How to make Civ4 for Mac work better

Edit: I'm going to temper this a bit and say that this info is still not 100% solid. I don't want to encourage anyone to downgrade OSX unless they feel like being guinea pigs.

The short and sweet answer is simple: downgrade to 10.4.6.

Here's a breakdown of our breakdown.

Missing sounds: we took it in the shorts with 10.4.7's CoreAudio and OpenAL updates, as these broke a lot of Civ4's sounds. They should work pretty good in 10.4.6. Edit: seems this may be premature and that an earlier version of OSX (still not nailed down) works better. I can confirm that it works good in 10.4.0, but I want to try incremental upgrades to see where the line in the sand is drawn.

Kernel panics on Intel: The initial 10.4.7 release with the busted OpenGL is causing hard lockups and kernel panics on Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros. Updating to the fixed 10.4.7 (the "a" release) or downgrading to 10.4.6 will fix this.

Poor performance on PPC: turns out that the CoreAudio/OpenAL issues that are causing silent sounds are also causing performance to go in the toilet on PPC Macs (not so much on Intel). Downgrading to 10.4.6 should give you a performance increase. Edit: same as above for the audio caveat.

We're still gathering more data, but so far this is what we've got. If anyone has contrary data, please reply. My head is still spinning a bit from all this - it's a little unbelievable to fathom. I suppose I should be glad that at least there are no reported issues with keyboards and mice not working.

Apparently I was due for a blast of bad karma, so I'm going to start playing the lottery with the expectation that some massive positive compensation is headed my way.

Brad, not to burst your bubble, but I just tested 10.4.6 on a fresh install, and I wasn't getting any sounds. I had ambient music, but no sound effects. I had my scouts fight some lions just to test it out.

I did have some sounds in 10.4 without any upgrading.

Brad Oliver said:

We're still gathering more data, but so far this is what we've got. If anyone has contrary data, please reply. My head is still spinning a bit from all this - it's a little unbelievable to fathom. I suppose I should be glad that at least there are no reported issues with keyboards and mice not working.

Click to expand...

I've got a dual 2.7GHz G5 with a Radeon 9650 card, 256MB VRAM, and Mac OS X 10.4.6. I'm seeing all those issues...

* No unit sounds. Well, once I did hear a plane on patrol, but that was just after loading a saved game, and the noise went away once I actually did anything.
* Glitchy music. The background music stutters a lot. I know when a popup is coming, because the music abruptly halts a good second before it pops. Sometimes the background music keeps playing when a foreign leader pops up, so I get a mash of both.
* Zooming out to the point where clouds appears is badly broken. The globe is covered with bad textures, usually related to the last popup window. Other areas go red or blue or black...
* Both CPUs are pegged at 100% while the game is running. Even if the game isn't the frontmost app and it's sitting there waiting for me to push Return to start a new turn. Neither iDVD nor Final Cut Express use that much CPU.
* General sluggishness. Probably related to above, but navigating the game just seems slow. Doom 3 doesn't seem to have trouble with my hardware, but Civ IV lags like... say, Civ III on a Mac II. As others have posted, running it in a window instead of full screen makes a dramatic improvement.

If you need a test subject, just say the word...

Brad,
How can you tell if you have the "good" revision of 10.4.7?

I second what MacWhiz said... running on a Quad G5 with 2.5 GB RAM... even with all the graphics set at stock, I pan around smoothly (for the most part) but as I move about the world in the beginning, I see a frame jump...

Also, went to 10.4.6 - no music, and really no sound improvements (seemingly) over 10.4.7

It is really unexpected as to why it is so incredibly demanding of my CPUs... like he said, not even encoding a DVD or what not causes my CPUs to this high...

Brad,

I have the good version of 10.4.7 and still get kernel panics with antialiasing multisamples on when moving scouts.

I've installed both the Combo and fixed Delta on my machine but still get the kernel panics reliably with AAMS and scouts while in full screen mode. It's not a problem in windowed mode. Happy to provide any further information you would like to track this down either here or via email.

(15" MacBook Pro)

macwhiz said:

I've got a dual 2.7GHz G5 with a Radeon 9650 card, 256MB VRAM, and Mac OS X 10.4.6. I'm seeing all those issues...

* No unit sounds. Well, once I did hear a plane on patrol, but that was just after loading a saved game, and the noise went away once I actually did anything.
* Glitchy music. The background music stutters a lot. I know when a popup is coming, because the music abruptly halts a good second before it pops. Sometimes the background music keeps playing when a foreign leader pops up, so I get a mash of both.
* Zooming out to the point where clouds appears is badly broken. The globe is covered with bad textures, usually related to the last popup window. Other areas go red or blue or black...
* Both CPUs are pegged at 100% while the game is running. Even if the game isn't the frontmost app and it's sitting there waiting for me to push Return to start a new turn. Neither iDVD nor Final Cut Express use that much CPU.
* General sluggishness. Probably related to above, but navigating the game just seems slow. Doom 3 doesn't seem to have trouble with my hardware, but Civ IV lags like... say, Civ III on a Mac II. As others have posted, running it in a window instead of full screen makes a dramatic improvement.

If you need a test subject, just say the word...

Click to expand...

I'll throw in some of my own info here too. I'm using a MacBook Pro, 2.16GHz, Radeon x1600 256MB VRAM, 1GB RAM, 10.4.7.

* I have the sound issue everyone reports, only background music. I do hear the music change when I zoom in on a city.

* No problems zooming out, but a couple times I had all buildings & objects on the ground turn black. Zooming all the way out, then back in fixed this one.

* Both CPUs at 100% all the time - I don't know that this is really a bug, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

* My nation's banner & unit selection icon (on the bottom of the screen) slowly got more pixelated as I played longer. Eventually the banner disappeared completely. I grabbed a couple screenshots of this: Pic 1 Pic 2

* I had a couple of kernel panics while playing the game. I think they stopped after I installed the fixed 10.4.7 release. Just incase you want it, I saved the kernel panic logs. Panic Log

I was able to reproduce all of these bugs after restarting the game and my computer.

Likewise, I'd be more than happy to act as a tester for these and other bugs. I have an external drive that I can install old releases of the OS on if you want any testing done on previous versions of OS X.

Just for the record, I did some more testing with 10.4 straight up, and it runs much better overall than either 10.4.6 or 10.4.7. I loaded up the game I finished on 10.4.7, and all the ambient music plays, I can scroll out to the clouds with no graphics anomalies, and the gameplay is smoother. There are also sounds. SOUNDS!

Skippy_Kangaroo said:

I have the good version of 10.4.7 and still get kernel panics with antialiasing multisamples on when moving scouts.

Click to expand...

So did you finally do the forced combo update, and does your build version now have the "a" at the end, or did you update some other way?

And for the record, play in a window is way slower than full screen.

jsurpless said:

It is really unexpected as to why it is so incredibly demanding of my CPUs... like he said, not even encoding a DVD or what not causes my CPUs to this high...

Click to expand...

Have you ever played any other 3D games on your Mac? Pretty much all of them should peg at least one CPU.

gfeier said:

Brad,
How can you tell if you have the "good" revision of 10.4.7?

Click to expand...

Open the "About This Mac" dialog, click on 10.4.7. It should show you a build number with an "a" at the end. Note that this is Intel-only. The PPC 10.4.7 update was good from the get-go.

macwhiz said:

As others have posted, running it in a window instead of full screen makes a dramatic improvement.

Click to expand...

From what I read, others have said that windowed mode eliminates the kernel panics on Intel hardware - at a slight performance cost.

You don't appear to be having kernel panics, and you say windowed mode is faster, which is not what the Intel Mac users appear to be saying. How much faster is windowed mode for you?

Brad Oliver said:

So did you finally do the forced combo update, and does your build version now have the "a" at the end, or did you update some other way?

Click to expand...

My update history is:
1)Software Update 10.4.7 (Delta light) - affected by problem files
2)Direct download of full Combo updater - reputedly unaffected
3)Direct download of fixed Delta installer
4)Reaplication of fixed Delta installer in my Admin account (just in case even though it asked for my admin password before updating at step 3)

I have the 'a' and the same OpenGL framework version as you.

Skippy_Kangaroo said:

I have the 'a' and the same OpenGL framework version as you.

Click to expand...

Are you getting actual entries in the panic.log file now? If so, could you post one here or e-mail it to me (brad AT aspyr DOT com)?

Brad Oliver said:

Poor performance on PPC: turns out that the CoreAudio/OpenAL issues that are causing silent sounds are also causing performance to go in the toilet on PPC Macs (not so much on Intel). Downgrading to 10.4.6 should give you a performance increase. Edit: same as above for the audio caveat.

Click to expand...

Hope this info helps. I have the following system:

PowerMac G5 1.8ghz Rev-A (single processor)
1 gig RAM
ATI 9800 Special Edition (256 VRAM)
10.4.7

Performance is pretty terrible, even with 256 megs VRAM. The sound cuts out and if I got similar framerates in a fps the game would be unplayable. In Civ 4, its playable, but it really tries your patience. Hard to really equate sluggishness, but I have a feeling the performance on my system is not exactly what was intended. Let me know if there is other system information that would be helpful.

Brad Oliver said:

You don't appear to be having kernel panics, and you say windowed mode is faster, which is not what the Intel Mac users appear to be saying. How much faster is windowed mode for you?

Click to expand...

Just to be clear, I at least couldn't tell whether windowed mode was faster or not - it was running at full speed in full-screen mode with everything turned up. So AFAICT, windowed mode might well have had superior performance.

Brad Oliver said:

Have you ever played any other 3D games on your Mac? Pretty much all of them should peg at least one CPU.

Click to expand...

I'm not a huge gamer but I have played a few.... namely Warcraft III, Rise of Nations... I understand that these are older games and therefore less taxing

Should Civ IV be taxing 3-4 of the CPUs?

After testing 10.4, 10.4.1, 10.4.2, 10.4.6 and 10.4.7, I found the best performance to be 10.4.1. 10.4.2 played well, but the sounds seemed to be cutting out more than in 10.4.1.

I shut off all the sounds except for Sound Effects, but the only ones that played (even under 10.4.1) were the city building noises... and those were cut off almost in mid noise.

But the ambient sounds and music worked splendidly under 10.4.1, and the gameplay is faster and smoother.

I'm not sure if it's worth messing with, but maybe this information can help you figure out what went wrong in the later builds of Tiger.

It's been a long day in front of the computer intalling and updating... I now have a different version of OS X on four different drives.

Time to do some cleaning.

Brad Oliver said:

Are you getting actual entries in the panic.log file now? If so, could you post one here or e-mail it to me (brad AT aspyr DOT com)?

Click to expand...

Brad -

I actually did get a kernel panic after installing the 10.4.7 'a' build, while running in a window. I have the entry from the panic.log if you want it...