any other Radeon8500DV users?

[jeff3f]

I get system crashes whenever I attempt to "attack" a goodie village or found a religion. Obviously I don't get very far. I occasionally have gotten these crashes when loading the game but not too frequently.

Also get inconsistent movie stuttering with occasional minimization of the game (un-minimizing acts like a keypress, thereby skipping the movie!).

Needless to say, I haven't played this game at all as a result.

My video card is old, but is theoretically capable of running the game. I'm just wondering if anyone else out there with my type of card has been successful (8500DV as opposed to other, non-DV 8500 cards). Drivers are 5.10 cats, have not yet tried the Omegas because I'm guessing that those are optimized for the newer cards (not my old junk).

Other hardware are:
1.4GHz Athlon (Asus A7A266 mobo) with 512MB RAM
SB Live! 5.1 with recently re-installed, latest drivers
Maxtor PCI IDE adapter (extra HDD in system)

[Tyrole]

Dear god! There really is another soul out there who has one...


Yes, I too am running the old ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV. TV tuner still works great, but the game performance seems to be lacking...

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), we seem to be having different issues with the game. I don't crash at all, but I only get 5 frames per second while in game (which is most common for GeForce 5200 users). Since I don't crash, I haven't tried the Omega drivers yet, but it might be worth a shot for you to download them. With such a wide range of bugs and glitches in this game, a change as substantial as getting new graphics drivers could fix a lot of your problems. Of course, knowing Civ 4, it will cause several other problems too, but at least you have a chance at an improvement.

Good luck!

[jeff3f]

That was fast!

I forgot to post my OS--I'm using winXP pro with sp2.

Relatively clean/recent install.

Am running Norton AV in the background though. No other utilities though.

How about you? What OS are you running? Because maybe this means the drivers and game aren't at fault (it's something in my system).

If you're using the cat 5.10 drivers and an identical card and not crashing, then I want to see if I can fix my setup prior to fiddling with the drivers...

Thanks!

[jeff3f]

Things that failed:

I tried setting AGP from 4x to off (Smartgart)--this had a noticeable effect on the game (slowed it down) but it still had an identical crash.

Went from 5.10 to 5.6 cats (suggested in civfanatics forum); this didn't work.

Disabled other TSR programs (Norton). No joy.

[Suneo]

i've got an 8500DV, glad to see others too out there with one. My OS is WinXP Home. System crashed often when graphics were set to High detail, it became a little less often after setting them to Medium... I really don't want to go any lower. Most of my crashes are happening at the Diplomacy screen, like others. Hope ATI, or Firaxis fixes these nasty problems.

[jeff3f]

Suneo, what version drivers are you using? How much RAM?

Finally, what kind of performance do you see at medium? I would think the 8500DV was strictly a "low" setting card for this game, but I'm glad to hear otherwise...

[Tyrole]

I'm on Win XP Pro SP2 also. Running 5.10 catalyst.

Other than that, I'm sitting at 512 RAM, 2 Ghz Pentium 4, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (newest drivers), MSI motherboard (forgot the model).

I can run the game at all graphics settings, though high is a bit choppier than low and medium. My framerate problems are still a pretty serious issue, but I have yet to crash at all, having logged probably about 10 hours on the game so far.

[Suneo]

Running the latest drivers (5.10), 640mb ram, 1.4 ghz P4. I originally had it overclocked a little with RivaTuner, and originally thought that was the reason for the problem. I turned off the overclocking and it still crashed. Ran fine for me in high quality, infact, for me, it's running slightly slower at Medium quality, but there may be other factors causing that, i'm not too sure. The fact is though, that the game is running fine for me, but I want it to stay running.

[jeff3f]

It's strange that 3 people running the same video card can have such different experiences!

When using 5.10 cats, I get great (i.e. not sluggish and certainly not 5 or 10 fps) performance. At low and medium settings. But it crashes mercilessly a few minutes into the game when I do certain actions (found a religion or attack a goodie hut).

I rolled back to 4.12 cats based upon something I read in another thread; with these, I was able to play longer, but I had miserable performance (too sluggish to enjoy).

The most damning thing, Tyrole. is that you've only played the game for 10 hours. Most people with Civ4 working have played it until their hands fell off.

I hope that they fix these issues soon. If not, I may give up soon and shelve the game until after my next computer upgrade.

[Common Sensei]

Athlon XP 2000 (FIC AN11 Stealth Mobo and 1 GB of RAM)
Windows XP SP 2
Radeon 8500DV AIW (Latest Catalyst drivers)
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS

When I first got the game I was running Windows 2000. The game performance was kind of choppy (including Wonder movies). A week in I moved up to Windows XP and the game itself ran much, much more smoothly. However, I now get the problem fairly frequently of the game crashing hard to a black screen during the diplomacy screen.

I am about to update the sound card drivers now. We'll see if it helps any.