Speed Civ 5 Up Between Turns?

Civ V is hands down the worse optimized game released recently. It seems to prefer current generation DirectX11 GPUs, so upgrading your video card would be the best bet (although I'd never upgrade only one generation; Radeon 4890->Radeon 5xxx would be such a waste of money).

Your system is actually pretty amazing; I'm envious with my Core i7 920 stock speed, old ass spinning HDD, and GTX 260 (Civ V runs poorly on any GTX 2XX card). And like you, I've tested every graphically setting and found no increase of FPS. Matter of fact, my performance decreased when I ran DirectX9 and my textures were full of "artifacts" when I turned tessalation on low.

Terrible game engine. And don't defend it with "AI complexity". Total War does nearly everything Civ does, except it beautifully (and at 60+ FPS running ULTRA settings) renders 10,000+ soldiers with physics.

Solution: wait for a patch or just don't run the larger maps.

HeavyTwenty said:

Civ V is hands down the worse optimized game released recently. It seems to prefer current generation DirectX11 GPUs, so upgrading your video card would be the best bet (although I'd never upgrade only one generation; Radeon 4890->Radeon 5xxx would be such a waste of money).

Your system is actually pretty amazing; I'm envious with my Core i7 920 stock speed, old ass spinning HDD, and GTX 260 (Civ V runs poorly on any GTX 2XX card). And like you, I've tested every graphically setting and found no increase of FPS. Matter of fact, my performance decreased when I ran DirectX9 and my textures were full of "artifacts" when I turned tessalation on low.

Terrible game engine. And don't defend it with "AI complexity". Total War does nearly everything Civ does, except it beautifully (and at 60+ FPS running ULTRA settings) renders 10,000+ soldiers with physics.

Solution: wait for a patch or just don't run the larger maps.

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Eh, hasn't every Civ been horrible like this on release? The AI is always bad (though 5 is worse than usual), the AI always seems to be poorly optimized in terms of how long it takes to make decisions, and the engine always sucks.

q9450 quad core proc at 3.8ghz
8gb ddr2 ram
Gtx 260 x2 in sli (but disabled for now in this game specifically)
Xfx 780i mobo
Ocz vertex ssd

With this mixed bag of mostly old hardware I'm running this game just fine and only seem to have huge turn lag in huge games after 300+ turns. Everything is turned up to max graphics-wise and I run at 1920x1200 and I also run dual monitors and watch dvds/netflix on the other monitor - hence the disabled sli in this game for its not wanting to play well with the dvds going.

Pulling 60-70fps always according to msi afterburner. Running win7 x64 ultimate as well. Not really sure that you should be seeing such poor performance OP. :/

Edit: as has been mentioned before, going to strategic mode before ending turn should speed things along

I can't stand waite any longer than 6 seconds. Thats why I play on small maps with only 9 AIs.


I'm at 2300AD and have to waite 6sec per turn

Spec: i5 4Ghz 4GB RAM

pretty much the same issue as the OP - no crashes at all but renaissance+ turns take a lot of time to process 1 minute +
I play huge maps with all civs and CSs

my system is very decent, core i7@920 running at stock speed, BFG Geforce 295 gtx, HDD @ 7200 rpm, 3 GB RAM - don't need more cuz of my win xp 32 i got.

I don't have problem playing the most demanding games and so far i did not have to overclock the cpu or gpu to obtain decent results.

OTOH, a frd of mine has better results using a setup that is definitely weaker than mine: gtx 250 and a dual core intel cpu - he reports, using the same huge map settings, a waiting time between turns of max 30 sec in later game eras. He runs a win 7 64 bit and has 4 GB RAM.

i am wondering if Civ V has a built in hatred towards the i7 cpu series?

cosminerul said:

pretty much the same issue as the OP - no crashes at i am wondering if Civ V has a built in hatred towards the i7 cpu series?

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I would try disabling HT (hyperthreading) and EIST (energy saving features) in the BIOS to see whether it makes any difference. Especially the HT feature can sometimes actually have a bad effect on performance.

stormerne said:

Someone can shoot me down for speculating on this but here goes...

I suspect the game engine uses an interpreter rather than compiled code. (I apologise for the techie term; I was a software pro for a few decades.) If the flight simulators that I worked in teams building 20 years ago ran like that, no airline would have bought them. The complexity is less in Civ5 than a flight simulator and, though your hardware may be less powerful, it should still be able to work out what to draw in a split second, even if your graphics card won't display it instantly.

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You could be right! Civ 4 also had appalling performance problems on release. I assumed a lot of this was the move to Python, which is an interpreted language considered not suitable for game development by many. Luckily hardware has caught up....

I guess bottleneck code could then be recoded in C++ over time, hence the vast improvements seen in Civ 4 performance. This happened quite quickly, on my PC back then it went from 'unplayable other than 4 civs, small map' to 'good performance with many civs and high graphics options" in less than a year.

However, I believe V had moved from Python to LUA. Python is allegedly way superior to LUA in numeric computation - AI code in other words. I really hope they haven't code the AI in LUA....

The problem seems to be AI code, not graphics code. My guess is that city states have the same performance impact as a full nation. That perhaps they are using the same AI routine, but just with an expansion limitation. So you could try removing, or only having 2 or 3 city states.

I played one game with 8 civs and 0 CS and AI turn seemed fine right through to end game. At a rough guess, taking 2 - 3 seconds per turn compared to upwards of 15 seconds at end game with 8 civs and 16 city states (the default). The trouble is that switching CS off unbalances the game quite badly.

I'd like to see the whole CS concept revamped such that it is possible to switch them off (like Vassals in 4). And rather than have a set number, they should evolve naturally so you are never sure how many (if any) there are. They should also be able to grow to full nations....but that's another story.

I think turning on 'fast moves' (no 'walking' animation) would help in this situation, but the option is not in civ 5..! grr.
I also played a large map and late on most city states and AI's were still around. I too had 30-90 secs turns.
It's not that it's slow, it's just that it takes a few secs for each AI to move which all adds up.
I'm sticking to small/standard sized maps which are much faster.

charon2112 said:

To the OP: How much ram do you have? and what kind of video card...?

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I have 5GB RAM and GeForce GTX 275 GPU.

man-erg said:

However, I believe V had moved from Python to LUA.

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Thank you. Case proven. To quote the LUA website:

Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

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Yeah well we can hope that Civ5 one day makes it out of prototype status.

Would someone try an experiment with me? Load a mid game save and make note of map size/details in DX11 on standard settings. Then do the same on DX9 with standard settings and time several identical turns to compare. I'll do a few later today and will graph them for everyone to see which options make differences. No strategic zoom for this test please.

Now, I am addict into Civ5, but I have a trouble, each time I load a saved game, the game speed will definitely slow down. I bought a brand-new computer for Civ5, which cost me about 3000$, I don't think it is my computer problem. But I don't why?

eoc said:

Now, I am addict into Civ5, but I have a trouble, each time I load a saved game, the game speed will definitely slow down. I bought a brand-new computer for Civ5, which cost me about 3000$, I don't think it is my computer problem. But I don't why?

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I merged your post into a thread where people are having similar problems, hopefully their answers help you.

Try re-starting Civ and loading your file from the Main Menu.

daudi81 said:

Directx 9, 10, 11 give me all the same performance speeds. I have everything maxed out on the detail section, and I'm guessing if I lower something I may get better performance - what do you guys suggest? What do you lower to get the most bang for the buck performance/image quality?

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I lower "shadows", always go for that first.
They require the most processing power out of the bunch, with shadows on low and everything else on high i with my dinky duocore am running the game fine even on large maps.

Turns in the "late" era's range from 20 seconds to 30 seconds, depending on how much vision i have on the map itself.

stormerne said:

Thank you. Case proven. To quote the LUA website:

Yeah well we can hope that Civ5 one day makes it out of prototype status.

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Python and Lua are comparable. They have strengths and weaknesses; Lua's strengths make it better suited as a solution for the particular problems they're trying to solve. The reason they use either is specifically because it makes modding much, much, much easier, not because they're using it for rapid prototyping. It enables many of the mods you see around (though not the giant megamods like Rhyes or FFH, which could exist with only C++ because they're run by programmers with a significant team in support). In short, Lua is not the problem (though specific things being located in Lua when they should have been located in the C++ might be one problem).

The reason Firaxis games have optimization problems is that their development methodology is straight out of the 1980s - they want designer/programmers who will work relatively independently to implement and prove out features, and then they go back and look at everything from the big picture. There's a huge difference between how a designer with programming chops builds a system and how a software engineer builds it, and while their development methodology is really good at getting fun, innovative games built without being mired in paperwork (Civ III IV and V, the updates to Colonization, Pirates!, and Railroad! being great examples), it's really bad at creating polished, bug-free, well-optimized software.

Long story short, I guarantee there's a massive amount of optimization possible just in the C++ portions of Civ Vs code.

The long turn processing is because of the AI players. If you start a long, huge game, and set the number of City States to 0, you will see a dramatic improvement in the game turn speeds versus the same size game with AI Civs and CSs.

It has little to do with system specs. The delay between turns is you waiting for each civ, city state, and barbarian 'alliance' to move in turn. Later game means more units moving.

Right now the only way to "fix it" is to include fewer civs/city states. In mp for example I've found small map, 6 players, 8 city states to be a pretty good pace.

It's an obvious design flaw and they need "fast unit slide" or some such patched in, unless someone knows something I don't.

Malkaviel said:

It has little to do with system specs. The delay between turns is you waiting for each civ, city state, and barbarian 'alliance' to move in turn. Later game means more units moving.

Right now the only way to "fix it" is to include fewer civs/city states. In mp for example I've found small map, 6 players, 8 city states to be a pretty good pace.

It's an obvious design flaw and they need "fast unit slide" or some such patched in, unless someone knows something I don't.

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Agreed. This is all about moving units. Relaxing the 1UPT rule is, IMO, the only solution to this. By allowing units to move simultaneously they can take advantage of multi-core CPUs. Right now, everything has to happen sequentially.

One thing which would help is an option to disable (some? all?) screen redraw in the inter-turn. It's cool to watch units truck on by but it gets lame real quick - and it the redraw does take time. Apparently this doesn't happen in the Strategic View but I shouldn't have to switch to that at the end of every turn.