How much difference does ram make?

[Bogdanovist]

Civ 4 on my machine really sluggish and has frequent mini freezes, long load times and in particular, opening a diplomatic dialogue takes a minute or more once I'm into the mid to late game on standard ish sized maps (though it's much quicker early on in a game, that seems weird to me?). It's pretty much unplayable once I've met a few other Civs and have their maps on any reasonable sized maps.

My system is

1.8 GHz P4 processor
Nvida 5200 128 M graphics card
256 M Ram
Dunno sound card, not great though
running XP with service pack 1

Obviously my Ram is pretty low for Civ 4, so my question is how much improvement am I likely to get by getting say the recommended Ram of 512M, or getting nice and comfy with 1024M Ram? I'm not sure whether to spend the cash or not. I'm reduced to playing on tiny maps to get reasonable performance at the moment, but if I buy the Ram will it help, or would I need to also upgrade the graphics card as well? I'd hate to spend my cash on heaps of Ram to not find a great deal of improvement.

Anyone with a system like mine but more ram wanna comment on how things run?

Oh btw I of course play on 'low' graphics detail setting.

[Timmer]

Ram makes a HUGE difference !

I had a limp 256 RAM just like you untill
saturday. Now I have a robust, potent 786 !

I* added a 512 card to the standard 256, and
my system handled combining them well.

And here's the breakdown :

On 256, I NEED the graphics turned to low,and,
on a large map the game still starts crawling
by the time you get to the industrial/modern ages,
as you uncover most of the map and more and
more units come into play. With crawling I mean :

- When you trade world maps, there's a long pause
before you can do anything else
- Whenever you create a unit that hasn't been
created before, there's a short pause.
- Time between turn anything from 1 to 4 minutes
- If AI initiates diplomacy, a pause of about 30s-
1 minute
- Moving units is sluggish

This is all with graphics on LOW.

With 786, NONE of these lags occur, even with
the graphics turned on HIGH. I have a 2-year-old
pentium IV

* What I mean is, I got a friend who actually knows
something about computers to do it for me

[Bionic-Badger]

I found even 512MB was pretty agonizing to work with. Windows uses about 200MB of RAM for itself, and uses the remaining bit of RAM for caching. The game itself also takes about 200MB of RAM, and swapping out all the DLLs and other junk to the pagefile is a big pain. Try hitting ALT-TAB and the swapping will take nearly forever, especially trying to get back into CIV 4, where it has to load everything back into memory again. I upgraded to 2GB of RAM for a noticable difference (it really isn't that expensive anymore).

It really is amazing that a game from the Civilization legacy would take up more resources than a game like DOOM 3.

[Bogdanovist]

Thanks for the comments, at least I know now my money should be well spent if I get some more RAM.

[Raion]

Read the other thread about the Nvidia card with a happy ending -- thread!

There is explained at the end to help improve your video card performance, and I think a patch is still needed for the game.

You will need more ram for XP though, as that takes too much memory for 256mB to play a game with.
Windows 2K takes much less so with 512mB the game was using as I seen -- 320mB of main memory, and Virtual Memory also.
Still I think a patch is needed or a newer computer supporting the new technology introduced in the last year or so.

(If you really want performance!)