quick performance Question?

[gorland]

Hi

I notice the scrolling is kind of slow on my xp machine..is this normal..i have 512mb of ram..amd 2800+cpu and a ATI 9200SE video card...by the way couldn't really afford to add another 512mb of ram this month. i'm retired but i ordered another 256mb of DDR ram....bringing it to 768mb will this help?

Tom

[Gaal Dornik]

I dont think more RAM will help. You graphic card is too slow. SE usually stands for "slow edition" :S Try lowering video options and try again.

[Willem]

Yes, your video card is a bit old for the game. Though adding more RAM might help a bit. If it really bothers you, maybe you should think about updating your card.

[Gaal Dornik]

Also try this tip from the sticky thread, which came with the patch.

In addition, a new config file (ini) option called 'MemorySaver' has been added for further memory reduction, at the cost of alt-tabbing support. If you set MemorySaver=1 in the config file, you can lower your system memory usage by 70% of video memory. So if you have a 128MB video card, you can save an additional ~90MB of system memory. MemorySaver defaults to off, and is not officially recommended since it doesn't handle alt-tabbing and other cases of graphics device loss at this time. However, we recognize that some users may want to experiment with it.

not only it saves memory, but somehow it fixed lag for me, which came when playing Civ4 for a longer period of time (memory leak i think). Also the game does not longer crashes on reload(for me). ALT-TAB will not work anymore however.

[Willem]

I wouldn't recommend that myself, it's known to be unstable. I had some serious glitches happening when I was running it. It doesn't really help your problem anyway, since the issue is clearly your video card. Just upgrade that and you'll see an improvement.