Very slow UI on Nvidia 5700 Go and 5900 FX, anyone got these working?

[DemonFox]

I am having trouble running the game on the following computers:
Laptop
P4 3.06 GHz
NVidia 5700 Go
2GB of Ram
Conexant AMC Audio
OS: Windows XP SP2

Desktop
AMD 64 bit 3000+
NVidia 5900 FX
1 GB of RAM
Soundblaster Audigy
OS: Windows XP SP1 (sp2 is getting installed and i will try that tonight)

My desktop is worse than my laptop. Basically the game runs so slow that I can't play it. Every action seems to have a 5 second lag. Tried to play with my friend over the internet and couldn't do it . I have attached my DXdiag report for my laptop (don't have access to the other computer right now). Has anyone got the 5700 or 5900 to work? If so what drivers are you using? What sound card, etc? Any help would be great! I really want to play the game!

[evizaer]

I have the same graphics card as you (nVidia GeForce FX Go5700 128MB) and i am also experiencing UI slowdown. It takes the game about 1.5 seconds to respond to any of my actions (even mouseovers). As i play, this sometimes gets progressively worse. It can get so bad that i have to restart the game because it becomes unplayable. The game was also running very choppy earlier, but i installed Omega's nVidia graphics card drivers and saw some improvement, then i set the process priority on civ4 to realtime and the animations were better (but still not fluid). The response time of the UI was still about 1.5 seconds, though. This is all happening when i'm running the game on lowest possible graphics settings.

[Meister]

I have the same problem with a 5950 card. Framrates are unacceptable. Between 3 and 10 most of the time. Adding something in a buildqueue and the game freezes for 2-4 seconds. Same when trying to move a unit.

Seeing I have well above even the recommended config this is really annoying!

EDIT: Forgot to mention I have every possible setting on lowest. Done all the usuall "fixes" like updating drivers.

Also found out the game is leaking memory like crazy.
Something that should have been picked up during beta testing...


3,6GHz Intel CPU
1 Gig 533Mhz DDR2 RAM
Nvidia FX 5950

[evizaer]

I've gotten the game to run playably well. The only thing i can complain about: there's a still a 1.5ish second delay between pressing a button on the numpad and when the unit actually moves.

Here's what i did:
1. Downloaded and installed Omega Drivers for nVidia. Set them to "Performance" during the install.
2. Pasted the following into my civilizationIV.ini file OVER where the oldy [CONFIG] section was:

[CONFIG]

; Enable Trilinear Filtering for the Minimap
MinimapTrilinearFilter = 0

; Enable Tree Region Cutting
CutTrees = 1

; Enable Quick Slide Show Transitions
PopSlides = 0

; Random seed for map generation, or '0' for default
MapRandSeed = 0

; Random seed for game sync, or '0' for default
SyncRandSeed = 0

; Enable/disable background music
PlayMusic = 1

; Allow Screenshots. May affect performance on some video cards
AllowScreenShots = 0

; Set max frame rate clamp (0 means none)
SetMaxFrameRate = 0

; Set to 1 for dynamic animation paging
DynamicAnimPaging = 0

; Set to 1 for no in-game movies
NoMovies = 0

; Set to 1 for no python exception popups
HidePythonExceptions = 1

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 25

; Enable Audio
AudioEnable = 1

; Sync input to smooth interface (may run slower)
SyncInput = 1

; Force numlock always on while playing
ForceNumlock = 0

(the SyncInput =1 is actually something i did that fixed most UI lag in game. It's at worst a half second now.)
3. Turned Sound Card Acceleration off.
4. Turned the detailed city info off.

I then ran the game damn smoothe on minimum graphics settings and resolution. I was able to pop the res up to 1440 x 800 without problem. I still have the other graphics settings set to low, though, to kee the framerate reasonable when there are more units on the screen.

[DemonFox]

Geez, we shouldn't have to do stuff like that to get the game to run! I will try that would though and see if I can get it in a playable state. Thanks for posting the info!

[evizaer]

I agree. It's ridiculous. I don't know what firaxis was thinking when they put this game together. Hardware compatibility seems to abysmal, especially considering where the Civ franchise has come from.

[DemonFox]

evi,

do you have d3dx9_27.dll in your windows/system32 directory? Try renaming that to d3dx9_27.test and see if you get better performance... I did everything you suggested AND renamed the DLL and it seems to work okay now. I'm not sure if your suggestions or that plus the DLL thing though.

Fox