Making BNW To Perform Better On An Older PC

Hello Folks,

I am MPing with my sister BNW, but, she notices that the game is haltingly slow on her end. She runs Vista, and has 2 GB of RAM. I would guess her video card is stock. Yes, she has turned down all settings. And, she uses "enditall" or "smartclose".

Are there ways to make the game run more smoothly, without having to buy more hardware or make an OS upgrade?

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Marc

You're gonna need better hardware in all likelihood, plain and simple. 2GB of RAM isn't gonna cut it, Vista's probably using half of it. Video card I'm also guessing is bad if it's stock, although you don't need a great one for Civ V (my 5770 is almost 3 years old and still does a decent job). Guessing the CPU is also subpar.

My utter piece of -pc runs BNW surprisngly well at a decent 35 fps in SP. it has only 512 MB GPU, 3 gb ram and a 1.2 GHz AMD Mobile CpU. All my setting are minimum btw. I think your sister should upgrade her RAM, as 2 is the minimum for BNW and Vista probably also takes up some, so an upgrade to 4 is recommended. Has she turned off shadows? This is a setting that isn't so clear in the options, and i ony recently found out about it. Added a good 10 frames to my game. For SP, she could install lower textures mod, available in Steam Workshop.

Thanks to both of you for your responses; I will relay on to my sister. Digrosz, I will have her do those additional tweaks.

Regards,

Marc

The best thing you could do is try and run the game windowed and in the lowest resolution possible, assuming just turning all the settings down to low isn't good enough.

Saying the video card is 'stock' really doesn't tell us much though. Could you let us know what model it is? You can do this easily by doing 'run - dxdiag' and then click on the 'display' tab. Also if you could let us know what CPU you have that would be helpful. It should tell you that on the main screen of the dxdiag.

Thanks Red for the windowed tip. Even if I had my sister go get us those pieces of data, it wouldn't really matter; everyone here would still say that she needs to upgrade her OS, her video card, her RAM, her CPU...I think the main thing for her to do is to find techniques to increase her FPS.

Regards,

Marc

About the only things not mentioned is for the old machine run the older version of DirectX and also if minimum settings is still too slow, switch to strategic view.

Always run in strategic mode. That's what I do with my computer. It's next to the minimap.