Analyzing Civilization IV Performance

[ulyanov]

1) Pentium IV 2.8Ghz HT, 1GB Dual Channel DDR400

2) Ti4200 with 128MB

3) 1280 * 1024

4) Poor - CTD, Restarts, Laggy Map, loooooooooooooong delays with hard-disk thrashing, occasional white boxes in place of resources and smoke(?)

Was running an nvidia 61 series driver, just updated to 81.85 and it got worse. Very bad lag, even get weird map display of the Terrain, the sea and nothing for minutes at a time, just for moving the screen around a bit. Not so many crashes, but still had a couple...


5) Haven't looked yet

6) Large only.

[Akaoz]

1) AMD 64 3500+ 2.21GHz, 1GB RAM

2) x800 PCI-Express, 256MB

3) 1280 * 1024

4) Good performance overall, but I get CTDs in the late game.

5) No.

6) Large.

[Lafferty]

1) AMD 64 4000+ 2GB DDR RAM

2) Some ATI 850XT or PE (forgot)

3) 1600x1200 NEC Multisync 2080 UX+

4) Performance alltogether is okay. Normally i still have to see a game where i need to adjust settings. Annoying lags occur in the military advisor though and the first time is zoom out into glove mode. (all high)

5) no

6) HUGE and all others as well

[Venger]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Venger, I was thinking the highest Athlon MPs went was 2800+. Are you running an overclocked system, or did AMD slip something past me when I wasn't looking?

I run mine slightly hot at 2.2 rather than 2.13... though the system recognizes them as MP 2800+

Venger

[larsenex]

Specs

I have..

Athlon 3400 (2.2gig)
1 gig Ram PC3200
Gforce 6800GT w/256
Creative speakers
Apple 20.6" Cinema display!! WIDESCREEN 1680x1050
Audigy2 Soudcard
WinXP Home w/ SP 1&2
I play game at highest graphic lvls and it Plays and runs Smooth and great! Fast load times and no hangs whatsoever.

[Adagio]

P4 2.4 GHz
1 GB ram PC2700
Nvidia FX5900XT
WinXP

I play the game with the highest settings at 1024x768 and it runs great (with the expection of the wonder movies... or are they ment to be that slow?), with only some lag a few times
I haven't tried huge maps yet, only standard. No slowdown at the end of the game

[walterwalker]

Windows 2000 SP4 fully patched

1. AMD 3500+ ("Newcastle") o/c to 2.3GHz. 1GB PC3200

2. Sapphire X700 Pro

3. 1600*1200

4 & 5. The game played fine, no crash, no delays, but I've just had a few hours. However I run duals screens with system monitors running on the 2nd screen and the CPU load is always at 100%.

I've changed display setting from 1600*1200 with details at high to 1024*768 with details at low and the CPU load remained at 100%.

Also note that CPU temp on the system got close to 55C with a heatsink (Zalman 7700Cu) that is much more efficient than the factory standard.

[Imminence]

Here we go:

BIOS Date: 06/11/03 (newest available to download)
BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v6.0
BIOS ID: 06/11/2003-SiS646
OEM Sign-On: ASUS P4S533 ACPI BIOS Revision 1010 (MoBo)
Chipset: SiS 646 rev 0
Superio: Unknown
OS: WinXP SP2
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 1800 Mhz MAX: 2400 Mhz
BIOS ROM In Socket: Yes
BIOS ROM Size: 256K
Memory Installed: 1024 MB

Swapdisk size: 2.500 MB min and max

GeF 4200 Ti 128 MB; 4xAGP; 256 MB aperture size
SB Audigy Player with newest available driver.

Highest resolution to play Civ 4: 1024x768; I did not dare to test different ones.

Grafics were tested with all options (low, med and high ql) and different drivers. Finally I get the best result with nVidia 61.77; no difference to Omega drivers. With the newest nVidia-driver 81.85 it was unplayable.

I play only huge maps with epic setting.

The game runs about 30 minutes now and then it crashes to desktop or to reboot.

The 30 minutes it runs, everything is ok. So in my feeling the system, they recommend, is ok.

About 40 gaming hours yet since thursday.
Since then I defragged C-drive 2 times; installed/uninstalled CIV 4 5 times.

Note: My system might not be state of the art, but until now I could run anything with all options set to "on" without any problem. So in my eyes all the arguments, that I am to blame for my problems with CIV 4 are just rubbish.

[ml_4da3]

1) Athlon 64 3500+ with 1.7 GB RAM (upgraded for civ 4)

2) Nvidia 6600 GT PCI-express

3) I have TFT so I only play at 1280x1024. No problems with FPS.

4) Good performance fps-wise. AI moves can sometimes take a little time, but never so long that you get disturbed by it.

5) Lower settings does not improve FPS or AI speed for me significantly.

6) I want to play as huge as possible. When I had 1 GB ram earlier I could not play on bigger maps than huge late in the game. After I upgraded to 1.7GB I can easily finish a huge game and play a out-of-speg gigantic map until late game.

However, my problem now consits only of this; When I am playing on late game on my gigantic 40x25 maps I cannot save my game after a certain point. The latest working save is ca 1.4 MB large. After this point when the game tries to save it CTDs and the savefile is only 2kb big. It seemes that the program crashes at some point during creation of the savegame file due to the big/extreme game I am running.

[trickey]

1-Intel Celeron 1.1 Ghz, 512 MB of Ram
2-Geforce 5200fx
3-1024x768
4-Surprisingly great performance, very minimal lag. Wonder movies are sometimes choppy, sometimes very smooth. I wonder what makes the difference.
5-I found a small difference going from high to medium graphics. I've never tried low.
6-Standard maps, and I'm afraid I won't ever be able to go bigger on this machine.

[Mace]

1) Intel P4 1.8 ghz @ 2.1 ghz, 512 MB ram
2) GeForce3 Ti200 64 mb ram
3) 1024x768
4) the latest vid drivers made a BIG difference. The game is quite playable. A little jumpy late game on big maps at times. I recommend at least 128 mb vid and 1 gig ram and 2 ghz cpu for this game.
5) I run low graphics, looks great to me.
6) Haven't tried terra map or huge map. They would probably be slower on my rig.

[Arrian]

1) What kind of processor do you have (including speed), and how much memory? (For those who don't know, this can be found by going to the Control Panel and selecting System.)

1.72 ghz processor speed. I'm not sure of the chip type (can check when I get home, I guess) because a friend built it for me. 512 MB RAM (? again, have to check)

2) What graphics card are you using? (This can be found by going to the control panel, selecting Display, going to the Settings tab, clicking Advanced, and clicking the Adapter tab.)

Nvidia GeForce 5500

3) What is the highest resolution you've played at successfully, and have you tried higher resolutions but had problems?

Whatever the default is, I haven't messed w/it.

4) What kind of performance are you getting from your system?

It's ok. It's not exactly greased lightning, but it's quite playable. Scrolling out to the "globe" view is painful (I always regret it).

5) Have you felt a need to lower image quality in order to improve performance, and if so, what were your results?

No.

Edit: 6) What map sizes and types do you play, and if you do, does your performance differ significantly depending on map size and type?

I play on standard map size. I've played a terra map, which I understand to be a little bigger? I tried starting the Earth (4000bc) scenario and it took quite a while to load up. I didn't actually play it. I'm a little scared of the bigger maps.

-Arrian

[Nikolai]

1) Pentium M 1.7 GHz, 512 MB RAM
2) Mobility Radeon 9700 SE 128 MB
3) Have only tried the default resolution.
4) Small maps and smaller gives me no problems. Standard maps nearly kills the computer, but it works like a sharm as soon as I've been playing for a little while. Bigger maps kills the computer. Loading save games either crashes the computer during load or I get colourful stripes across the screen or black screen forcing me to reboot the computer.
5) I use medium graphics quality to assure fewest problems possible, but I think my computer would manage best quality too.
6) Standard and Small maps.

[Qwijibo]

Athlon 64 3700+ @2.4 GHz.
1 GB RAM.
GeForce 6600 AGP 256 MB.

Not sure about resolution, but I don't have any performance issues. On occasion it will hang up for a moment, but it's only crashed a couple times. Good performance on every map size.

[Raion]

I have a 1.8gHz Celeron Processor, Windows 2K Professional with 512mB of memory, and a FX5200 Geforce card with 128mB of memory and 78.01 drivers as of now, only need 77.77 drivers or so actually since nothing else is newer for my graphics card.

At first the game play slowed to a crawl, when the first Diplomacy screen came up, so after finding out to go out to the Desktop (Alt-Tab) I waited a minute or so and returned to the game, the game started working fine like before. Only went up to around 800A.D. or so, but I don't play the game for hours at a time. Only up to maybe 3 hours real-time clock before quitting the game.

Since then and trying different things and different maps, I have changed the name of my computer, un-installed the game and re-installed it 3 times, and have started maybe up to three or four games giving the game a try. Since the last time I have installed the game on my DVD-Rom drive using the CD's I have now gone up to using 'single units' playing in 1280 x 960 graphics an Island Map Standard game with 6 Civs.

Now, I have not had any slowdowns in the game yet, and everything is working better than ever before.
In the previous game I was up to 1150 A.D. on a small Island map with 5 Civs total. That game has been proceeding well after an initial slowdown with the first Diplomacy screen comes up, but not after, and I Alt-Tab (ed) out to Desktop.

So I play for shorter periods, and have had no problems when doing so, and am now using even higher graphics but with no Antialiasing or still set to '0' in the game as it installed with the default.

However, I think the game needs a patch, so to avoid problems with the game (and it has never crashed but did a great slowdown) I play for shorter periods of time, and await the patch to fix whatever is wrong with the game.

This still means that the video portion of the beginning and end movies still have the sound cutting in and out, but not for the Wonders I have built or getting to flaky yet with the sound but a little flaky.

Yes I ended a game with 3 turns after I realized that I was only playing myself in the game at first, and after getting all the goody huts, the game gave me a Conquest Victory so I got to see the ending movie, and the replay of the game. I was shocked then I realized that the other players in the game was actually the 'AI' instead of my name which made me wonder.

My monitor has a fault or needs a cleaning because text in the middle of the screen is fuzzy, and at the edged cyrstal clear as it was when bought this Sony 19" monitor. So, the focus is out a little in the middle of the screen and gets better when going out towards the edges. Yes, I need to find out what is wrong with it, and need to get it fixed, but then again the switch went out of my 17" monitor so when it does not go into sleep mode or turn itself off, the monitor would work perfectly for reading all the text, so someday, I guess I will remove the backcase of the monitor and clean it up first before I take it in. Sometimes the 19" is better than at other times, so I have been degaussing it sometimes which may slightly help. It is not that old though, but probably has a cold-soldered joint somewhere and it showed up a year after I bought it.

So besides all of that, the game is working better than my computer equipment which now also needs another cleaning out of the dust and dirt, as well as that may help the monitors also, or else, I will have to live with it until I can get it fixed. I am hoping that by not touching anything inside the monitor and cleaning the circuit boards that I will not electrocute myself because monitors can be very dangerous with voltage still in them even if unplugged -- up to 50,000 volts that I do not need today or any day at any time.

However since re-installing the game, the game is working better than before, and since one can not low-level format a harddrive anymore, I wonder if the game must settle on the harddrive first a little before it starts playing better. That should not have to happen but with things made today as they are -- that may also be another possiblity, and I always like to think that there are possiblities.

Well, enough of Spock there at the end!