New video Card kills waiting times?

I just upgraded to the Radeon RX9550 video card I noticed my waiting time is very noticably shorter in Huge Maps/lots of civs games for civ3. I heard beside turning off animations, which never helped much, waiting times were not fixable rather a civ3 design problem. Has anyone else seen improvments with massive epics using this card.

i dont see how that can be since wait times are dependent on cpu,ram,hard drive not vid card

explain?

civ 4 maybe, but civ 3 doesn't utilize gfx at all.

Good some info. I will now explain. With Civ3 complete I expierenced long waiting times on many different types of mods all when I expanded the globe and # of civs signifigently . I bought the Radeon RX9550 card so I could play Civ 4. It did the trick fixxing that problem.You should no I only have 206 ram.

Lo and behold! after upgrading the card, my waiting times for Civ Complete had bin cut drastictly.

I wouldn't waste my time b.s 'ing anyone I just wanted to see if by chance someone who recently got the same card noticed this. Im trolling some sparse waters but its worth a try

The only other change to my system occured when a strange expansion of usable virtual memory was autmatically allocated after I exited Civ4 the 1st time I got it to work. It said "your system is low on virtual memory currently expanding ....blah blah" (can't remeber exactly)

Im not sure if this particular Radeon product is a graphics card or a video card ( Im sure others will though) or whats the dif. but things are a lot faster now. Thats no lie.
What else could it be? If its impossible theres something in the new Radeon that speed things up in civ3. I guess its a unexplained phenomina. cause im not dilusional I swear!

Before you bought the 9550, did you use onboard graphics? The only explanation I can think of is that an onboard graphics chip was stealing system RAM.

Why yes, yes I did as a matter of fact. but my computers a 2002, 1.9 G Dell not a dino anyway.

Wait!!. could this mean that some of those peaple that complained about slow times between turns (and there was a lot of them) very well could have had the same onboard junk in their trunk
Why did all of those peole say there wasn't anything that could be done when there really was a fix, all along?"(for some people at least)

I bet theirs tons of civ fans out there that don't realize their cheap factory onboard G cards are the whole reason behind all their troubles. When peaple cried about those horrible long wait times no one though to consider what you did? jerks! I say!!

Anyone who bothered to complain surly would have invested in a new card if they knew the differance it makes. This thread could potentially have saved countless minutes for gamers around the globe. t

inboard cards do a fine job of handling the graphics requirements, but I fear many have a "huge" drawback most people don't know about

Thank you Zakharov I know you are right. I just wish I knew about this earlier.

There is a simple solution for those people you mention (in case they are reading this thread). They can go into the BIOS settings and lower the amount of system RAM used by the onboard graphics chip. I wouldn't be surprised if it set at a default 64MB, which is ridiculous for such a low powered gpu. For Civ 3 this can safely be dropped to 8MB.

Sometimes it's not just the card, but the memory, too. If you have 1 gig of RAM, Civ3 (and Civ4) should work fine.

Zakharov said:

There is a simple solution for those people you mention (in case they are reading this thread). They can go into the BIOS settings and lower the amount of system RAM used by the onboard graphics chip. I wouldn't be surprised if it set at a default 64MB, which is ridiculous for such a low powered gpu. For Civ 3 this can safely be dropped to 8MB.

Click to expand...

That's not always possible. Mine's greyed out. I saw on some reviewsite that someone who bought the same puter as me worked with the tech support for a couple of hours and was unable to change it.

The BIOS reports 64mb, but everything I see on line says I have 256mb. :shrug:

Mr Turner, for cases like yours did it help when you upgraded your G card to something like the one I mentioned. Or did you already have a same or better one. Just asking because my bro's a computer tech for a lumber mill mine coulda been greyed out to. cause he couldn't do nutin for me before the new RADEON But Im stylin now. No doubt I don't no much bout the computer field Im just trying to narrow things down for other people who read this.
If a grey out occurs with your onboard Can diffrent G cards undo the greyout? Can any anyone anwser this?

I've never upgraded my video card. I'm still using onboard. I may or may not, depending.

I would imagine it would be different from mobo to mobo. But then, I'm not that technical, so I don't know.

Yep just as I suspected my option to lower the amount of ram was greyed out with my onboard. I uninstalled my new graphics card and switched back to the old setup, which was made after Civ 3 was released!, just to prove this.

I bought this Dell during the explosive "Dude get a Dell " expansion era Serves me right for listning to that annoying guy Unless my computer's a one in a kind, this could explain the rash of slow turn complaints around this globe at this time.

In Conclusion it was the RADEONX 9550 card that unlocked the system ram menu the onboard variety was blocking for some reason,

Next, my computer made full use of all available memory automatically when I loaded Civ4 with the Onboad junk otta the way.

This explains than, why when I went to play Civ3 complete again, The turns were faster without me doing anything. If more Virtual Mem =faster loading.

The mysteries solved then!!! My Dell, along with countless others is guilty of coming equipt with a hog of a onboard G card that made it unusally slower than other systems and unable to correct itself. What a time wasting travisty!

Case closed Next!