Optimizing Performance?

[Finarfin]

Maybe I'm blind but I couldn't find anything here about tweaking the performance of Civ4. I'm running a 1.6GHz CPU with 512 MB RAM and, though the game runs, it's sluggish and the videos are choppy, completely pausing every couple of seconds. My video card is a GEForce4 with 64 MB RAM. Are there any particular in game tweaks or settings that should be used to get the most out of this game without completely degrading the visual presentation?

[seebs]

I dunno, but I get a certain amount of pausing from time to time too.

[Finarfin]

For me, even the zoom in and zoom out is jerky, as well as unit movement.

[Cambo67]

With a 64Mb graphics card, your machine is probably youing system RAM for some of the graphics textures (that AGP aperture thingy in the BIOS). Your graphics card is having to fetch this texture data over the AGP bus. Remember, it has to do this for _every_ frame it draws. Adds you to quite a lot of traffic. Lowering the detail level should help a bit.



Cambo

[Finarfin]

I decided to put my system up to 1 GM RAM and a 128 MB RAM Nvidia card. It made a nice improvement (except that I still can't play the movies without them being choppy and pausing every few seconds). However, there is something weird going on with loading saved games, even after a fresh boot. The saved games are choppy and have nowhere near the performance of a new game (or the same game before restarting the system). Is anyone else experiencing this?

[JamesFKirk]

Well... The same happens here. The game has moments when it goes well, but... They do not last very long and are not to be seen very often. Even though my configuration is:

Athlon 64 3500+
1 GB RAM
Gainward Powerpack (GeForce 6800 Ultra 256 MB RAM)

I think this isn't system related... The game goes sluggish the moment I start a map (haven't tried other than huge, but that shouldn't matter with my configuration), although it runs well on globe view and sometimes on max zoom. But on normal zoom it's unplayable most of the time. At the end of the game, after the summary of what happened (clicking exit to be specific) the game stops for a REALLY long time (lost patience after 20 minutes and rebooted). The engine itself allocates (on it's start!) about 500 MB of RAM, still, the game only uses 3-5 % of system resources - but still the whole computer performace almost dies when the game goes to the lowest performance level.

[Finarfin]

I definitely see similar behaviour. The globe view is fine and zooming far in seems fine. But trying to play at a medium zoom gets sluggish. Hopefully whatever patch they are working on will address performance. I'd had some success using a tip in one of the pinned topics that says to give Civilization4.exe Above Normal processor time. I just wish you could set the shortcut to the executable to do this instead of having to do it manually each time. I haven't tried any of the settings above Above Normal as I don't want to really mess up the rest of the system.