Why is it so slow?!?

[interwurm]

Ok, so I am playing a large map. It's 180x87. By the mid 1800s it was taking a good minute for each turn. Not to mention that whenever I play, no matter what size, the game does not zoom out well. As in *choppy*.

My computer *should* be able to handle this, and anything else on the market right now.

AMD 64 X2 4400+
XFX Geforce 7800 GTX
4GB OCR low latency ram

The game is running from a raid0 hd, but it's a little fragmented. (a lot fragmented really). I don't think that's the problem, but I'll defrag it tonight.

I checked out the process in task manager, and it was using around 1.4gb ram.

I also tried running the program on only one processor, and setting the priority to real-time. That seemed to help... but only a little. I would NOT reccomend setting the priority unless running a multiprocessor system. Good way to freeze your os.

[OnboardG1]

I have this problem too

Athlon 64 3700+
GeForce 6800GT 256MB
2GB PC3200

I can run BF2 on high settings on every map yet this is choppy as hell

[Capsa]

Re Slow game . Sorry no help here but to share the misery . I am using a dual pentium 3.4ghz processor
with nVidia G force 6610 amd 1GB of Ram . Symptoms exactly the same .I am on very large map and now at 1910AD . Everything is so slow as to be not playable.
Your posts have saved me wasting money on further large amounts of ram. I the real problem is map size . It is the first game I have tried on a very large map.
Hopefully the problem can be fixed by a further patch .

Capsa

[Capsa]

Sorry me again . I have now read almost all of the rest of the "help" posts. This thread is called
"SLOW" It is really identical to all the other threads listed particularly the one that says - something something smell of poo ............ smell of poo . It does . I get all the other symptoms just not so many crashes.
Lets face it is the game , not our computers , not our
video cards - just not fit for the purpose coding.
Having waited so many years since Civ 2 -
(Civ 3 was poo ) This is very disappointing indeed.

I think we should deluge Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
with reviews.

Capsa

[Raion]

Time yourself taking a turn, and it would more like 15 minutes perhaps. The computer also has to do the same thing, and not for one player but for several players.

Get a life!

[ETF]

But something isn't right it hangs constantly.........I also have a very quick machine. Even moving across the map as you scroll its very slow.
Disappointing.......

[interwurm]

Originally posted by Raion
Time yourself taking a turn, and it would more like 15 minutes perhaps. The computer also has to do the same thing, and not for one player but for several players.

Get a life!

Yes, but I can't perform 2,372,969,431 operations per second. Can you?

[interwurm]

Also, sometimes it slows way down on starting diplomacy (leader head is choppy) and whenever I aquire a city, it freezes a bit, and whenever I trade world maps, it freezes for a good amount of time. 15 seconds? It's really ridiculous.

[Orky]

Well, I've only played Normal map games on my 1GHz/512MiB machine, and that has convinced me not to even try bigger maps on it.

During my turn, the program will cycle trough my active units, but switching from one to the other takes several seconds, which is annoying, because it happens a lot each turn.

Once I end my turn, it also takes several seconds to start the next turn, which doesn't surprise or annoy me at all.

Also, scrolling the map is pretty slow, and zooming out, I get about 0.1fps, so I just don't use that feature ;-)

Yes, I get big slowdowns when I trade maps as well. It would be helpful if the game shows a progress bar, and estimates the time left, so I know I can go take a leak, or something.

I appreciate that there are CPU-intensive tasks in the game, but I'd really like the active unit switching to be sped up, and the map trading to be accompanied by a progress bar.

[Capsa]

Yes it does look as though it is the size of the map that causes all the problems . I am now quite happily playing on "large" and so far so good . Not built up much of an empire yet though, will see what happens.

I sincerely hope the problem gets fixed though as it means the real earth scenario can not be played.

PS thanks Interwurm for your very suitable numerical reply - is it really that many ?

[swat-spas2]

Trading maps and subsequently seeing the map causes a big slowdown. However, generally after one turn of dissension in my computer, it returns to status quo. This is also true in the first couple of turns of a new game or the first turn after a reload. Leaderheads are a bigger slowdown, but do not give me the black terrain glitch anymore, that happens somewhat randomly, but not so often. I believe its actually the game crashing now (but somehow not), since when it does happen, the game slows way the hell down. I've been able to play large or standard maps without much beyond a slow load time into the 20th century, or played several hours consecutively without CTD. Occasionally a game will crash/crawl on that first turn after a reload, however rebooting the PC seems to work better than deleting the cache when this happens. Not ideal. It's slow because its poorly managing memory by the look of it. I have a huge v-mem allocation and tweaked the game settings like crazy, and it runs much smoother and faster, but loads alot slower. I can live with that for now, but the next patch had better actually attack these issues instead of merely giving us some new options to play with in the ini.

one minor note, technically the human brain performs more operations still than any computer ever made to date (~1000000000000000), but most of them are "useless" things like breathing and sensory data. The process of sight alone has more "operations" involved than almost any PC around could do in a second, and the retina does it almost instantly. We don't seem to be able to compete on computation though.

[tai4ji2x]

Originally posted by interwurm


Yes, but I can't perform 2,372,969,431 operations per second. Can you?

exactly - raion, please be a little more civil. "get a life" only makes YOU look bad

[interwurm]

Hehe, yes I know the brain is infinitely more advanced than even MY computer. The way I got the operations per second (and I hope this is correct) is I took my processor speed, 2.21 GHz and multiplied it by 1024*1024*1024 or 2^30. Since it's a dual core, and I have it running at real-time priority on one core, I figured that would be fairly accurate.

[interwurm]

One more bit, I can't imagine why it takes so long to run each turn. I mean, what does it have to do? Determining the outcome of combat should be *really* easy. I mean, how long does it take to generate two random numbers, apply modifiers, and compare the results. It shouldn't take a huge amount of time to calculate borders either. I mean, civ4 is based on squares. Squares! It's not like the game has to calculate distances from cities or anything.

Also, firaxis may scoff at this, but I can't imagine that the AI is all that complex. If it was, they wouldn't have to make it cheat to be competetive. I mean, it gets a discount to upgrading troops, no matter what difficulty you play on.

As far as the whole zooming out thing... I really wonder what that is all about, because I have played a lot of games on my computer, and I haven't had any kind of problems like that before. In DOOM 3 when there are lots and lots of explosions nearby, sometimes it will have a noticeable jerkiness to it... but nothing like civ4 zoomed out.

I don't know. I can't imagine that the reason civ4 is so slow is anything other than graphical. Is the game really all that more complex than civ 2 or civ 3? So much more complex that it should tax top of the line computers of today?

I really just wanted to know how to speed it up. Longer load times really don't bother me either, so if you could share some tips swat-spas that would be awesome. I have 4gb ram, and a 6,111 MB paging file that is on a separate drive from the game. Same drive as windows, but different partition.

[Raion]

Try 16-bit color depth. It speeds it up quite a bit and uses so far about 40% less Virtual Memory, and the game looks the same!