Speed, CPU, RAM

[stonecoldt]

There's been a lot of discussion about speed on this board - Civ3 is definitely *slow*, especially if you play huge maps, 16 civs like I do. I wanted to share some performance issues regarding the game that some of my recent PC upgrades have highlighted.

CPU - The time to process a turn is mostly dependent upon the CPU, and faster CPUs mean faster turn speeds. A gigahertz CPU is needed to handle the later stages of a huge game, and it will still take 5-6 minutes to process the turn. That's from "press enter" to first production decision. After handling production, you'll wait for 2-3 more minutes before you can move you're first piece.

RAM - Interface issues are dependent upon RAM. If you don't have enough, the system will swap during things like found city, diplomacy, civilopedia, etc, and then swap back when you're done to process it. Not having enough RAM will affect turn speed a little, but will generally make the game *feel* sluggish. How much RAM is enough? Win2k reports that the my system is using about 280 megs of physical memory, so I'd recommend 300+ megs to play a huge game and still have a little left over to surf the web or check email during delays.

How I figured this out - when I started playing Civ3, I played on a Dell 3500 laptop (celeron 366, 128meg RAM). Then I got a Dell 4100 (P3-1ghz, 128 meg RAM), and then later upgraded it to 320 megs.

If people want to explore this further, here's my suggestion - upload a savegame, civ 1.17, marla's map 1.13, huge, 16 civs, and also post the time it takes to run a turn (from press enter to first production decision) as well as your system config. (I'd do this myself, but my save game is 613k and this board has a limit of 500k :-( ) Maybe we can come up with a civ3 benchmark.

[ebolav35]

I appreciate the thread, but my slowness of the game is not dependent on any of those factors. My hardware is tweaked, and optimal. Rather, my UNITS move in slow motion ever since I installed XP...i.e. them mining, building roads, etc. is incredibly sluggish, even on a small 2 player map...