technical difficulty

[jbp26]

lately i've been having a problem running civ4. it starts off fine, but within 20 minutes there is a noticable lag time. units move slower and theres a pause before a lot of events, like windows opening, combat, the units actually getting to their destination, etc. its not unplayable, but certainly is annoying. quitting to desktop doesn't help at all. restarting the computer gives me that 20 minute window of functionality.

im playing with warlords 2.08, though this happens when i play vanilla civ too (albeit modded versions).

its not a problem of demands on the hardware, as my computer is more than up to specs to play civ- pentium D 3.0ghz dual core, 4gb ram, nvidia 7800, infinite hard drive, etc. also i havent had this problem with other games.

anybody else have this problem?

[kiky]

Check for any program running at the time. It maybe your virus scanner or something like that?

Also dont forget to scan for virus and spywares. That may add load in the background.

In another thread someone reported slow Civ4 because upgrading graphics card driver. Try to re-install older driver may solve the problem.

[Dale]

infinite hard drive

Where did you get that? I've been looking for one for 3 months now.

One thing, turn off your anti-virus and see if this makes a difference. Some people have reported lags disappearing when turning off AV.

[jbp26]

virus scanner is off. i didnt change any video card drivers either, so it cant be that. maybe ill just uninstall and reinstall.

[snoopy369]

Definitely check your video drivers - consider downgrading a bit just to see what happens.

Also, check your temperatures particularly of your video card. Civ4 for whatever reason causes some significant overheats of video cards (probably because it renders so many units...) Definitely try turning down graphical options and see how that affects things.

Finally, a reinstall never hurts

[jbp26]

reinstall improved performance marginally, but the problem is still there. is there some kind of cache that the game uses and references during play? maybe this is overflowing?

[Willem]

Speaking of cache, how full is your hard drive? If there isn't very much room, applications are going to slow down considerably. Maybe it's time for a little drive-cleaning. De-fragging might help as well.

[Adagio]

Are you using WinXP or Vista?

[jbp26]

Originally posted by Willem
Speaking of cache, how full is your hard drive? If there isn't very much room, applications are going to slow down considerably. Maybe it's time for a little drive-cleaning. De-fragging might help as well.

i have infinite hard drive, space isnt really an issue. i defragged just for the heck of it.. nothing. i am running winxp.

i dusted out the inside of the computer too. nothings helping, actually it seems to be running a little worse.

civ4 withdrawl is terrible.

[jbp26]

i doubled the virtual memory (thank you, infinite hard drive) and the game runs much smoother- so i guess i can attritbute that slow down to HD wear and tear. however, theres still the problem of the hiccup in animation whenever a unit moves, which has me pretty convinced that that is the root of my problem.

the only thing i haven't tried is updating the video card driver. maybe someone can explain this to me a little better. i downloaded the newest driver from nvidia (i have a geforce 7600 GT btw) and tried to install it, however the autoinstall and windows driver update both said there was no hardware for me to update with this driver. i am pretty positive it is the right one, i downloaded the nvidia series 7 driver package. do i need to uninstall the old one first or something? im nervous to do this and screw up my system.

[snoopy369]

Your virtual memory FYI should be 2x your total system memory, no more no less. Yes, that means with more RAM you need more VRAM, which sounds odd, but Windows uses VRAM even when it isn't nearly out of RAM... it's just odd that way.

[snoopy369]

How are you installing the driver? nVidia has a unified driver package, and it's not really mean to install via Windows... the Forceware should just be installed straight up. It's possible you have the newest full release ...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_93.71.html is the newest current Forceware driver, 93.71 , for Windows XP-32bit ... not sure what you have but it's going to be similar either way. There shouldn't be a separate driver package for 7000 series, so maybe that's where you're going wrong?

[jbp26]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Your virtual memory FYI should be 2x your total system memory, no more no less. Yes, that means with more RAM you need more VRAM, which sounds odd, but Windows uses VRAM even when it isn't nearly out of RAM... it's just odd that way.

question about this- i have 4gb of ram, but i've read that winxp can only really utilize up to 2gb. so should i up it to 8gb VRAM? or leave it at 4.

i installed the video driver succesfully.

interestingly, boosting the ram, the new driver, deleting the cache, all that stuff has improved performance to the point that when im starting the game, the units are flying around, almost too fast. all the animations and everything are smooth. but hte problem still remains, i can still see the small pause between each movement, and when the game gets crowded, the performance goes to hell.

[Willem]

Originally posted by jbp26


i have infinite hard drive, space isnt really an issue.

What do you mean by infinite hard drive? There's no such thing, every drive on the market today has a maximum capacity. Having infinite space would be bordering on magic, it's just not scientifically possible.

[jbp26]

Originally posted by Willem


What do you mean by infinite hard drive? There's no such thing, every drive on the market today has a maximum capacity. Having infinite space would be bordering on magic, it's just not scientifically possible.

speaking figuratively. its like 120GB, 90GB free. not literally infinite, but practically.