Minimum System Requirements ???

[aebrahim]

Who is Firaxis trying to kid when they say on the box that the game will work satisfactorily with 64MB RAM? A friend of mine who has 64MB RAM picked PTW up, and it runs slow as $hit on his computer.

He just ordered a 256MB DIMM to stick into his machine so that PTW will work properly. One would think that with 320MB RAM it might work okay.

64MB RAM my ass. At the very least they can be honest about it on the box.

[sun_tzu_159]

Aebrahim,

Min requirement for PTW that may be on the box.
On CIVIII website it is 32MB RAM, 300MHz processor.
Apparently PTW is only 100MB of disk space!! for £20.00 in UK. 100MB?

I recommend a minimum 384MB memory.
1GHz any processor.
Graphics card with 32MB memory on AGP port, 64MB on PCI and max the system memory used in 3D and OpenGL on the control panel of video card.

Now the usual - check that your video card drivers are fully up to date. Some of the Nvidia card drivers out this year have sped up graphics remarkably and release 40 WHQL candidate has just been published as 40.72 beta on there website. This will be fifth update (inc betas)since December 2001.

Also at the moment many such as AZUS and VIA are publishing new BIOS and DRIVERS for system boards. These to can help when installed. Check your system board manufacturers website.

With new dual capable Pentium4 as Pentium Xeon chip equivalent soon coming out for PC at 3.0GHz+ the up to 2.8GHz range will soon tumble in price. A shop local to me is selling 2.8GHz base unit only for £999. Might be worth checking if any 1.0GHz machines are under £500 by now.

Also have you tried turning the music off. It really does take a huge resource of the computer especially when sharing with modem on IRQ5 (Older machines may still have this with PCI edge set in BIOS - DON'T change the BIOS setting, believe me).

The turn rate is then fast enough, the screen scroll is OK, and the graphics don't jump.

Regards
Sun_Tzu

[sun_tzu_159]

Ooops, ASUS system boards, not AZUS.

Check website www.cnet.com then follow links through DOWNLOADS, WINDOWS, DRIVERS, BIOS&SYSTEM UPDATES.

There is a mass of updates there in October. Worth it for anyone to check.

Regards
Sun_Tzu

[Cagliostro]

That's a real lowdown - I think the optimum system requirements are infinite for this game - Moves of 15 minutes and more (32civs, 256² world map, 1350 A.D.) when large parts of the map are not even colonized (whole northern american continent) are a pain in the ass - and I'm running this on an athlon xp 1800+ and 512 MB ddr ram (cl2).


Loading times for saved games are horrible too - I guess it's also a matter of CPU power - otherwise, I can't imagine how the hell it's possible to take 3-4 minutes to load a 7 MB savegame on a raid 0 system

They could at least have made the AI diplomacy contact you at once and not every 5 minutes - it allways interrupts me reading books while the AI moves...

but still, I love this game

[vmxa1]

Every game in the last year or two has horrific loading of save games. Games take forever to start up now thanks to the security checks as well.

[Cagliostro]

I don't see that vmxa1 - every game I played during the last year loaded in at least 30 seconds (morrowind, mafia, neverwinter nights, medieval, age of mythology, moh:aa, RTCW, SOF2 and lots more) - as I said, I use 2 60GB IBM harddrives at 7200 rpm in raid 0 mode - there's allmost nothing faster except using scsi - and it's not the loading them itself - my HDs barely work when loading a civ game, but it still takes 6x as long as with any other game...

[vmxa1]

I use 7200 rpm drive as well. I never timed it, but 30 seconds may be right, that seems like forever to me. Try counting 1001 to 1030. Try loading Diablo2 LOD game.

[Cagliostro]

If I say 30 secs, I also think it's a long loading game, but I timed the amount of time civ 3 takes to load my game with a stopwatch and it's around 3 minutes - 6 times the amount I consider being "long").
I also don't know if you're familiar with raid systems, but in case you aren't: raid 0 means there is a special controller on my board, reading and writing to both HD's at the same time (imagine data to be read/written like a zipper), which results in about 150% speed compared to a normal single 7200rpm drive...
Unfortunately, I can't test loading a D2 LOD game, 'cause I don't have (play) the diablo series...

[vmxa1]

I just loaded it from a late save of PTW on std map. It took exactly 30 seconds. I am aware, but other factor apply I would image. I understand disk in the main frame world, but no so much in PC. I would expect the cluster location and such would impact the load time. The dual aspect would not come into play and neither would any sort of buffering until data had been accessed once. In any event the pipe may be the limiting factor, how fast is the bus on that box? The disk can not pass data any faster than the bus can take it. I admit I am not up to date on this stuff anymore. I the bus used my other devices that may slow it down?

[Cagliostro]

It's not that I don't know the problem - it's the size of the map I'm playing on - a standard map has 10000 squares, the one I'm playing on has 65536 - taken into account the total of 32 civ's, the amount of citys and units, it's no wonder it's taking long.

You're right - the HD is definetely not the limiting factor (as mentioned before, it barely shows activity, when loading a game) - bus speed is
266mhz (133mhz FSB with double data rate support) - but still, it takes 3 mins with the system mentioned above on winxp pro - I don't really complain (I would even play on larger world maps with more civs, if they were available, and wait 15 minutes to load a game), but still it's impressive, how an "old-fashioned" game like civ3 can slow a system down, whereas even the leaked doom3 alpha (even with taking into account the gpu) does not...

[vmxa1]

It depends on the amount of data that is required to be store in the save. Some games do not need that much in the way of information to load. My is an XP PRO as well. I guess I would load and go do something else till it was up. I mean it would not stop me either, just annoy me.

[Cagliostro]

That's exactly why I hang around (and post) so much in this forum lately - I come here while loading games and ai moves, when I'm not tidying my flat, read books or do anything else while it computes