Stuttery or unplayable?

[Acid Reign]

Howdy,

my specs are as follows:-


3 Ghz Pentium 4 (with HyperThreading)
256 MB DDR RAM
GeForceFX 5200

The problem here is the RAM. I'm betting that if I try to run Civ IV with these specs that it's going to stutter, or be very sluggish. Anyone running with specs like these and can tell me your experiences would be greatly apprechiated.

[evizaer]

I have very similar specs except i have 1GB of rAM and a GeForce FX Go5700. The game stutters a lot if i play on a map larger than "standard" size.

with 256MB of RAM, the game almost isn't worth buying.

[Acid Reign]

Okay, if you're running with a Gig of RAM and have issues, trying it with 256 would just be stupid.

Thanks for the help.

[Ramsses]

When I play the worldmap it's stuttering here a bit and loading takes up to 4 minutes (I have 512 MB RAM, a AMD Athlon-64 3000+ and a GeForce FX Go 5700), but isn't there a way to speed it up?

[eggdisk]

For me also it is unplayably slow, the scrolling is really jerky and there are delays whenever you do anything. Also screens like the tech tree go at less than 1 fps.

My system
GeForce FX 5600 (edit: that is 128mb)
p4 2.66
1gb RAM

On the lowest graphics settings it is exactly the same slowness.

[Ramsses]

And the whole map is dark (like it is night)?

This non-optimized code just sucks big time. Wished they took another month or so to optimize is before shipping.

[eggdisk]

It looks fine for me, like all the advisors show up properly and stuff.

But everything goes at about 5 fps on average.

I find it laughable that a game which has nothing going on goes slow. It is unacceptable. For me they have killed Civilization.

Luckily I can exchange it for something else. Gonna wait a bit to see if there is a patch first though!

[Veikko Nieminen]

Anyone else noted that on default the game run as "Below Average" priority.

I moved it to above average and i feel it's going little better.

Crashes still tho and the activity gets bigger.

6800gt; amd64 3700+; 1gb RAM; integrated ac97

I have tried 5 different drivers.

I have disabled all audio devices. It's just broken.

[Ramsses]

I have GameXP installed and always run my games on High Priority (or do you mean some option in the game itself?).

[eggdisk]

Yeah I noticed that "below average" as well, forgot to mention it.

I tried changing it but once I went back into Civ4 it went too slow, it basically stopped responding.

You can force it to start in "Normal" by doing this in cmd prompt:

start "civ4" /D"f:\games\civ4" /Normal Civilization4.exe

I just tried this but once it loaded the game it forced into below normal anyway.

[eggdisk]

He means the task priority on Windows Task Manager, on processes.

[Ramsses]

Or you take some time to download an install the free version of GameXP .

[snepp]

The game does run on normal priority. As with many games, when it is not the active application, its process priority is reduced. You can verify this by starting the game in windowed mode, open the task manager (set to always on top), and switch focus to the game.

[Veikko Nieminen]

oh, silly oh me

[eggdisk]

I didn't realise that either, thanks.

Just want to clarify to anyone else who read this, all this to do with the task priority has no relevance to the slowness I and others are getting.