Game nice, but...

[Hydro]

After overcoming significant reservations I was convinced to try CIV4 by the reviews of Vel and Yin. And, I liked what I found, much to my surprise. The look and feel was right, and as Vel said there are interesting choices (unlike CivIII).

Now my interested has cooled to dull embers. The reason? The game is chronically unstable and I’ve only been able to get one game to the end before a fatal crash or the game simply…stopping. I’ve installed the 1.52, checked my drivers at the Dell web site, and have found no hardware compatibility problems. I have to say that I’m disappointed that my system that (slightly) exceeds the recommended specifications can’t handle Civ4, and can’t believe these types of issues didn’t come up in beta testing. What was Firaxis thinking?

Oh, well. I guess I’ll go back home to SMAX. At least in 1999 Firaxis designed stable games.

Hydro

[Urban Ranger]

Do you come here just to rant or do you actually want help?

You have been around long enough to know that Polytubbies don't treat ranters kindly.

Seeing that you have a Dell, it's normally impossible to find out what it uses for graphics. Unless, of course, you had opened the box and put in your on dedicated graphics card.

[Alex]

yeah, we can help you if you tell us what kind of graphic card you have.

[Hydro]

Perhaps a little rant, but more a plea for help since I do like the game and have recommended it to friends. The various threads here are useful for tracking down potential hardware and software problems, and I think I've seen most of them. The patch did help a lot, but not enough to make mid and late game playable.

What is frustrating is that my out-of-the-box Dell, which is about as standard a computer and reasonable quality as you can get, seems to have so many difficulties. After all, Gforce 5200 video is OK but not great, my dram is OK, software is up-to-date, and processor speed is above the game's recommended level. After checking drivers, what's left?

**sigh**

Hydro

[Alex]

I also have a Geforce 5200 and I was struggling with bad performance in mid and late game, and this was playing standard maps. Besides installing the newest drivers (81.98, but now I'm running the 82.12 beta drivers found in Guru3d and I think there is a small boost in performance), one thing that really helped was to use RivaTuner to tweak pixel and vertex shaders - I changed them from "no override" to "force 1.1" and things got better.

Of course, my graphics are low, low res textures and antialiasing disabled in the game. Oh, and desktop set to 16 bit colors.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Hydro
What is frustrating is that my out-of-the-box Dell, which is about as standard a computer and reasonable quality as you can get, seems to have so many difficulties. After all, Gforce 5200 video is OK but not great, my dram is OK, software is up-to-date, and processor speed is above the game's recommended level. After checking drivers, what's left?

1. Turn off all useless processes and startup programs
2. What Alex said
3. You can add more RAM
4. Make a bigger page file

[Hydro]

Thanks for all of your patience and helpful suggestions. I’ll see if they work, and will dig around to see if I’ve missed anything. I’ll also keep tabs on the Civ4 Help to see if new tips come up.

Hydro