Since there's about 5 different threads relating to how the game is not working properly, or poorly, I thought I'd post an e mail i got from Aspyr this morning regarding the game running very poorly on my Imac G5. Hope it helps...for myself, i've done everything that is listen in the e mail without any real improvements...however, playing it windowed mode is an improvement.


ASPYR EMAIL:

Civilization 4 is a considerably graphics-intensive game, and thus it is important to configure it to run optimally without putting too much stress on your machine, which results in all manner of visual glitches. Even some higher-end systems may choke on some of the more extravagant settings. As follows are a number of things you may take into consideration, both with in-game settings and configuration files.

These are the settings in-game you can change to get the most out of your system:

Lowest Resolution: 1024x768
Anti-Aliasing Multisamples: 0
Graphics Quality: Low, turning the graphics quality to low should set these as follows:
Render Quality: Low
Globe Quality: Low
Animations Frozen: on
Single Unit Graphics: on
Effects Disabled: on
Globe View Buildings Disabled: on
Low Resolution Textures: on
No Movies: on
If all else fails, you may try turning off all sound effects.

Outside of the game, if you wish, you may edit the configuration file found at Documents > Civilization IV > CivilizationIV.ini
You may try to tweak the settings more to squeeze a little bit more performance out of your system.

General performance-related options:
MinimapTrilinearFilter = 1 change to 0
HideMovieBackground = 0 change to 1
MemSaver = 0 change to 1
GUIManagedTextures = 0 change to 1, may cause artifacting on the menu though
SyncInput = 0 make sure it's 0

Movie playback options, these should improve movie performance (but can also cause skipping and artifacting):
BinkNoSkip = 1 change to 0
BinkCopyAll = 1 change to 0
Bink16Bit = 0 change to 1
BinkInterlace = 0 change to 1

Quicker start ups. These shouldn't affect in-game performance but should hopefully help the game start up faster:
DisableFileCaching = 1 change to 0
DisableCaching = 0 make sure it's 0
NoIntroMovie = 0

Debug options. These should be off by default but couldn't hurt to double check :
LoggingEnabled = 0
SynchLog = 0
RandLog = 0
MessageLog = 0

One last thing you may want to try is to turn off the vertex and pixel shaders. This may help performance on some systems. Essentially, there are prefs to disable vertex and pixel shaders, which will cause Civilization 4 to fall back to a lower-end rendering path. This may help performance if you have a lower-end Mac. To enable this, go to the terminal and enter these 2 commands:

defaults write com.aspyr.civ4 ASLForcePSOff -bool true
defaults write com.aspyr.civ4 ASLForceVSOff -bool true

Be careful to watch the spelling - a typo will cause nothing to happen. Once you've done this, relaunch Civilization 4.

Hopefully, using these guidelines, you may adjust your game to run optimally on your machine. Let me know if these suggestions help.

interesting. I'll try a few of these tomorrow and report back on how it affects me.

Unreal. Having to make serious alterations to a game you payed for to make it 'playable'.

interesting. I'll try a few of these tomorrow and report back on how it affects me.

They probably won't do anything, but I suppose it would be informative to try.

That said, the Bink options, for example, are totally useless on the Mac as we don't use Bink in Mac Civ4.

Well I didn't get much out of what she wrote, but I'm pretty impressed that I got an email back in 24h with at least something written by a person, and not one of those 'we'll send this to our pr guy, and he'll write you back in 2 years.' Having said that when I initially wrote to them I told them that the minimum requirements for the game are deceitful, since I do match them and exceed on the ram, and they simply said its graphics intensive. They should have put the minimum req. a bit higher, since I wouldn't have bought the game knowing that it will simply be unplayable on my system.

Definitely better than the response I got, which was "Sign up for our newsletter!"

I hope eventually we'll get a sticky with all these potential fixes in them?

They probably won't do anything, but I suppose it would be informative to try.

That said, the Bink options, for example, are totally useless on the Mac as we don't use Bink in Mac Civ4.
How about disabling the shaders? Would that help on an iMac G5?

Brad said at IMG that disabling shaders wouldn't do anything if you had a decent graphics card. It would either slow the game down or make it look worse with no benefit.

How about disabling the shaders? Would that help on an iMac G5?

Probably not. If you've got an nVidia 5200 card (which some of these iMacs have), they're disabled automatically. We did isolate an issue which is causing severe performance degradation on some PPC-based Macs for which we have a fix in testing.