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Hi all
I’m new to this site, but a very seasoned Civ player, having played on all previous versions from v1.0 back in the good old DOS days when the prog fitted on a 1.44 floppy!!
Software: Civ Version 152, Save version 102, Build 1.5.2.1736 (42422) Date 22/12/05. Mod – none.
System Info: AMD Athlon 64 3200+, ASUS A8V Mobo, 1Gb RAM, ATI Radeon 9600XT AGP 256Mb Driver version 6.14.10.6483, 21” Eizo monitor running at 1280 x 1024, Windows XP32 SP2.
To start with, I had the Failed To Initialise Renderer issue, which appears to be a common problem. The detailed fix on http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support_ati.htm resolved this and I was able to start playing the game.
As I have what I regard as a fairly decent machine, and as Civ is only a turned-based game, I thought I’d give it whirl at 1280 x 1024 with everything else set to highest, including AA. No problem, all seemed to be well, opening vids were fine and the game graphics were lovely.
Then I started to hit problems. The Wonder videos stuttered and wouldn’t play properly. I wasn’t too concerned, as these are just eye candy really, so I just started hitting the OK button as soon as they appeared. Then the game starting crashing without warning, giving the following error:
"Your system has run out of video memory. Please try reducing your video settings... etc"
I don’t really think so, unless you’ve got a bad memory leak! Followed by:
"Runtime error! Program: Firaxis... Civ4.exe. This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information."
This is a bad thing! No application should ever show the user a message like this. No nice friendly “Please send an error report to Microsoft” dialogue here!
These crashes always happened when scrolling quickly across other Civ’s territory. I assume your own territory is cached in some way, as it never happened when doing the same thing over my own area.
The official support site give no help on this problem. I then spent the next day or so exploring Apolyton’s fantastic forum and tried all kinds of red herring solutions, like increasing the size of the swap file, (which is now 2Gb), etc.
Then I found a solution which made sense. Some shrewd person (I must find the thread and credit him/her +++ for the original post, but the Search facility is down!) said to forget all these other “solutions”, the problem lies with the in-game anti-aliasing, and to use the AA function within Catalyst. And never, ever switch the in-game AA back on. So I set the in-game AA option to off. Then I cleared the cache to get rid of the old settings. On trying the game, it seemed to be more crash resistant, but the Wonder videos still didn’t work and the graphics looked pretty grotty.
Then I downloaded the latest version of Catalyst and installed it and applied settings as below. (Sorry, can't figure out how to post a screenshot here!) Control Panel>Display>Advanced>ATI 3D. Open GL radio button, slider set one click to the right of centre. Save & exit out.
Result – the game now works perfectly. Intro vids are fine, Wonder movies play well and after 10-15 hours of gameplay, not one CTD.
It did take me a while to have the confidence to get out of the habit of saving every turn!
Conclusions
Great game, a big improvement over all previous versions, especially with many of the “sillyosities” removed.
BUT… haven’t Firaxis ever heard of Beta testing? It’s pretty obvious from the lack of any real support ‘meat’ on the CivIV web site, that they are relying on the user for quality control and on the fan forums to come up with solutions. (Rushed out for the Xmas sales???) Which is pretty poor show really. My system can hardly be described as unusual. My video card is a very popular mid-price one, which should be supported properly without a user having to experimentally fiddle around with critical system settings to get it to work. It clearly hasn’t been tested enough by a broad enough base of users with a sufficiently wide range of hardware, to expose the issues that are now being encountered wholesale.
http://www.2kgames.com/index.php?p=support is a joke!
I hope this post might help other Radeon users to go straight to the correct solution and reduce the amount of time needed to get this great game working properly.
Best regards & happy CIVing!
Strutty
I’m new to this site, but a very seasoned Civ player, having played on all previous versions from v1.0 back in the good old DOS days when the prog fitted on a 1.44 floppy!!
Software: Civ Version 152, Save version 102, Build 1.5.2.1736 (42422) Date 22/12/05. Mod – none.
System Info: AMD Athlon 64 3200+, ASUS A8V Mobo, 1Gb RAM, ATI Radeon 9600XT AGP 256Mb Driver version 6.14.10.6483, 21” Eizo monitor running at 1280 x 1024, Windows XP32 SP2.
To start with, I had the Failed To Initialise Renderer issue, which appears to be a common problem. The detailed fix on http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support_ati.htm resolved this and I was able to start playing the game.
As I have what I regard as a fairly decent machine, and as Civ is only a turned-based game, I thought I’d give it whirl at 1280 x 1024 with everything else set to highest, including AA. No problem, all seemed to be well, opening vids were fine and the game graphics were lovely.
Then I started to hit problems. The Wonder videos stuttered and wouldn’t play properly. I wasn’t too concerned, as these are just eye candy really, so I just started hitting the OK button as soon as they appeared. Then the game starting crashing without warning, giving the following error:
"Your system has run out of video memory. Please try reducing your video settings... etc"
I don’t really think so, unless you’ve got a bad memory leak! Followed by:
"Runtime error! Program: Firaxis... Civ4.exe. This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information."
This is a bad thing! No application should ever show the user a message like this. No nice friendly “Please send an error report to Microsoft” dialogue here!
These crashes always happened when scrolling quickly across other Civ’s territory. I assume your own territory is cached in some way, as it never happened when doing the same thing over my own area.
The official support site give no help on this problem. I then spent the next day or so exploring Apolyton’s fantastic forum and tried all kinds of red herring solutions, like increasing the size of the swap file, (which is now 2Gb), etc.
Then I found a solution which made sense. Some shrewd person (I must find the thread and credit him/her +++ for the original post, but the Search facility is down!) said to forget all these other “solutions”, the problem lies with the in-game anti-aliasing, and to use the AA function within Catalyst. And never, ever switch the in-game AA back on. So I set the in-game AA option to off. Then I cleared the cache to get rid of the old settings. On trying the game, it seemed to be more crash resistant, but the Wonder videos still didn’t work and the graphics looked pretty grotty.
Then I downloaded the latest version of Catalyst and installed it and applied settings as below. (Sorry, can't figure out how to post a screenshot here!) Control Panel>Display>Advanced>ATI 3D. Open GL radio button, slider set one click to the right of centre. Save & exit out.
Result – the game now works perfectly. Intro vids are fine, Wonder movies play well and after 10-15 hours of gameplay, not one CTD.
It did take me a while to have the confidence to get out of the habit of saving every turn!Conclusions
Great game, a big improvement over all previous versions, especially with many of the “sillyosities” removed.
BUT… haven’t Firaxis ever heard of Beta testing? It’s pretty obvious from the lack of any real support ‘meat’ on the CivIV web site, that they are relying on the user for quality control and on the fan forums to come up with solutions. (Rushed out for the Xmas sales???) Which is pretty poor show really. My system can hardly be described as unusual. My video card is a very popular mid-price one, which should be supported properly without a user having to experimentally fiddle around with critical system settings to get it to work. It clearly hasn’t been tested enough by a broad enough base of users with a sufficiently wide range of hardware, to expose the issues that are now being encountered wholesale.
http://www.2kgames.com/index.php?p=support is a joke!
I hope this post might help other Radeon users to go straight to the correct solution and reduce the amount of time needed to get this great game working properly.
Best regards & happy CIVing!
Strutty
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