Civ3 system requirements from the infograms website

[korn469]

here's the website

http://us.infogrames.com/games/civ3_pc/

and here are the system requirments posted there

Pentium 300 mhz
32 megs or ram
100 megs of hard drive space (+50 for swapfile)
4X CD-Rom
DirectX 7 compatible video card (must be able to display 1024x768x16bit)
DirectX 7 compatible sound card
Windows 95/98/ME/2000

though nobody from firaxis has confirmed this, it seems about right...

though i bet with the minimum system specs (especially only 32 megs of ram...if you look closely there is a typo on the infograms page...it says megs or ram instead of megs of ram) it will run really slowly...but nothing on here seems like it would prevent the majority of people from running civ3 on their system...and really if you have a pentium 166 i think it's about time for you to upgrade your system

[Executor]

Anybody know if a swap file is required. I got rid of mine, permanently.

[Nemo]

While infograms should be an official word, i highly question these requirements that they posted.

As stated here by microsoft:

http://apolyton.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumid=17

it shows that win2k ALONE requires at least 64 Mb of ram

However, Windows ME requires at least 32Mb to run alone.
Windows 95/98 requre at least 16mb alone.

so, if civ 3 supports windows 95/98/me/2000 as it states, AND only requires 32Mb of ram...how can this be?

---

also, what is the "1024x768x16bit" compatible video card all about? does that mean that the MINIMIUM screen resolution is 1024x768?

while neither of the two deter me from playing the game (although, the processor is getting vicariously close to my 450mhz), i just found the requirements very odd and contradictory.

[ancient]

so it wont work on a amd?

or should it just say Pentium 300 or equivilant?

[Nemo]

Executor:
getting rid of your swap file is not a good move.
but anyway, essentially by saying that the system req is 32mb + 50mb swap is the same as saying the minimium system RAM req is really 82Mb ram.
so you better be running win95/98/me with at least 82 mb ram or win2000 with at least 114mb ram. and if you are even CLOSE to that ram without ANY virtual memory/swap file you should expect some blue screen of death, and other errors even random program shutdowns.

[Executor]

Originally posted by ancient
so it wont work on a amd?

or should it just say Pentium 300 or equivilant?

There's no difference between an Athlon and a Pentium III, I have an Athlon.

[Executor]

WinME is a lot more stable now that I disabled the swap file. Why do I need it anyway, it just slows down my computer?

[ancient]

Athlons a hell of a lot faster

[Nemo]

a swap file (a.k.a. virtual memory) is a ram overflow. it is a file on you hard disk that is used as as extra RAM. e.g. if you have 64Mb ram, and lets say your operating system is using 50Mb ram on its own, and you decide to open mulitple applications which use up 34Mb of ram (this can be done by 3 netscape windows and outlook open at the same time). Well. that extra 20Mb of ram has to come from somewhere, or else the computer crashes. So, what happens is, windows uses the virtual memory for the extra 20Mb of ram. Now, when ever your virutal memory is being used, windows must resize the virtual memory to 20Mb and since it is an actual file, that means that the access speed is limitted by your HDD rpm and access/seek time. Thus, whenever your system requires/uses swap file, it noticably slows down your system. In order to HELP reduce SOME of the slowness from using a swap file, you can set your minimium and maximium virutal memory to the same settings. (i.e. min virtual memory = 500mb :: max virtual memory = 500mb; the higher the better, if you make the max too low, it will crash the PC) this, at least, will eliminate the time it takes to create the swap file, but you willstill be limitted by the access time.

on my home computer with windows 98 i had 256mb ram with 500mb set swap. i would get out of memory errors easily when doing web page developement, or playing flight sims. now i am running win 2k with 512 mb ram ...yet i still have 800mb of swap set aside. i usually peak about 400mb of ram usage, and average about 180-200 mb of ram usage (i.e. i have win2000 with icq, zone alarm, antivirus, sound card driver apps, video card driver apps running in the systray, and that uses about 110mb as my base memory usage ...but since i have 512 mb of ram, i dont need swap, but if i had 96 mb ram, i would need 14mb swap just to turn on my pc)

[Executor]

I have 384MB of RAM and never have less than 80MB free.

[Inverse Icarus]

i can handle that.

looks like i can run 3 games at once!

[MORON]

YES, I SURVIVED.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Nemo
While infograms should be an official word, I highly question these requirements that they posted.

I don't know they seem to be very badly informed by Firaxis. If they can't even get the website right, how shall they be able to get the system requirements right?

That site (www.civ3.com) is just a Swedish Telecom company.

[KoalaBear33]

Executor you are the first person that I have ever met who doesn't use a swap file The swap file is basically virtual RAM so if you run out of RAM then the OS uses the swap file as extra RAM. Since you have 384MB RAM you should be all right under most circumstances. I wonder what happens when you do run out of memory (try opening up as many applications as you can). I think your PC will crash. It's best to enable swap file unless you are 100% positive that your PC is not going to use all of the 384MB RAM.

KoalaBear33

[KoalaBear33]

As far as the specs are concerned, they seem reasonable. THe processor speed is ok... the RAM is a bit low but I have seen publishers give a really low value so that more people will buy the game. The low RAM shouldn't really be a problem until you hit late stages with tons of cities with lots of races.... The graphics requirement seem to imply that the game will run in 1024x768 at 16 bit colours....

These are probably the minimum requirements. They will likely release recommendations which will be slightly higher. I expect you need the following for Civ III to run well on your system: 450 MHz processor, 128MB RAM, video card with good 16 bit colour support at 1024x768 (some older cards are slow at this res)...

KoalaBear33