I have a $350 current-gen ATI video card, 8gig of ram, a hot CPU Win7 and I STILL CAN'T PLAY CIV-V in directx11 without it locking up on me.

ARE THEY GOING TO FIX THIS, FINALLY???????????????

PS: Please, lets avoid the long list of people saying, 'gee, it works for me'. It's a problem for a LOT of people, so IT'S A PROBLEM.

I'd be more encouraged about the new version if they hadn't had so much trouble getting the old version to work.

gee, it works for me

Have you tried updating your drivers? It didn't work for me until I did

To me it sounds like he wants to be able to see the sickest stuff with his 350 $ card. Therefore he (like many progamers for e.g. with an immense amount of technological knowledge also do) setup his graphic drivers to do like 16x antialias and 256 (or some ridiculous number) times anisotrop filtering for every application, instead of letting the application chose these settings.

This is however what screws with peoples performances and causes incompatibilities a lot of times, despite the graphic card being super expensive.

To me it sounds like he wants to be able to see the sickest stuff with his 350 $ card. Therefore he (like many progamers for e.g. with an immense amount of technological knowledge also do) setup his graphic drivers to do like 16x antialias and 256 (or some ridiculous number) times anisotrop filtering for every application, instead of letting the application chose these settings.

This is however what screws with peoples performances and causes incompatibilities a lot of times, despite the graphic card being super expensive.

gee, it works for me
:goodjob:

yup.

ATI actually makes it very simple to overclock (even having an 'auto' setting where it'll do it for you) your graphics card. You know what happens?

They overclock and then don't realize that they actually needed a higher PSU wattage and they're also skyrocketing the heat in the box ->>> failure imminent.

oh, and the over clock settings are rarely stable (else they would just clock it there in the first place!)

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Plus, I think he just wanted to say $350 "curr-gen" video card.

It could very well be DDI memory and 'curr-gen' from 3 years ago. plus 'hot' could actually mean 'hot'.

I have a 6870. Have aa turned down since I play at 1600p no problems, honesty I didn't know this was a problem. First to here about this. Have you tried turning the settings down like others have suggested?

Never tried Dx11 properly because it gets slow in mid to late game on large maps. My system is quite good though & well above recommended specs (i3, 8GB DDR3 RAM, ATI 6850). I think they still need to improve the performance.

Thought civ was more cpu bound then gpu?

For what it's worth: There's hardly any difference in graphics between DX9 and DX11.
So you're not missing anything.

For me DX11 mostly makes my cpu run a lot hotter and therefore mostly run in DX9 to keep it cool.
(Maybe that's why it's locking up on you?)

Oh, and have you tried looking in the tech support forum, maybe someone can help you out there?

I have a GTX 570 and have to play in DX9 because DX11 runs a lot slower (sometimes) and it also locks up. Furthermore, in DX11 I can't alt-tab to the desktop, because sometimes (randomly) when I alt-tab back my screen just goes black and have to force quit the game and restart...very annoying.
Please fix.

I never had a problem with it.

Strangely also, some unit graphics of mods will work on the DX9 version, but not on the DX11 version.

I have a 6870. Have aa turned down since I play at 1600p no problems, honesty I didn't know this was a problem. First to here about this. Have you tried turning the settings down like others have suggested?

I have a 6700 (which I upgraded to recently for Total War not CiV, which really does not require a huge graphics card.) and I have not played CiV in a few months. When I did play my card was an ATI Radeon 5870 graphics card. I always used DX11 and also played on a giant TSL map. Never had an issue. Is this a common occurrence? Up until now I heard nothing at all about this. Until it does not work for me I'll have to say, "Gee, works for me." Just joking, lighten up eh?

I have a GTX 570 and have to play in DX9 because DX11 runs a lot slower (sometimes) and it also locks up. Furthermore, in DX11 I can't alt-tab to the desktop, because sometimes (randomly) when I alt-tab back my screen just goes black and have to force quit the game and restart...very annoying.
Please fix.

I had the same problem once, but windowed mode fixed it nicely.

I actually wasn't aware that many people played in fullscreen - Civ doesn't really seem the right game to play fullscreened.

Wasn't there a difference how ATi cards and nVidia cards handle DX11 in Civ5?

That the high cpu-taxation was a 'problem' that only occured with nVidia cards?

This is slightly OT, but the initial splash screen lets you choose between "DX9" or "DX10 & DX11". I have a DX10 card (all the latest drivers, etc.) and choosing the DX10/DX11 option inevitably results in a frozen computer after 15-30 mins of gameplay. DX9 runs flawlessly. Seems to me they ought to edit their splash screen.

This thread on the 2k forum will let you enable it if the problem is compatibility mode:

http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?88977-When-I-click-quot-Play-Civilization-V-quot-I-cannot-select-the-DX10-11-option

I have a GTX 570 and have to play in DX9 because DX11 runs a lot slower (sometimes) and it also locks up.

I have the same card and no troubles in DX11 (285.62 drivers). But I always run the game in a window (work ...), so possible alt-tab issues aren't something I'd have ran into.

For what it's worth: There's hardly any difference in graphics between DX9 and DX11.
So you're not missing anything.



There is a very pronounced difference. About the difference between Civ4 and Civ5, IMO.

Regarding the crashing, I found that not having the latest driver will do that... even a 2 day newer NVIDIA driver fixed a sudden bug I had.

seems i remember dx10 being terrible. but i still use 9 and havent bothered to use 11 yet. i might try though. i have a ati 5770 and 8gb ram (pc1600 cl7) but im sure ill still have to lower the settings.

on dx9 though i didnt lower any settings and never had a crash. also, my case is near a window and in winter i can push it a little further as its pretty cold by the window.

There is a very pronounced difference. About the difference between Civ4 and Civ5, IMO.Hmm.. Strange. With me the difference is hardly noticeable. It's there, but you really need to look for it, and even then.
The only real difference I found is in the loading speed of the graphics and that for some reason the game doesn't allow me to use antialiasing, so I need to force that in the driver if I play in DX9.
But apart from that (and the hotter cpu in DX11) they both look almost the same to me.

Hmm.. Strange. With me the difference is hardly noticeable. It's there, but you really need to look for it, and even then.
The only real difference I found is in the loading speed of the graphics and that for some reason the game doesn't allow me to use antialiasing, so I need to force that in the driver if I play in DX9.
But apart from that (and the hotter cpu in DX11) they both look almost the same to me.

Do you have an early DX11 card then? I bet you're missing some bells and whistles.

DX9 spanned what, about 12 generations of GPU's? So basically, not all DX9 compatible cards were the same and that goes for the latest versions too.

I've got a similar setup: AMD 6950, 6gb RAM, i7-930 @ 3.6GHz, W7 64bit. No issues at all running Civ5 in DX11/10. Are you sure your drivers are updated? Nothing is overheating? And your power supply can handle your hardware (especially if you overclocked anything)?

I had the same problem once, but windowed mode fixed it nicely.

I actually wasn't aware that many people played in fullscreen - Civ doesn't really seem the right game to play fullscreened.

I'd love to play in windowed mode, but the scrolling is what keeps me going back to full screen. In windowed mode moving your mouse to the edge of the screen (top/bottom) doesn't scroll sadly...

Do you have an early DX11 card then? I bet you're missing some bells and whistles.Nvidia GTX460, latest drivers.
It's not one of the latest cards, and it hasn't DX11.1-support (only 600-series have that), but it isn't thát old, I think?

I've made comparable screenshots, it's zoomed in so you can see the difference, but as I said, there isn't that much.
A little crispier here and there, but nothing I'd call 'the difference between civ4 and civ5'.

DirectX9 (http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/506891210596136426/0C2DB7042391741CFDC38C4BB27636D67B683CC9/)
DirectX11 (http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/506891210596177145/5B4962A2E38869FEFE076D48DF1A66854BFE78DE/)

Does it look a lot different on your setup?

I'd love to play in windowed mode, but the scrolling is what keeps me going back to full screen. In windowed mode moving your mouse to the edge of the screen (top/bottom) doesn't scroll sadly...

I would too but scrolling does kill.

I'd love to play in windowed mode, but the scrolling is what keeps me going back to full screen. In windowed mode moving your mouse to the edge of the screen (top/bottom) doesn't scroll sadly...

Have you set the option to lock the mouse to the game window? I had the same problem while running in full screen on my primary monitor with something else on my second one, but setting that fixed it. I'd imagine it'd be the same for windowed.

Have you set the option to lock the mouse to the game window? I had the same problem while running in full screen on my primary monitor with something else on my second one, but setting that fixed it. I'd imagine it'd be the same for windowed.


going to have to give this a try thanks for the heads up

I'd love to play in windowed mode, but the scrolling is what keeps me going back to full screen. In windowed mode moving your mouse to the edge of the screen (top/bottom) doesn't scroll sadly...

I had that problem too, until I set my Windows Taskbar to "auto-hide".