First Impression on iMacG5 1.8GHz GeForceFX5200 2G RAM

Hello everybody,
This is my first post, but Ive been reading the forums ever since the C3C buzz last december. But now Ive decided to join the conversation.

Here is my experience thus far:

My system: iMac G5 1.8 GHz 1gig RAM GeForce 5200 OS 10.4.7 and quicktime 7.0.2 or whatever the latest one is.

I am happy to report that CIV is playable on my machine, not only that, it is extremely fun!!! I almost didnt open the box b/c I thought I would send it back and buy it later after reading all of the bad reports on the forum here, especially since my machine has the doomed 5200. But, I am pleasently surprise! Not only does it play, I think it plays very very well. It is fast, smooth, and doesnt have any major graphical problems. Even the fraxis intro played great with full sound.

My Game: low res, graphics low, standard map, 6 rivals, normal speed. I am in the year 1650 or so and the whole game thus far has moved right right along. In fact, I actually think that the rival turn moves happend too fast, as its sometimes hard to ascertain what they just did. My goal now is to push the limits of my system. First, see how the end game goes, then either up the graphics or increase rival # and world size.
(personal note: I dont really care about dazzling graphics and "moving" music in my civ games, so it doesnt bother me that I may not be able to play on full graphics. I like strategy and unit sound!)

What doesnt work: Unit sounds DO NOT work. This is the greatest disappointment so far. History wasnt silent. It isnt as fun when there is no combat sound or when unit movement is silent. I hope this can be fixed. The music and the ambient sound doesnt seem to work. Although, once mysteriously the music kicked in (then it went away, but honestly I cant remember if that was me turning it off ooops). Graphically, the globe mode has red distortion at a certain height. Other than that most things seem to work. No crashes and no kernel panics.

I am happy thus far and hope the sound problems get worked out. Now back to figuring out CIV...it is different yet very familiar...

I'm really surprised at your experience, I have the exact same computer (a bit less ram, 750mb) and its runs pretty slow and choppy...i can't believe you say that it runs 'fast,' on your imac...please give some more info, or tips on how you've managed to get it rolling well. For me its choppy and slow, and I didn't realize how much so until i loaded it on my friends intelmac and saw a blazingly fast performance.

Well, first I must state that Im no serious gamer (just civ3 and sim city 4) so my reference point to "fast" and "smooth" are based on those games. For me, the screen scrolls as I imagine it should (it is a little jumpy but not choppy and the graphics maintain their integrity). Maybe on a more powerful computer it would just scroll so smooth it would be like moving my web browser. I might have a different reference point then.
All I did was load the game and start playing, making sure that I was on a standard size map, graphics and res low, and only 6 rivals.

For me, the turns are not slow, the graphics look great and dont lose their integrity, and moving around the map is fast enough--even when jumping from one part of the world to the next. Im not claiming that it works like it should on a powerful computer, but that it works very well on mine.

One last note, when I played Sim City 4 and only 256mb RAM, whenever I moved around on the screen I had to watch the game load the graphics for each detail. That was slow and choppy, but once I got 1gig it changed the whole experience.

So maybe it is our subjective notions of "fast" and "playable." Or maybe the extra RAM, or some other factor. Hope this helps.

I've managed to get Civ4 up on my iBook G4, believe it or not.

I bought the computer last fall, it's specs are PowerPC 1.33 processor, with 512 mb RAM. Graphics card is Radeon 9550 with 32 mb RAM.

As you can see, this is by not even remotely close to the minimum required, but I've still managed to get it going.

Everything is, of course, turned as far down as possible, no sound, basically nothing that is not needed.

I've played all afternoon without any crashes, the game slows down after a while (I'm playing on a small map as it is), but it's still playable.

If anyone would like me to post further, jsut say so.

Hi. Welcome

Impressive! That comes close to the spec of my G4 tower. I have more RAM but only 1 GHz CPU. My Geforce 4MX is also only 32 MBytes. I wasn't expecting to be able to play the game, just to do some work on S/GOTM support, mod installation and such. But you've given me some hope that I may actually be able to see what all the fuss is about when it finally makes it to these remote shores!

Zukov45 said:

I'm really surprised at your experience, I have the exact same computer (a bit less ram, 750mb) and its runs pretty slow and choppy...i can't believe you say that it runs 'fast,' on your imac...

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This is believable. We've identified an issue that can cause two nearly identical Macs (typically, PowerPC-based) to run Civ4 with dramatically different performance. There is no workaround you can apply right now (that I'm aware of), but it will be addressed very soon in a patch.

I can load and run it on my 1 GHz/1.12 GByte G4 system. It's slow and choppy, but then I never expected to be able to actually play it until I invest in a new system later in the year.

I see some strange behaviour that is not mentionedanywhere else as far as I can tell. I see no fog. Trees and rivers are black where there should be fog, but the base terrain is clear. I imagine it's related to my well-below-spec video card - a Geforce 4MX with 32 MBytes VRAM, but I'm intrigued that I seem to be the only person seeing it.

IIRC that was reported several times on the Windows side, by people with similarly below-spec video cards. IIRC your card isn't capable of displaying the FoW for some reason.

AlanH said:

I imagine it's related to my well-below-spec video card - a Geforce 4MX with 32 MBytes VRAM, but I'm intrigued that I seem to be the only person seeing it.

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That's exactly right. Your card is not only below-spec, it's fantastically below spec. It doesn't support most of what Civ4 needs out of a 3D card. The 4MX is really just a GeForce 2MX with some minor enhancements, which places it several generations behind in the 3D card wars, unfortunately.

I remember seeing lots of people complaining that all they could see were eyes in a black screen, but that seems to be the opposite of my experience. I also recall some comments that flood plains were visible in the fog area. I don't recall this total visibility effect being mentioned, though, and I would have expected it to come up in the GOTM forums since it's a deal breaker for competition play. But I'll have another look around.

I had almost the opposite experience on the PC side. All terrain was black- it didn't matter whether you had revealed the terrain or not. Only resources and sometimes rivers/shorelines were visible.

I also had the "eyes-and-teeth-only" leaderheads. I uninstalled in January, so I have no idea if any of the more recent patches would help this. I had relatively frequent crashes (once ever 1-5hr) - sometimes with graphical anomalies, sometimes sound related, sometimes???

Can't remember exactly what card it is, but it was an integrated graphics card on a Presario.

I think most of those issues were resolved by the patches and/or players realising they had to upgrade their video cards. I'm still aware of at least one PC player with visible flood plains though.

AlanH said:

I remember seeing lots of people complaining that all they could see were eyes in a black screen, but that seems to be the opposite of my experience. I also recall some comments that flood plains were visible in the fog area. I don't recall this total visibility effect being mentioned, though, and I would have expected it to come up in the GOTM forums since it's a deal breaker for competition play. But I'll have another look around.

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Yeah, we should resolve this by simply permitting the game to not run on cards that can't handle it.

I'm running civ4 on a Macbook Pro with 1.83 ghz core duo, 1gb of memory, and an ATI X1600 graphics card with 128 mb of video memory. The game runs beautifully on max settings and large maps. The only problem comes with using the scout unit on maximum settings. Do not attempt to move the scout! It completely freezes the system. Just play the game with medium graphics settings then after disbanding scouts when no longer needed, have the settings on high again.

For some odd reason, when on the menu screen my MBP’s fans rev up like crazy.

With the G5 system’s, it sounds like the graphics card is the problem. Weren’t the Geforce 5200 series cards pretty lackluster in performance?

Boy, if a G5 system can’t even run the game smoothly, then what are the chances of my brothers G4 iBook with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9550 graphics processor with 32 MB video RAM even working at all.

Edit: Also, are there supposed to be sounds when units attack, defend, and move? Because I'm getting nothing.

Brad Oliver said:

This is believable. We've identified an issue that can cause two nearly identical Macs (typically, PowerPC-based) to run Civ4 with dramatically different performance.

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Weird. Just out of curiosity, what is the issue exactly?

Brad Oliver said:

Yeah, we should resolve this by simply permitting the game to not run on cards that can't handle it.

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Oh, thanks! That'll kill my efforts to support the community Let's hope my new Conroe/Woodcrest/whatever Mac is released soon, and is affordable.

Riesstiu IV said:

I'm running civ4 on a Macbook Pro with 1.83 ghz core duo, 1gb of memory, and an ATI X1600 graphics card with 128 mb of video memory. The game runs beautifully on max settings and large maps. The only problem comes with using the scout unit on maximum settings. Do not attempt to move the scout! It completely freezes the system. Just play the game with medium graphics settings then after disbanding scouts when no longer needed, have the settings on high again.

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Turn off multisampling and you should be able to avoid the lockup. Let me know if that is not the case.

Many PowerPC macs are being affected by a performance bug, so it's hard to make an accurate assessment right now of performance. Needless to say, it should be much more in line with the Intel Macs.

The sound bugs in the Mac version are known, and are in fact approaching legendary status.

AlanH said:

Oh, thanks! That'll kill my efforts to support the community Let's hope my new Conroe/Woodcrest/whatever Mac is released soon, and is affordable.

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The bug you're seeing does represent a serious cheating issue with multiplayer games, and it's difficult to make a case for trying to find a solution for such a low-end card as opposed to just eliminating it. The card has none of the shader support necessary to fog the items properly, and there is no non-shader code in the game to do that.

Cougarcat said:

Weird. Just out of curiosity, what is the issue exactly?

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Civ4 has a "hotload" mechanism whereby it monitors several game folders and gets notified if any files are added/removed from those folders while the game is running. We used a kqueue/kevent mechanism to do this on the Mac.

As it turns out, on some machines, kqueue starts failing, and we end up spawning off dozens of threads and consuming a huge chunk of CPU time. If you are seeing CPU usage of 180% on a dual-CPU PPC or Intel mac, that's what's going on. It doesn't happen for everyone (none of us 3 programmers, for example), but we were able to finally reproduce it in dramatic fashion on Glenda's Mac.

Brad Oliver said:

The bug you're seeing does represent a serious cheating issue with multiplayer games, and it's difficult to make a case for trying to find a solution for such a low-end card as opposed to just eliminating it. The card has none of the shader support necessary to fog the items properly, and there is no non-shader code in the game to do that.

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This assumes everyone plays multi-player. Seems better to somehow add a flag that a game was played using an unsupported video card. Then, in situations where it would matter for competition purposes, administrators or whoever could exclude those games as needed. As I mentioned earlier in this post- my PC has an under-spec integrated graphics card that showed no terrain at all- far from giving me an advantage it was a real pain in the butt.

This would likely make sense for Aspyr too: look how many people are playing Civ4 on underspec machines!