Your machine? How does Civ4 run?

[axisworks]

I was wondering what speed machines some folks run Civ4 on. I have a laptop with a Centrino 2 ghz with 512 megs, and I've found using some of the larger maps slows the game down so much I feel like I'm back using a 286 to play Wolfenstein. I'm getting a RAM upgrade soon, however.

[The keeper]

a liquid cooled 64-bit Opteron 3200+, 1 GB ram, 256mb Radeon 9550.


Civ 4 runs fine for me

[Silver14]

Yeah but you live in 'Antarctica' and not Tennessee. I'm sure you can over clock your system with no problems.

I have a 3.06g 800bus 1g ram PC3200 256mb Radeon X800 and the game will slow down in the early modern era on standard maps on marathon speed. I think it has more of a problem with all of the units the AI has at this point more then anything. Hopefully the next patch will address the memory leaks. I’d like to upgrade my memory but am waiting for the next patch. Given all 4 of my mem slots are filled I’d have to remove memory to add memory.

[Quillan]

The last build of my machine was an Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice core), 1 gig of PC3200 (2x512 megs, dual channel), Audigy 2 and a 9800 Pro. With 1.52, I didn't get any significant slowdowns even in the end game, and I typically play on large/huge maps. The time the "end turn" calculations takes gets a lot longer, but I don't get the choppiness and general slowdown I used to under the earlier patches. I replaced my 9800 Pro with a 6800GS a couple of days ago (and unlocked it to a full 16 pipelines and 6 vertex shaders), but haven't played Civ 4 since. I don't expect the video card will make much difference; I really think the CPU and memory are the limiting factors in this game.

[phlucas]

Until recently I had a 2 GHz Athlon, with 1.5 GB RAM and GeForce 5600. Scrolling was slow, when zooming to the city screen I could count the frames, and the end video for a win on Huge could be measured in seconds per frame. Yet, the game never crashed.

Now I have a 2.4 GHz Dual Core Athlon, 2 GB Ram, GeForce 6800 Ultra. Turning on the grid lines takes only a few seconds, moving and zooming is fluent, and most (not all) videos play without problems.

[Adagio]

I have a P4 2.4 GHz, Geforce FX5900GT and 1 GB ram. For me the game runs great. There's no difference if I'm playing small map in 4000 BC or large map in 2050. I do get slowdowns ocasionally though, mostly it helps to alt-tab back to windows and back in again for it to go back to normal speed, and if that doesn't work then often it helps to just end the turn, and when it's my turn again it's back to normal
I've never tried a huge map though, and only played on large twice


Btw, this is with all settings on high, AA on 4, at 1024x768

[bahoo]

2.4g pentium, 1.5mb ram, gforce 6800 ultra.

The game runs fine until I get to the late game. Once I reach late game on even a standard map (large maps are terrible), the game bogs down big time. It seems to only bog down at certain times though.

- When I move huge stacks of units; This makes no sense whatsoever, because there really are no CPU calculations that need made. All I can figure is that for some reason the game decides it has to animate every single unit in the stack even though they all overlap.

- When I shuffle citizens around in the city screen; This one doesn't make much sense either. All I can guess is that everytime you move a guy it runs through a bazillion unneccesary algorithms like recalculating the best trade route partner for the city or some such. I can't believe that simply recalculating food, commerce, and shields produced would take much more than a few simple calculations by modern day computer standards.

The strangest thing is, is that the time you think you would slow the most, end of turn AI moves, the game hardly slows at all.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by bahoo
2.4g pentium, 1.5mb ram, gforce 6800 ultra.

How can you even get Windows running?

[Mistermook]

I have a 700 Mhz Dell with 256 RAM and a fairly new (but certainly not top of the line) video card that I can't remember the brand of or specs of currently. I'm sure it doesn't run as well as it does on everyone else's computers, but I've got several hundred dollars less invested in it too.

Basically I toss all the eye-candy for the most part on anything larger than a small map, and if I actually wanted to play on the "large numbers of civs" maps I'd probably end up sitting down with a book to read as well for between turns. On most maps up to Normal size though, it runs fine all the way through.

OTOH, I'm used to slow - I might be handwaving speed problems that would cause the rest of the world to knock their heads against the wall until bloody. CIV certainly runs better on my computer than the average FPS, or even The Sims 2.

[moustafa]

hey mistermook, you got it right buddy, it all depends on how tolerant you are of the 'problems'.

me? i am yet to play on more than a standard map, but i would be curious to play on a large/huge map. would be great fun, i believe, plus my pc will also get a workout.

tell me, are larger maps generally 'tougher' (regarding difficulty) than smaller maps? i would guess so...

[axisworks]

Yeah, mine tends to run really smoothly until I get a bit into modern age... then suddenly it's chunk city. Mind you, I am also running in 1680x1050 with all the details on high...

I have a Radeon 9700 video adapter.

[Rychro Anrise]

I have a 2 GHz Athlon Processor, 786 MB of RAM, and a Radeon 9250 (256 MB). Game runs quite fine on it with all the graphical frills on. The game also ran pretty well when I had a 1 GHz Athlon Processor and 512 MB of RAM instead, but not "as" well.

[Boppo]

I have a AMD 3700+ OC'd with 1Gb of RAM and a NVidia 7800GTX. I have no problems with the game since the patch came out.

[Calvin Vu]

I used to have problems with a 2.8+ Ghz Athlon, 1G of memory and a 128M graphic card (GeForce line) even with standard maps (using unpatched version).

After upgrading to a 256M graphic cards all problems seeed to have gone away. I just installed the1.52 patch recently and that probably made it work even better. I have never tried huge map yet

Previous problems included:
- program aborted
- all units and improvements turned blackish. That made all units looked like ninjas, cool !! Zooming all the way out and then back in made them look normal again.
- very slow responses and graphics by mid-game.

[bahoo]

Originally posted by Adagio





How can you even get Windows running?

Civ 4? I thought we were talking civ1...