Which component might be causing serious FPS drops?

R

Roquen

Chieftain
Joined
Feb 22, 2011
Messages
2
Hello, everyone! First time poster here! Ok, so here is my issue. I am on a huge map with continents (Earth) and on turn 600. There is some extreme lag when the map is zoomed out all the way. Scrolling drops the FPS down to 8. The game also sometimes crashes after crawling to 1 FPS. If I zoom in all the way I get about 38 FPS and I can scroll around locally without a probelm (If I try to scroll too far I get the FPS drop again). Leader screens and menus produce nice FPS as well.

My graphics are on high with no AA. These symptoms occur in both Directx 9 and Directx 10/11 mode. The symptoms persist even when lowering the graphics to the lowest possible settings. Directx is up to date, as well as the c++ redistributable.

Here are my specs:

Alienware M17x R1 Gaming Laptop
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T9600@ 2.8 Ghz
Memory: 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz
Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 260M SLI (2 of them) running latest 266.58 WHQL drivers.
Hard Drive: Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB, 7200 RPM
Monitor: Acer 1440x900 native resolution

I'm assuming that the probelm is likely the processor, but I'd like some confirmation on that. My processor is above the minumum requirements. Thank you for any help in advance!!
 
The_J said:
Welcome to CFC :).

Did you try disabling the SLI bundle? While one of the last driver updates improved the performance with SLI, you can never now that it doesn't cause anything problematic else.
Click to expand...

I just gave it a shot. I do see better fram rates while zoomed in completely. I went from 38 fps to 43 on average. However, when scrolling and while zoomed out I hit the same exact frame rate drops. Thanks, though! It was a good idea. At this point, the game is nearly unplayable as I need to be zoomed out to see whats going on.
 
Nothing wrong with your system, the buggy "component" is Civ5 :D

Desktop C2D 3GHz and GTX260 @1920x1200 here, which has about twice the performance of a mobile GTX260. Getting comparable fps with those settings. Someone here on CFC figured out how to get a bit smoother scrolling and less crashing by tinkering with some .ini files. You will have to dig in the older threats for that.
 
Here is a comparison of some desktop processors. Your CPU would be on the lower end of this chart. For laptop gaming, only the most modern CPUs can run Civ5 well.

http://www.techspot.com/review/320-civilization-v-performance/

The conclusion is that Civ5 tends to be bottlenecked by the processor, rather than the graphics card. 4 core processors perform better than 2 core, but 6 core is equal or worse to 4 core. Civ5 will only use 4 threads maximum.


 
Please note that in the same article and the same settings the G92/GT200 based nVidia cards are running at 10-15 fps, well under the CPU limit of ~22 fps for a 2.8GHz C2D.

You would need at least something like the mobile GTX460 / desktop GTS450 for a fast dualcore to turn into a significant bottleneck in Civ5.
 
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