Unplayable at mid-game.

[mgdpublic]

2.4ghz Pentium blah blah
512mg Ram
Radeon 9600 pRO

The game becomes unplayable as the game progresses even with lows across the board, AA turned off, and the res turned down to the point where I might as well being playing Pong.
This is fricking absurd. Yea, whatever, I need more fricking RAM but that didn't come with the game. This is just bad damn programming. Has anyone solved the lag issue for themselves?

[Civfreak1970]

I feel your pain but some Beta tester will soon come in here and tell you that its your fault! LOL

Civfreak1970

/nerf Beta Testers of Civ4

[James009]

Me Too

I have the same problem but sometimes the game will work well until it randomly crashes. Other times, on the same savegame, it will load forever and lag for something like five minutes and then work fine. I have a ATI Radeon 9600, 2.8 GHz processor, and 640 DDR RAM.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Civfreak1970
I feel your pain but some Beta tester will soon come in here and tell you that its your fault! LOL

Civfreak1970

/nerf Beta Testers of Civ4

Very constructive post, I'm guessing it really helped solve the problem.

[Willem]

Originally posted by mgdpublic
2.4ghz Pentium blah blah
512mg Ram
Radeon 9600 pRO

The game becomes unplayable as the game progresses even with lows across the board, AA turned off, and the res turned down to the point where I might as well being playing Pong.
This is fricking absurd. Yea, whatever, I need more fricking RAM but that didn't come with the game. This is just bad damn programming. Has anyone solved the lag issue for themselves?

There's been reports of a memory leak, try exiting the game and restarting. Apparently you might have to do this a few times. Getting more RAM will definately help. Personally I'd recommend everyone who runs XP should have at least 1 gig, and not just for Civ 4 but in general.

[mrs_c]

I have P4 3.06 with 1 GB of ram and have the same problem. Have also set WinXP to run in classic mode and shut down all background programs.

The game runs fine for about an hour. If a movie clip happens to run, the fonts become gibberish after that. But no matter what, after an hour of game time, it freezes and only a hard reboot will solve the problem.

I've noticed that terrain improvements seriously slow down my pc. Switching to a scout in unimproved territory immediately causes my pc to respond in normal fashion again. (rather than just barely moving when I move the mouse) The more an area becomes improved, the more sluggish game movements become.

There's a lot going on there... sparks/smoke from mines, fish jumping, etc. I would turn off animation if I knew how.

[Dzhel]

P4 3 ghz
2 gigs RAM
nvidia geforce 6600 gt

I get the same problem with the game slowing down the farther along the game gets. Improvements seem to slow things down as well. It's not horrible for me but it's enough that I don't like it.

The AI isn't doing anything when I'm scrolling around the map on my turn so it shouldn't be a CPU problem. And the graphics aren't that cutting edge that it should bog down like it does.

I'm guessing the game code isn't optimized very well.

[Spocko]

Somewhere someone posted an answer to this that seems to have helped me tremendously - the game flies at later stages of the game.

Set your minimum virtual memory and maximum virtual memory to be 2.5 times your RAM. I have 768mb (Radeon 9200 128mb) so I set both min and max virtual memory to be 1920mb and assigned it to my fastest hard drive.

Here's what I did (XP machine)
Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > System > Advanced tab > Performance Settings button > Advanced tab > Virtual Memory change button.

My system screams now using other applications too.

Good luck!

PS: I wish I could thank the Apolyton member that first posted this...

[Imran Siddiqui]

Interesting, Spocko. I'll try that .

[tanathos]

Just tried this. The game runs way better now! Instead of dodgy at the beginning and unplayable near the end, now it's perfect at the beginning and dodgy near the end