On the pc, this game will not work on 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 , 1 GB RAM, 1 MB l2 Cache and Geforce FX 5200. it will not work regardless of World size, time you've been playing, etc. From the get-go it will be slow and painful to play.

The reason is that the fx 5200 is a very weak card. at least when playing civ 4, it will choke up virtually any system. on the PC i mentioned above, it is a hell of a bottleneck.

for some reason apple is very shady with video cards...many of their computers simply have none ; others tend to have mid-range or weak cards, but still retail for much more than their PC counterparts. In addition apple is rumoured to underclock some of the cards on its new Macbook Pro by as much as 40%, apparently in a borderline-fraudulent effort to "reduce heat". this might be causing some problems for people here.

So, many people who have been outraged at Aspyr should realize two things: 1) apple is terrible about pricing its computers (so you get a bad video card) and 2) the original game for PC also surprised people who expected a Turn-based game to be playable --at some level -- on virtually all decent machines.

anyway, those who are frustrated should look into an alternative video card, especially if they have the civ-killing FX5200, which used to be decimated by Civ4 on a PC desktop of mine until I upgraded it.

Hello, welcome.

FX5200 is on Aspyr's list of supported video cards. I think that's going to be a source of a lot of disappointment.

The problems with your recommendation are:

(1) most Macs that have enough CPU power to play this game don't have the option to change the video card. The only exceptions I am aware of are the G5 towers.

(2) Replacement video cards for Macs are horrendously expensive, and a G5 tower owner is unlikely to want to invest significant $$$ in a system that now has an obsolete CPU.

This thing CANT be that much of a hog. Quake 4 plays on Macs, and has for a while. Quake 4 is more demanding than Civ 4 in anything graphical. It simply MUST be.

Well, I could play DOOM 3 (low settings) on the PC, but not Civ 4 at all. The game had serious performance issues from the first turn that made in unplayable...and that is after all patches and several driver updates. I was amazed that my computer would be brought to its knees by a settler and a completely uncharted small world...but it was :(

I was unaware that Mac graphic cards are so expensive compared to their PC counterparts. I also didn't know most macs couldn't upgrade...can iMacs? If not that is a really big problem to have in the design, especially since you pay a lot for "ease of use."

I wouldn't say Apple does a horrible job with video cards, but it does do a pretty inadaquate job with them. For whatever reason, they seem to be a step or two behind in terms of including new video cards into their computers. It's too bad that a lot of the spec's for Civ 4 were driven by the incompatibility of the graphic cards rather than the actual speed / memory of the computer! Bleh. All in all, I think this is a reminder that Apple has never pushed itself as a 'gaming' machine for a reason...

You're probably talking pre-patch Civ 4 on the PC. I've run Civ 4 on a laptop with integrated graphics. it would play fine for small maps, but big maps with max. players would slow to a crawl in the late game.

It is possible to get Civ 4 running on the PC with very poor graphics cards. It'll even run on many systems with integrated graphics as long as the map size isn't above about standard, and you're playing the most recent patch. I've got a laptop with 512MB RAM and an FX 5200 to run large maps at least playably.

The FX 5200 may be a very weak card, but it will run the PC version far more satisfactorily than you say.

On the pc, this game will not work on 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 , 1 GB RAM, 1 MB l2 Cache and Geforce FX 5200. it will not work regardless of World size, time you've been playing, etc. From the get-go it will be slow and painful to play.

Actually, you're very wrong. I've had huge maps run well on my P4-2.4, 1 GB RAM and ATI 9550.

It's all in how your PC is setup.

Hell, I've had normal maps running okay on a P3-800 with 256 MG RAM. :)

Dale