How to avoid crashes!!

[dipollet]

Like I said, How much money do I have to spend in order to play a $45 game? So now I need to spend another $200 (min) on a video card. Great. I smell conspiracy. They made the game so demanding because the RAM and video card industry needs a boost in sales.

[WolfEyes]

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the largest Geforce 4 MX card is either 64 or 128 Meg. I do know that a 512 Meg Geforce 4 MX does not exist, they were never made with that much vRam.

[eataTREE]

I have a gigabyte of RAM, but it's *cheap* Kingston Value RAM. I was getting crashes to desktop every few hours until I went into the BIOS and actually turned down the RAM speed -- running the DDR400 RAM as DDR333. Haven't crashed since. If your RAM is a "discount" brand, you might want to try doing the same -- the slight decrease in speed is more than made up for by the increased stability.

[Gavin Berchler]

Its all in the graphics card

Hi all,
I just wanted to put in my pennys worth, it may answer some questions.

I have a GEFORCE FX 5900 card, and early parts of the game are fine however later parts of the game will crash after every turn, I have a gig of ram and a 3000 processor.

I realised that it would lag and crash later in the game when there was a lot of switching between large parts of the map I scrolling from the top of north america to africa. When I prevented scrolling it wouldn't crash. The interesting thing was that after the crash and reload it would work fine, but on the second crash it would give me the ati error.

I though that it must be the graphics card. I know that the developers always have the spankiest latest cards so I forked out 129 and got a new 256 mb 6600 card with diectx 9 and sli. Guess what no crashes! EVER! Even when I tried to scroll quickly between parts of the map, it was still perfect!

When I put the old card back in then it went back to crashing, hence either by a sweet graphics card or wait for the patch. My advice is you are going to need an updated card sooner or later anyway might as well be now...

[Melloj]

Yeah im running into major problems in the end game, with a turn resolution taking over 2 minutes after I press end turn.

After I exited the game recently I had a warning message saying there wasnt enough virtual memory and the system was adding more.

I've changed my virtual memory to 1gig. We'll see if this helps.

I have a pretty tricked out laptop, but only 512 memory PC4200 DDR2.

I think there is a memory leak somewhere in the code that needs to be seriously looked at for any patch. As it stands the end game is near unplayable for me and that shouldnt be happening.

Another to-do item on the list guys, but gameplay wise its a great game!

[Willem]

Originally posted by Shadowlord
I've never needed more than 512 for ANY game or program, I don't see why I should go and buy more for just one game. Paying $90 for a game, and more if it turns out not to like my video card, would be ridiculous.

I guess that makes Civ 4 a trend setter. Get used to it, if people can stuff 2-4 gigs of RAM in their machines these days, the developers are going to start taking advantage of that.

And 512 is squat for RAM! IMO everyone should have at least 1 gig if they're running XP, everything just runs better. I did a test the other day and with just 2 Internet Explorer windows open I was using 300 meg. That doesn't leave a lot left over for other application, especially one that's as demanding as Civ is.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Shadowlord
It uses that much RAM? The minimum req is 256 MB and the recommended is 512.

Maybe it has objects which are never deallocated and which get saved in the saved games?

No the minimum is 256 only if you're running 2000. For XP it's 512.

[WolfEyes]

Which is one reason I much prefer Win2k over WinXP.

[Willem]

Originally posted by dipollet
Like I said, How much money do I have to spend in order to play a $45 game? So now I need to spend another $200 (min) on a video card. Great. I smell conspiracy. They made the game so demanding because the RAM and video card industry needs a boost in sales.

Yeah it sucks, but computer equipment becomes obsolete quickly these days. I'm guessing what, you bought that about 3 years ago? At any rate it's technology that's at least 3 years old, which is ancient in computer terms. Civ 4 is a brand new game, and may mean upgrading to more modern equipment to run it well.

And no, video cards are much cheaper these days, you can get one that will do the job for $100 or less.

[ChaotikVisions]

I'm playing fine on my P41.6ghz, 512mb of DDR PC2100 ram, and a GF2MX200(64mb). Admittedly I had to turn the graphical options down but thats to be expected. This is just from testing on the standard size though, i'm going to be trying epic/huge today once I finish my game. I don't expect any crashes though, slowdowns maybe but not crashes. I'll post back here on the results.

[MortVader]

Thanks for this information.
I myself got one gig ram. It will be interesting to see if I get any problems..

As someone said "this is not just a game; this is Civilization".. if it can help, and if I get in trouble, I plan to buy another gig, for the CIV.

[Taliseian]

System Specs:

Athlon 2600
ECS mobo (nForce 2 Ultra chipset)
1.5g DDR400 Dual Channel Ram
Raedon 9800XT 256mg AGP Video
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card
4g Fixed size Windows Swap File on Primary Drive/2nd Channel

All latest drivers and patches installed

So far, I've had zero crashes. The only issue I've had is late game scrolling when zoomed out to full planet view and stuttering sound in Wonder Movies.

I'll probably turn down some of the graphical goodness (not really needed anyway) and see if performance gets better. I find that I use the World view alot for fast movement around the map (espically for finding Barbarian units).


T

[Willem]

Originally posted by Taliseian
So far, I've had zero crashes. The only issue I've had is late game scrolling when zoomed out to full planet view and stuttering sound in Wonder Movies.

I've read that playing in windowed mode reduces the lag and movie stutter. You might want to try that.

[sidnitz]

Played most of the way through (past 1950 AD) 2 games so far, 1 on Large map and 1 on Huge. Crashed to Windows twice in the large map and once to desktop and Bluescreened once in the huge map. Big-time slow downs and dropped frames once I get past around 1900AD. Also, every single Wonder movie I've seen stutters horribly to the point where I just skip them. Every one of the crashes occurred while scrolling from one side of the map to the other towards the end game. I have been able to continue on from autosave after reboot thankfully.

Glad I'm not the only one having issues, seeing these posts semi-confirms for me that this seems to be memory management issue.

Here's the specs:

Abit IC7 MAXX3
Pentium 4 3 GHz HT
2x 512 MB PC3200
Asus GeForce FX5900 Ultra 256MB
2x80GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 150 in RAID 0
Generic onboard AC '97

Guess it's finally time to break down and build the Athlon 64 machine I've been putting off for the past year or so. My current gaming box is about three years old though, so I guess it's served me well enough to deserve retirement.

Anyone having issues with the NVidia 7800 GTX card?

[LordShiva]

I'm on a Pentium 3 1GHz, 512MB RAM, 32MB GeForce2 Go graphics card, and turning off wonder movies and setting graphics quality to low lets me play epic/huge games tolerably well. No crashes so far, the only sort-of-problem so far is that it takes so long to switch back and forth between the desktop and the game (and that's not a problem if I turn off my instant messenger client).