX/MX 400 64 GB

I first upgraded Civ 4 to 1.52 and then grabbed the latest driver from nVidia's web site (ForceWare 81.98). When Civ4 wouldn't work, I used dxdiag to determine that this driver would not allow Direct3D to run.

I sent a query to nVidia technical support (which is hard to do, because they try to reroute to to the PC vendors), and I got the following response:

Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer Care.

Your graphics card has been discontinued and is not supported by the latest NVIDIA drivers. However, you can always download the latest driver that is supported by your card on the NVIDIA website. To update your drivers, please refer to the link:

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

From the Software Downloads page, you will see three boxes. On the first box, click on "Graphics Driver" -> from the second box, choose "Geforce and TNT2" -> finally, on the third box, choose the operating system you are using and then click on the "Go" button to proceed to the next page.

On the next page, click on the "Products Supported" link on the left side of the screen. Scroll down and click on the "Available Here" link to download the driver. To avoid download issues, if you are running any 3rd party download utilities, please disable them as they are known to occasionally cause errors with the downloads.

Regards,
NVIDIA Customer Care

HOWEVER, the link they provide does not take you to the older drivers. You must follow THIS link (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html) to get to the older drivers.

I worked backwards through the version numbers until 78.01, which was able to do Direct3D properly AND render all of the text in the game properly (one of the later drivers could do 3D but didn't display all of the text correctly).

I'm posting this mainly because I've seen many posts indicating that an nVidia GForce card with 64 GB RAM should work with the latest drivers, but this was definitely not the case for me.

Regards,
John

PS: Apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong place in the thread. I'm new to Apolyton, so tips on how to post effectively are appreciated.

[GraemeC]

Hey guys, so i dont know if it will work for anyone else but i have just fixed this problem for me (i have a radeon x1600xt with vista home premium). I have it for steam so your directory may be different, but what i did was this...

Browse to the install directory...
(C: > Games > Steam > steamapps > common > sid meier's civilization iv)

In there you will find a file named "_Civ4Config". Open that and scroll down to where it says...

"; Specify whether to play in fullscreen mode 0/1/ask
FullScreen = 1"

Change the = 1 to = 0, save the changes and start it back up.

Now it will be in windowed mode (which you can change in game), or if your like me and dont care, just press the maximize button and play it in 'full screen'

Hope that helps.

Graeme