My game loads several minutes. Any workaround known?

[Handel]

I watch TV when I start or just load the game because it loads several minutes. Everything other is almost normal.
Any workaround known for this?

[marvinkosh]

Depending on your specification, a few minutes may be normal - there is a lot of disk activity when a map is being loaded or created. However, if you have a fairly fast machine you could expect to see that go down to half a minute.

As you would expect, the larger the map is, the more time is required for all the disk activity to finish.

[alva]

Buying a faster machine usually does the trick.


More info could help to see if your situation is as expected.

[Cambo67]

More RAM would help ;-)



Cambo

[Targonis]

If you have less than 512 megs of memory, that will cause this problem for many programs, not just Civ 4.

If you think about it, the creation of the world, and the AI are going to be fairly CPU(processor) intensive tasks. Depending on the speed of your system, you will find the game may seem a bit slow.

In general, an Athlon 64 or socket 754/939 Sempron will run the game a bit better than the "equivilant" Intel processors due to the integrated memory controller on the AMD processors, as well as some other reasons.

Athlon 64>Pentium 4>=Socket 754 or 939 Sempron>Celeron

Note that in some cases, a Sempron will beat out a Pentium 4, but it depends on the game/application. In rare cases you will see a Pentium 4 beating an Athlon 64 as well, but that's unusual when it comes to games.

Since hard drive access is a bit high while playing Civ 4, that will also impact performance, as well the amount of memory. 1 gig or more of system memory is recomended, with 512 megs being the effective minimum for decent performance under Windows XP.

[Handel]

I presume P 2.4 with 1 GB RAM and GF 6600 is fast enough.
The problem is not in the map generation. The map is generated and everything is ok in 10, maybe 15 sek. Then the game says "done" and the music starts... and then starts the great waiting too... from this moment.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Handel
The problem is not in the map generation. The map is generated and everything is ok in 10, maybe 15 sek. Then the game says "done" and the music starts... and then starts the great waiting too... from this moment.

I have the same problem the game loads at acceptable speed, but then it says done and the great waiting starts. That's definately a bug, when it says done then it should be done and not busy for several minutes.

-Martin

[Cambo67]

Hmm. Possibly that is where the game is actually loading the graphics data in video memory.... though I'm a bit surprised you're having problems with a GF6600. What version drivers are you using? I use the NGO optimised 81.89 from www.ngohq.com - they work nicely on my Athlon XP 2800+, nForce 2, GF5700LE 128Mb, 1024Mb DDR400....



Cambo

[Stone-D]

I had this problem pretty bad, tracked it down to the damn intro slideshow. Its still there, but not as bad - plus, no more loading time crashes.

You need to rename the .mp3 file from the intro to .mp_ or something else. I don't recall the exact filename as I'm at work.

"In the beginning..." yada yada yada.

[Handel]

Originally posted by Stone-D
I had this problem pretty bad, tracked it down to the damn intro slideshow. Its still there, but not as bad - plus, no more loading time crashes.

You need to rename the .mp3 file from the intro to .mp_ or something else. I don't recall the exact filename as I'm at work.

"In the beginning..." yada yada yada.

Can you check the exact name please?


Edit: I found the file; it may help in the very beginning, but it is not played when a save game is loaded and I didn't find any change when renamed it