Poll: Crashing During Mid/Late Game

[Drachasor]

Problem: Some people experience slow-downs and inevitable crashes in their mid to late games on some map sizes. Please only vote if this is the problem you are having.

I'm trying to look for patterns in the systems having this problem. It seems like a poll is the way to go.

I didn't have room for the people that don't crash. If you don't have problems (and if you do) please post your system specs as well as the largest map size you have played to completion in this thread. Thanks.

-Drachasor

PS. I made this because I have seem some potential patterns in the types of systems having this problem. I want to see if it is just coincidence or not.

[Shogun Gunner]

wow. that is some list of choices.

[Drachasor]

Well, 3 variables have seemed potentially significant as far as I have seen, so I wanted to cover them all.

[Shogun Gunner]

no VRAM variable? I think that would potentially contribute to any potential problems as well.

I have a GeForce 256 megs of VRAM, over 1 GIG of RAM, I'm crashing on really huge, complex maps (lots of civs), but that was on v1.00 I haven't tried since going to v1.09

AMD Athlon 3400+
1.5 gig RAM
nVidia Geforce 6800 GT - 256 RAM
fast, mostly empty hard drive

Edit: Added system specs

[Boris Godunov]

Never had a crash with the game yet

Pentium D 3.0 MHz
1 gig RAM
GeForce 6800 (256MB)

[Drachasor]

I'd do all that, but I was capped at 24 poll options. So 24 there are. If there is a noticeable pattern in the above poll, then I'll make another that covers other variables.

-Drachasor

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Never had a crash with the game yet

Pentium D 3.0 MHz
1 gig RAM
GeForce 6800 (256MB)

What's the biggest size map that you've played on?*

-Drachasor

*I just edited my original post so that hopefully everyone from now on will include that info as well. : )

[John-SJ]

I've been crashing a lot on standard (haven't tried larger) maps (GeForce and 512 Mb) until yesterday. I disabled videos in my config file and things are now smooth again.

I noticed that things would get really flaky after an ingame video ran, so I did some checking. Right after loading the game I was using about 500MB of ram (Alt-TAB out and look at peak usage in task manager) and things would run smoothly indefinitely. But after playing a movie my peak usage went to over 1Gb, and the current usage never went down either. In one case I was over 1.5GB just for playing movies.

It seems obvious that Firaxis has some rather gaping memory management issues left with this game, people with huge RAM don't see it maybe, but the problem is still there.

edit: (after reading updated OP)
To be more thorough, I have a 2.5Ghz Dell with 512 Mb main ram and a GeForce 420MX card with 64Mb of VRAM. I have played only Standard maps to completion and have had significant performance and crashing problems. I have not played smaller maps past mid-game, but even with videos running I experienced only minimal slow downs and no crashes.

[SCarton]

I have crashed once on the 18civ Earth map, the first time I ran the game, and have not on any map since then.

P4 3.0 GHz (800 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
1 GB RAM
Seagate 80 GB SATA HD (2.23 GB free, uh oh )
ATI X800 Pro (AGP version, 256 MB)

[Mandla]

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ processor
1GB RAM
250GB hard disk (Fast & 90% empty)
256MB GeForce 7800 GTX

I've played the game to completion on large maps with no problem and once I got to around 1800 on a Huge map with no crashes. My current (but now abandoned) game is on Huge and it's late game (late 2oth century) and it's crashing roughly every couple of turns.

[ScreamingCube]

Athlon, 2 gigs
512 RAM
geforce 4 mx, 64 mb of video memory

Performance-wise, the game runs fine, might get a little slow during the very end of large size games. The crash-to-desktops seem to happen in any size map, but more likely in larger sizes. Dont seem to happen at all before 1800, but I have quite a few games where I've saved and been unable to reload them without a CTD. So Ive had to give up on a lot of games. This is really frustrating, letting this make it into a final release is infuriating.

[Drachasor]

Hmm, so far it looks like the main factor is how much memory one has. I know that the later in the game you get the more graphical information is getting stored (since saves are about a meg on large maps it the state of the game info is trivial). Units increase, but so do roads, improvements, and cities.*

For me, in one large game, I had 1 gig of info filled in my virtual memory and almost all of my 768 megs of ram used. Outside of the game there's usually about 250 megs in virtual memory (which I have set to 1.5 gigs of total space) and 60-80 (depending) megs of ram used at a time. It always gets a bit slower to respond before it crashes. Of course it gets slightly slower and slower from the beginning to the end, starting off very responsive. Definitely related to how much of the map is uncovered.

On standard maps games I basically never crash.

-Drachasor

*I tried resizing all of the texture files in the game so they were 1/4th the size (in megs) they normally are. Inexplicably the amount of ram my system used on large maps didn't change, and the virtual memory usage only changed very slightly. The game was slightly more responsive, but it still crashed.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Drachasor


What's the biggest size map that you've played on?*

-Drachasor

*I just edited my original post so that hopefully everyone from now on will include that info as well. : )

Huge map, 18 civs, Pangea.

[hounddoglgs]

Glad to see this poll, as I'm having this problem myself. But you can't effectively measure this problem if you don't give an option to vote that they don't have problems with crashes.

[Kuciwalker]

Where's "ATI card, more than 1gb RAM, no crashes"?