Civ3 is a ram hog

[delsolsi]

I noticed that when I loaded a previous save that it sounded like my swap file on my hard drive was kicking in so I opened up task manager to see how much ram civ3 uses and I was shocked to see that it was using 134,636KB of ram which works out to 131MB of ram. Is it normal for this game to use that much ram. It doesn't see like it when the required specs say 32MB and recommended is 64MB. Is there something wrong with my game or is this normal. Heres a pic so you can see for your selves that its really useing this much.

EDIT: typo

[Pythagoras]

Maybe it has to do with NT...

[statusperfect]

Maybe it uses more RAM tp run faster?

[Nym]

It can probably run with 32MB, but tends to use as much memory as available to run faster.

[MarkG]

a minimum requirement is exactly that: a minimum requirement
just because a program uses all that ram(especially it finds it availiable, you have 768mb!), it doesnt mean it cant turn with less

[delsolsi]

Originally posted by statusperfect
Maybe it uses more RAM tp run faster?

If thats the case I'd hate to see it run with less ram. It takes 2 or 3 seconds per turn later in the game with the ram I have.

Originally posted by Nym
It can probably run with 32MB, but tends to use as much memory as available to run faster.

Your probably right, I've just never seen a program use all the available ram. Even windows will leave some ram for other programs to use.

[Sava]

Man, you have a lot of other programs running. Does the game seem slow with all that other sh*t?

There is a lot of math and processing needed for any game, of course it's going to hog memory. It's not Freecell, you know.

[Cesa]

Originally posted by Sava
Man, you have a lot of other programs running. Does the game seem slow with all that other sh*t?

There is a lot of math and processing needed for any game, of course it's going to hog memory. It's not Freecell, you know.

Most of those are standard programs/services that Windows use, WinNT/2k/XP anyway. Except Civ 3 I could only see 3 or 4 programs that is not running on my computer (XP).

[SpencerH]

Isnt that 768 Mb of RAM the swap file? How much actual RAM do you have.

[The Viceroy]

Hmm I could see 7 that don't run on my XP set .. but then, I always remove all unwanted services etc .. probably why.

It certainly can run on a 32Mb machine .. even if it was 130Mb in size .. remember, Windows can allocate much much more memory that is actually available .. it will only use actual memory when its committed and active, anything not active will get paged into the swap file .. the swap file will be as big as your hard disk (or set limit if you have one).

Obviously, the constant paging from HD to memory and back is going to slow the game down hugely .. especially if you have a billion services running ..

I think the size of the games exe has more to do with the memory resident graphics/sound/data .. rather than the code pages themselves .. raw maths can be acheived with very very small code size .. even the amount of maths in a game like civ would not amount to much compared to the 130Mb you can see ..

[Jahi]

its the trade newtwork that take that much ram.. on a 16 civ game i've been known to go as high as 260 MB of ram. as cites are destroyed you can actually watch it go down. i'm guessing they used a fully meshed network design when calculating the trade newtork which accounts for the long time between turns.

[kmill25]

I shut down as many programs as possible before running CivIII, but then I only have 64 megs of RAM.

[ChaotikVisions]

If its there, it'll use it. Since you're playing Civ3 I don't think it using moe ram will adversely affect it, probably just makes it faster. I've got 512mb of ram in my comp, and i've seen it using 200+mb of it before.

[chiefpaco]

Whenever I dip down to virtual memory Civ3 freezes up. I always reboot before I start playing it & shut down all my other processes if possible. It still takes up a ton of memory & I prefer to keep IE open if I can - a dangerous combo.

[Panag]

hi ,

on some comp's , like a MAC with 1.5 giga ram it uses 400 m of it ,....

have a nice day