Official System Requirements

Savior

Should work just fine. It is about have half way between min and recommended specs.

Just curious how long ago did you buy it.

Haven't bought it, as i cant afford it yet. By the way, thanks for responses. i appreciate it.
 
Those requirements exclude something along the lines of 90% of the world's laptops, and 75% of the world's desktops. If I was on the sales staff at Firaxis, I would murder the programmers for even suggesting these requirements.

Simply put, I do not believe this. If true, Civ 5 will be a huge failure. Deservedly so.

Yeah, I agree, I'm quite hopeful that many of us who think our graphics are under-par will be pleasantly surprised. Just remember the Dell machine that CNET got it to work on, as has already been posted earlier in this thread. If that can do it, I don't see why many of us non-gaming-laptop owners can't either.

Here's a laptop on which Civ5 "worked fine, as long as we dialed down the eye candy". It's using the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225, which isn't exactly for playing games. Check out benchmarks here and compare your notebook graphics with it which you'll find somewhere in the list on the right.

Having seen that, I think I'll be playing on low-medium settings with my graphics. Panic over. If you're still not sure, just sit tight and wait for the demo.
 
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced: Those GPU Requirements cannot be true. They are downright insane for a turn-based game. They might very well be the highest of any game yet, in any genre.
Consider the Graphics Card Heirarchy Chart:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Best-Graphics-Card,2033-7.html

Those requirements exclude something along the lines of 90% of the world's laptops, and 75% of the world's desktops. If I was on the sales staff at Firaxis, I would murder the programmers for even suggesting these requirements.

Simply put, I do not believe this. If true, Civ 5 will be a huge failure. Deservedly so.

You are referring to a two year old overview of graphics cards, not a new one there. A newer one is here.

If that was intentional to show that most cards which are 2 or more years old would not be meet the requirements, that I agree to. But saying 90% of the cards out there are below minimum is wrong, as you ignore all cards built in the last two years.

I agree the requirements are steep though, esp. for this kind of game.

Here's a laptop on which Civ5 "worked fine, as long as we dialed down the eye candy". It's using the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225, which isn't exactly for playing games. Check out benchmarks here and compare your notebook graphics with it which you'll find somewhere in the list on the right..

Mine runs circles around this one, depending on the test the speed is anywhere from 3 to 7 times faster (for Crysis that boiled down to mine being about 5 times faster, World in Conflict 16 times !). Of course they played on a 11Inch notebook, so its screen resolution is lower.

EDIT otoh it is not that much lower, just looked it up, it is 1366 x 768, mine is 1440x900 (went with the lower res on mine when I ordered it, to allow for more frames in games, seems to pay off now ;) ).
 
Uhm, can a mod close this thread or merge it with the real official systems spec thread. I cannot begin to count how many "is my computer/ laptop/ processor graphics card good enough" type threads.

So which one is the real official one ?

Here they said to discuss it in this one ;)
 
Thanks for the info on the 140M - I'm going to sae this for future reference. Much appreciated. Seems like I don't have a hope of running CiV on anything but the lowest settings - but that would be enough for me. Time to wait for the demo!

The reason you are having a hard time finding info on the 140M is that it is a Quadro line, which is not a gaming card but a CAD/CAM-DCC card. But in this case it is based on the 8400M Geforce chip.

Unfortunately even if your card was a fully capable 8400M(which it is not) the 8400M is much weaker than the 7900.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...7900-gs-vs-383mb-nvidia-geforce-8400m-gs.html

So you can try the demo with all the effects turned off and see how it goes, but I think you are in need of a new laptop or desktop to play Civ5.

CS
 
So which one is the real official one ?

Here they said to discuss it in this one ;)

It seems a mod just merged the thread he posted that in with this one, hence why we've suddenly got random posts appearing in the last page or two, and a now irrelevant request to merge this thread. ;)
 
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced: Those GPU Requirements cannot be true. They are downright insane for a turn-based game. They might very well be the highest of any game yet, in any genre.
Consider the Graphics Card Heirarchy Chart:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Best-Graphics-Card,2033-7.html

Those requirements exclude something along the lines of 90% of the world's laptops, and 75% of the world's desktops. If I was on the sales staff at Firaxis, I would murder the programmers for even suggesting these requirements.

Simply put, I do not believe this. If true, Civ 5 will be a huge failure. Deservedly so.

that list is some two years old. there have been two generations of video cards since then.

honestly, when i looked at the requirements i was suprised at how low they were. then i read the replies and i was truly shocked. i understand that civ gamers are not necessarily "gamers" in the more traditional sense, but i did not realize how many people play civ on PCs that simply are not built for gaming. why are so many people suprised when thier not-built-for-gaming PC will have difficulty handling a game? do you buy a minivan and then take it down to the local racetrack for a few laps?

equaly shocking is the level of ignorance people show regarding thier computers! a computer is a major purchase! you should know what all the bits are, and what they do! its not hard to give yourself a basic education. do you buy a car without checking under the hood? do you buy a house without inspecting the plumbing? I don't mean to offend with any of this, though im sure i will take some heat from it.

I built my PC from scratch some 6 years ago. i didn't have the foggiest idea how to do it, but i needed a new rig and i didn't have a whole lot of money. so i did some research online and learned how to get the most bang for my buck, spent about 6 months buying one piece every month or two, first the hard drive, then the motherboard ect. ect. ect. untill i had all the bits i needed. then i put it all together.

I have kept it well above the recomended specs of each new generation of games with constant upgrades. it started with a p4 3.0ghz, 2gigs of ram and an nvidia 7800gtx, and today its on its 2nd motherboard, with a core 2 duo, 4 gigs of ram, and an nvidia 470. the 3rd motherboard with a shiney new i7 should be en route before christmas. and i still don't make much money, i just use it smart.

watch sites like newegg.com for sales, you can sometimes find deals on ebay, but be wary of some of those. most bits can be found between $50-$100, though processors and graphics cards will set you back more. if you shop smart, you can still build a better pc cheaper than you can buy a prebuilt system. at the end of the day, you will know alot more about it too, and thats usefull knowledge.
 
Actually, that should be fine. The "4570" is the model of the card. The important number is the graphics card memory before it, and a 4570 is roughly the same generation as a Nvidia 9800, which is two generations newer than the 7900.

How so? the bench mark on the card is 350ish the minumum on the specs was 570ish.

I used the 2 links further up so thats why i said its not good enough if you fine the min spec card is much higher up the list.

The benchmark list above a few posts is also double if not more than the benchmark for my Dells studio 1555, ATi Mobilitiy Radeon HD 4570.

Tech specs
Manufacturer ATI
Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series

Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2

Mobility Radeon HD 4870 512MB dedicated (steals 512MB if it wants :D)

Mobility Radeon HD 4570
Codename M92-XT
Pipelines 80 - unified
Core Speed * 680 MHz
Shader Speed * 680 MHz
Memory Speed * 800 MHz
Memory Bus Width 64 Bit
Memory Type GDDR3, DDR2, DDR3
Shared Memory no
DirectX DirectX 10.1, Shader 4.1
Transistors 242 Million
technology 55 nm
Features OpenGL 2.0, PCI-E 2.0 x16, Powerplay, DisplayPort support up to 2560x1600, HDMI support up to 1920x1080 (both with 7.1 AC3 Audio), 1x Dual-Link/Single-Link DVI, 1x Single-Link DVI Support (all display ports have to be supported by the laptop manufacturer)
 
I have a GeForce 8700 GT and a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo 5450 (low clock, unfortunately). I think the graphics will be fine, but as there is an absence of a clock speed under minimum requirements, do you think 1.6 Ghz will cut it?
 
I have a GeForce 8700 GT and a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo 5450 (low clock, unfortunately). I think the graphics will be fine, but as there is an absence of a clock speed under minimum requirements, do you think 1.6 Ghz will cut it?

I highly doubt it. My CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ rating for 2.4G and I'm excluded.
 
regardless of the answer I'll test my computer out on the demo, but I'd like to know if I meet the minimum specs:

Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
RAM- 2 GB
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
 
I highly doubt it. My CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ rating for 2.4G and I'm excluded.

Excluded from what?
 
honestly, when i looked at the requirements i was suprised at how low they were. then i read the replies and i was truly shocked. i understand that civ gamers are not necessarily "gamers" in the more traditional sense, but i did not realize how many people play civ on PCs that simply are not built for gaming. why are so many people suprised when thier not-built-for-gaming PC will have difficulty handling a game? do you buy a minivan and then take it down to the local racetrack for a few laps?

When you strip down the game to its core it is still a 2D tile based game. If you strip away the eye candy it ought to run on a 486 ;) It's the gameplay that is important. I ought to be able to play civ in windowed mode and just switch over to it for a few turns while I'm working on other stuff. Otherwise I'm just never going to have time to play it. That's what makes Civ different from most other games, you actually can play it that way, it doesn't have to be an immersive thing that you have to devote large chunks of time to.

equaly shocking is the level of ignorance people show regarding thier computers! a computer is a major purchase! you should know what all the bits are, and what they do! its not hard to give yourself a basic education. do you buy a car without checking under the hood? do you buy a house without inspecting the plumbing? I don't mean to offend with any of this, though im sure i will take some heat from it.

When you don't keep up with the latest happenings in the PC world it is easy to get lost because things change so fast. I used to stay on top of everything but I don't have the time or desire to do so anymore. It was a struggle figuring out what to buy the last time I put together a new system three years ago as I had to make the jump to the new PCI-E and SATA stuff. And now they name everything things that tell you absolutely nothing about how they relate performance wise which just makes it that much harder to follow. I think the PC industry must have been taken over by the same people who write tax laws because it's like they purposefully don't want you to understand. I don't really blame people for just throwing up their hands and not even trying to understand.
 
honestly, when i looked at the requirements i was suprised at how low they were. then i read the replies and i was truly shocked.

Laptops without a decent graphics card (for laptops that is, which makes it low end for desktops...) stand no chance at Civ5. Note that most of the people wondering if their PC could handle the game use laptops.

Mine is 2 years old and can handle it (somewhere between minimum and recommended), so it is not as if they do not exist. But that was a top-of-the-line gaming laptop back then and I knew what I was doing when selecting the CPU and GPU, something most people probably really don't - and all the different 4xxx and 9xxx cards with no logic to numbering certainly do not make it any easier. A card with a higher number does not mean it is better, heck, it does not even have to use the same chip (it could use the previous generation) same with CPUs by now...

So to me it is perfectly understandable that many people will be / are surprised by how poorly the game will perform on their recent laptops. I definitely was not surprised by how low they were (in fact they are higher than I expected), esp. since the expectations had already been set to low requirements based o some previous comments.

equaly shocking is the level of ignorance people show regarding thier computers! a computer is a major purchase! you should know what all the bits are, and what they do! its not hard to give yourself a basic education. do you buy a car without checking under the hood? do you buy a house without inspecting the plumbing? I don't mean to offend with any of this, though im sure i will take some heat from it.

If you but a TV or a console you do not have to do much research, most people act the same way about PCs.

I have kept it well above the recomended specs of each new generation of games with constant upgrades. it started with a p4 3.0ghz, 2gigs of ram and an nvidia 7800gtx, and today its on its 2nd motherboard, with a core 2 duo, 4 gigs of ram, and an nvidia 470. the 3rd motherboard with a shiney new i7 should be en route before christmas. and i still don't make much money, i just use it smart.

not sure going for an i7 and an nVidia 470 already qualifies as smart ;) If you are a serious gamer and play at high resolutions, you might need it for some games, most will be fine on less top-of-the-line hardware however.

And I don't think building your own PC is something the majority wants to do (I have done it once, nowadays I rather find a shop which builds it to order and save me the 'hassle').
 
When I got my laptop two and some years ago I was only 11 or 12, can't remember which. The only things I paid attention to were RAM, hard drive, and monitor size. I also wanted to make sure it was Vista. A couple months before I got my computer I thought Windows Vista was a computer in itself :). I've learned a lot since then and have learned a lot more from hanging out here. Now I'm going to make sure I know what I'm doing when I get a new computer or upgrade parts. I've got to be ready for Civ6:lol:.
 
Could someone confirm/deny wether my PC can run Civ V? It's a Dell Latitude D410, basic specs, about 15 GB free on the Hard drive

Unfortunately, 5 year old intel integrated graphics are extremely weak. I highly doubt any latitude would run Civ 5 as business computers have extremely poor graphics. Don't bother.
 
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