Is anyone else noticing a LOT of lag when scrolling on the main map?

I've got a P-III 800, 128MB, and a GeForce2-64MB (Hercules). I'm running WinXP (beta2), the Detonator 21.83 reference drivers, and DirectX 8.0a

Is the scroll lag a known issue, or is there a setting I missed somewhere?

I tried several searches of the boards, but only found passing references.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Fat Mike
(walrus-in-training)

I'm having the same problem, Mike. My system...

AMD Athlon 750
256 MB
Geforce 2 GTS (Creative Labs Annihilator 2) 32MB
WinXP Pro (rtm)
the Detonator 21.83 drivers
DirectX 8.0a
Sound Blaster LIVE!

hmmm. Could it be a nvidea thing? I've tried all the resolutions between 1024 and 1600 with no luck. I've tried the KeepRes switch in the ini. Doesn't help. Close everything else...Scrolling is still VERY sluggish.

Is this happening to other people? I'm guessing not a lot. I've read all the reviews I could find and nobody is mentioning it.

Does anyone know what Firaxis is using from OpenGL? I mean, are they using OpenGL for fog-of-war or zooming, or what?

I have the slow scrolling as well, p3-500, 128mb ram, win2000, nvidia vanta, 10.80 drivers (i'll try the current drivers soon, but from above reply that doesn't seem to help). The screen mode I'm using is 1024x768 at 60Hz

So Win 98 is still the platform?

First start up your game, then go into your display/advanded and turn your hardware acceleration to the lowest level and apply it, works for me, however make sure you set it back when you start up the game or you'll get a black screen

AstralJack,

I tried running "clean" (close everything in the system tray, don't run any other apps before playing), and I saw a small improvement. You might try that.

Everybody (so far) who's posted has had Nvidia cards and NT-based OSes. Coincidence???

Fallout Tactics (another tile-based game) had a similar problem. I don't remember all the details, but I think the FoT scroll problem only showed up on 64MB cards (I may be remembering that wrong). Memory leak? Hell, I'm just throwing out wild-ass guesses now.


Anybody who stumbles across a solution or an acknowledgement that this is an "official" problem, please let us know.

-Fat Mike

Well, same here:

Celery 733, Geforce2 MX, 196 MB Ram, big Hard drive ;), latest drivers....the whole game takes a little pause between moves as well as very jerky movement of the screen...not annoying enough to be bothered with, yet still...not pleasant.

I'm not too crazy about those fireworks either!

~alek

I'm having similar problems. Choppy movement about 30 minutes into the game. Sound is also chopping around while my civ and others move about. This is very annoying. My computer is a HP pentium 4. Guess I'll just keep looking for solutions and do a little expeimenting instead of actually playing.

hey guys,

I'm also having the same problems, slow scrolling and unit movement. It's pretty poor testing or just laziness to release the game when it's having a pretty obvious problem like this.

My specs are similar to other people who have posted:
P3 733, 256ram, Geforce 256ddr 32mb, SBLive!, running Win2k with DirectX 8.0A

Hopefully this'll get resolved soon, cause it's making a really fun game slightly less fun. =) Maybe it's a good thing, I don't think I'd ever stop playing if the lag wasn't around to drop me back into reality.

I saw a post somewhere that mentioned reloading my nvidia drivers. I went to google and got the latest Detonator verison I could find (I think it was 22.50). Found it here...

http://www.overclockercafe.com/downloads.htm

My scrolling/recentering problem is MUCH improved

Good luck guys!

I downloaded the latest Detonator drivers 22.50 and it didn't help my scroll speed at all.
PIII-500Mhz, 512mb RAM, GeForceMX 64mb, WinXP

:crazyeyes I'm running an Athlon 1400 aswell with XP and NVidia GeForce, and I've tried it with several other smaller vidio card (ie Matrox) and the smaller ones scroll smother. I updated the drivers etc, etc. And nothing worked

However when I changed the hardware acceleration down a couple nothches the chunkyness disappeared. Anyone know why? and if there is a better way to fix this?

Thanks

I downloaded the Detonator 22.50 drivers from the url that was posted above. I was able to choose two drivers between two drivers, oem1 or oem2, and it said oem1 was what I already had so I chose oem2, the driver version is reported as being 1.2.4.1 and I do notice a huge difference in screen drawing. The units move without hesitation and the screen scrolls nicely (still goes by a tile at a time, that's an engine limitation, but it doesn't hesitate before scrolling) My vid card is a Geforce DDR 32mb, check previous post for full specs.

So something is up, hear that Infogrames!?!

I'm running WinXP with a nVidia GeForce2 MX400 and I was having the scrolling problem with the latest Detenators. I backed off and switched to the Microsoft Default Drivers that came with XP and it is scrolling a lot faster now. Hope that helps.

-Bacon.

I'm having the same problem on my TNT. Is this an nvidia only problem, any ati-owners with the same problem?

zooming out ('Z') helps a bit, except now i can't tell the units apart :(

this probably doesn't have anything to do with this, but has anyone else noticed that Civ3 eats up a whopping 138MB of memory while running? (Memory leak????)

Originally posted by glory
this probably doesn't have anything to do with this, but has anyone else noticed that Civ3 eats up a whopping 138MB of memory while running? (Memory leak????)

heheh i played two days straight without restarting civ3.(yeah, I didn't closed civ3 when i sleep..)
taskmanager reported its peak mem usage was 300 something mb.. :( (13x mb at that time)

but i'm sure it has nothing to do with this slow scroll problem. (i got 768mb ram)

Who has experience playing III on a notebook? I got specs like PIII 700, 256 Meg, Win2000, S3 8Meg video.

I also have horrible lag on the map and on the Advisors screens. Specs PIII 600, Win2k SP2, 384Meg, TNT2 Ultra 32Meg w/21.83 drivers, DirectX 8.0a. There is no reason that the game should perform this badly. It must be a problem with the code, hopefully fixed very soon with a patch.

I did what Downer said, put down the acceleration in the problem solving bit of advanced display properties of windows. It also works with one notch from the lowest.

The game is much faster then, even with animations on the units they move faster than they did without animations before.

Originally posted by Meneer Popken
I did what Downer said, put down the acceleration in the problem solving bit of advanced display properties of windows. It also works with one notch from the lowest.

Could someone explain this in steps for me? I follow the main jist, but after starting the game, what next? How do I access this display?

It would be much appreciated, as I am having slow scroll, units and advisor screens.

Thanks
~George:smoke:

EDIT - I figured it out. However, I cannot access my start menu once the game is running. The game screen takes up the whole screen. Is that the same for everyone?

Originally posted by joespaniel


EDIT - I figured it out. However, I cannot access my start menu once the game is running. The game screen takes up the whole screen. Is that the same for everyone?

Try pressing CTRL-ESC when you are at the main screen in CIV3. This should display the Start button and bottom tool bar. ALT-TAB may work also, but I haven't tried it yet. The changes worked for me, the scrolling is normal speed now.

Thank you, Stryker, I will try that now.

I also wanted to thank everyone who is online helping everyone else. I love the unity and fellowship here at CFC. Keep up the great work!:goodjob:

Now if you will excuse me, Kaiser Bismark has to go "entertain" some annoying little Impis.:eek: :rocket3:

Same problems here too. I have a dual-733 Abit VP6 with 256 megs of ram, a 40 gig hard drive, and a 64 meg geforce-based asus video card. Anyone else have a problem with running out of virtual ram too? (Don't tell to allocate more, i already gave it 800 megs!)

Oh, I'm running win2k sp2, btw.

XP:
there is a known issue with the latest detonator drivers and XP that will cause this. you must "roll-back" in XP to the default drivers. it is a driver & O/S issue, not a civ3 issue on this one. although, civ3 does seem to enhance the already present problem.

Win2k:
i use win2k and detonator driver 5.13.01.1240 and have some jumpiness, but no serious problems. i do not know about any other versions of the driver and civ3 problems in win2k, however.

if there is a memory leak (i'll have to check it out next game i play) then when the memory starts going into your page file (a.k.a. virtual memory) then the entire game will slow down, but htis will be more noticable during scrolling (uses mostly ram) rather than turn changing (uses mostly cpu)

are you sure about this; setting the hardware acceleration to min.? won't that make the game run even slower???

Originally posted by Nemo
XP:
there is a known issue with the latest detonator drivers and XP that will cause this. you must "roll-back" in XP to the default drivers. it is a driver & O/S issue, not a civ3 issue on this one. although, civ3 does seem to enhance the already present problem.



Nemo,

Where did you get this info? I'd like to read further details.

Thx,
-Fat Mike

Originally posted by FatMike


Nemo,

Where did you get this info? I'd like to read further details.

Thx,
-Fat Mike

unfortunatly, i don't have a written resource for you, but that doesn't mean that one does not exist somewhere.

I tried to deploy a copy of XP on our test box while seeing if it was worth upgrading the network at work. i experienced sluggish behavior in two realtime graphing programs we use. after a long story, elsa (the video card manuf for that box) told me that it had to do with the new detonator drivers that i installed. they had me use the roll-back feature of winXP to revert to the default windows drivers for the card, and everything was better (although, imo, i think win2k is still better in regards to this issue).

i did see something about this posted at apoylton.net forums i *think* by firaxis person, who mentioned the same thing.
i am sure you can find some info if you run a search for it on google, though.

Try disabling hardware acc. on your graphic adapter, it worked for me. (win2k, geforce)

that quote is from the infogames support site. hopefully they will be releasing a patch soon (THEY BETTER!!!)

Hey, this may be of interest to the readers of this thread.

I'm running a Celeron 466 (don't laugh), with 256MBRAM and Hercules Prophet 4000TX (32MB) video card (intentionally not with the latest drivers, but that's another story).

Even with McAffee VShield running in the background, scrolling-lag doesn't seem to be a big deal for me?

One thing I did do, however, is clean up my system registry (using Registry Healer - great program!), the do a clean reboot of the system, because I was having problems with the sound skipping (no sound card, only onboard sound), but it also sped up the scrolling a little bit. I also did some tweaking with the cache memory, and loaded Civ3 subsequent to defragmenting my hard drive (so I had a clean install and swap file)....

Maybe this will help you guys with P4s? :D

crayonx

nah the problem is a conflict between the detonator drivers and the 2000 kernel. By the way, I keep a very clean registry, and notice even the slightest performance decreases. It's why I clear my hard drive every couple months or so :-D

athlon 850
Geforce 2 MX 32M
256MB PC133

lag big time, the game is super slow.
i wonder when a patch will come out....

Running GF2MX on Win2k SP2. Had terrible scrolling performance with Det 21.83. Reverted to 14.10 and it's as fast as on Win98SE. Anyone tried 22.50?

I have a Duron 850, 512MB RAM, 32MB Geforce 2 GTS on Win 2000 using the last Official Nvidia Drivers 12.41 and have the scrolling problem.

Turning down hardware acceleration is not a great solution as I lose the 'settler, city border' graphic and I'm not sure what else might be disappearing doing this.

I was gonna update to the latest official drivers but they have the same problem according to most people. Firaxis really tested Nvidia cards well I see...

Many people in the games industry don't quite seem to have fully grasped quality control, project planning yet.

i had NVidia v12.40 for GeForce2 GTS and ithought the scrolling was sooo slow, BUT then i upgraded to NVidia v21.81 OMG, that is now so slow that i could take a coffee break while waiting for the screen to move 1 notch! ...well, back to 12.40 for me!
(using win2k sp2, directX 8.1, 512Mb RAM, Gladiac GeForce GTS 2)

I just wanted to chime in because I'm having the same lag/seems-like-a-memory-leak problem, but my video card is an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder. (Athlon 1.2, 512 RAM, W98)

I've read many, many problems with many different configurations (and many useful suggestions, as well.) Among the configurations, I'm beginning to see the one common denominator: Civ3!! Now that we've beta tested the release, who's ready to beta test the patch?

Schtinka

"All I want to do is play the game."

i'm on a radeon as well, and while the scrolling seems fine for the most part, when i get within about 6 tiles of either the north or south edge of the map, it begins to scroll incredibly slowly and chopy. this is on win2k with the latest ati drivers.

This is really an interesting bug. I run win2k and a geforce with the latest drivers and I'm of course afflicted by this issue. Oddly though, it scrolls at the same speed at 1024x768 and 1920x1440.

I'd just like to say that the Civ III people should hurry up and release a patch. This is not remotely pleasant, and the current plan of "blame nVIDIA" is not to my liking. They say other applications also have these kinds of problems with the nVIDIA cards. What applications? I've played plenty of games, and I definately get improved performance with the updated drivers, not decreased. I love the game, but this issue is really racking my nerves. Get the patch released NOW! :mad:

I am running a PII 400 with 384 MB of RAM and an ATI Radeon with 32MB video RAM. I am having a scrolling issue, it's awful. This game should not be a graphical resource hog, even with the icon animations on. I have Windows XP and the latest drivers and tried all the f'n around with settings, the games just not written optimally.

Originally posted by glory
I'd just like to say that the Civ III people should hurry up and release a patch. This is not remotely pleasant, and the current plan of "blame nVIDIA" is not to my liking. They say other applications also have these kinds of problems with the nVIDIA cards. What applications? I've played plenty of games, and I definately get improved performance with the updated drivers, not decreased. I love the game, but this issue is really racking my nerves. Get the patch released NOW! :mad:

Agreed...Again, goes to show how well Firaxis actually tested this game.:mad:

The following seems to at least mitigate the scrolling problem. You can substitute whatever version of the Detonator drivers appears to work best. I'm using 12.41 but might drop back further to see if it makes a difference.


1. Go to http://www.guru3d.com/files and click on Videocard Drivers, then NVIDIA detonator drivers. You'll be presented with a list of drivers.

2. Grab the Detonator 12.41 WHQL drivers that are appropriate for your platform. The drivers are in the form of an executable, but at least for Win2K you can open it up in your zip file handler program (I use Powerarchiver myself, but most people use Winzip).

3. Extract the nvoglnt.dll file into the directory that Civ3 is installed (i.e., the directory that the game executable resides in). This works under Win2K, as executables seem to pick up DLLs first in the home directory of the executable, then the system directories. This might not work everywhere. If it doesn't have an effect, then you'll have to place it in your system32 directory or system directory (wherever your current nvoglnt.dll file resides).

This procedure worked for me. Give it a shot...can't hurt...

good call kcbrown. didn't quite fix the prob, but made the game playable. now lets hope the civ3 team releases a patch soon and stops blaming nvidia.

Just to inform you guys on scrolling issues on Win 2000.

One of my 2 systems is a PIII 700 IBM Thinkpad running on Win 2000 with 256 Megs of Ram and a S3 Savage IX Display Driver with 8 Megs. And it runs just fine!!!

My other system has a GeForce 6600 32 Meg and 128 Meg on a PIII 600 and goes more "clumsy".

I guess Firaxis has to do better optimization on nVidia chipsets.

I also have slow scrolling??? What is with this?
My system is

P3 - 800
128 - PC-300 Ram
Nvida TNT2 32mb


is there a problem???