Insane lag.

I am playing a huge, pangea map.. I am mid game and the lag is jusst horrid and occasionally locks up with task manager reporting the game isn't responding , even after 30 minutes.

but every turn has huge lag of a few seconds to over a minute. It completely stops all animations and appears locked. but the cursor works.

I have a dual core i5 655K processor with hyper-threading on, 4GB ram, and 5670 video card. I copied the save to my USB stick and put it on my main rig with a quad core i7 920 with hyper-threading, 6gb ram, and a 5870 OC version and the lag is worse!!!!! What the heck is going on.

I have included a saved gamed for others to test. Let me know if it lags out on you as well, or if it runs smoothly.

PATCH 1.0.0.62 SEEMS TO HAVE FIXED THE MAJOR LAG SPIKES

on my lap i have i3 + 5650 + 3 gb and on your save it does the same thing you are describeing ... i don't know what is the problem ,it runs pretty smooth on the map until end turn or exit a city that's when it hungs for 30 seconds

Moderator Action: Moved to bug reports.

Probably an AI thing, i guess.

I am starting to get lag everywhere now. First, my turns were taking a long time, now they lockup for 1min 45secs plus the normal lag between turns.

I just captured Berlin last turn, Dortmund this turn and it sat at the annex screen for 1min 45secs for each city.

A couple of turns ago I was gifted a unit and it lagged for 1min 45secs as it was scrolling the map to my next unit. It just lagged in the middle of fog of war that has been busted.


I thought it was just the AIs lagging, but I'm not so sure now.

I have an i7 920, 6gb ram, 5870 oc 1gb version. this lag just seems to get more random and last longer the further I play this huge map. I'm at turn 302 (1864), lag was getting bad at turn 250ish of about 30secs lockups plus the normal game lag between turn.

Have you tried rebooting to see if it improves? I guess huge maps are pretty intensive (although your system is reasonable)

Yes, I have rebooted on several occasions. I have been playing this game for a few days now.

I started on my dual core i5 655k, 4gb, and integrated video and starting getting a little lag early on then decided to install my 5670 and lag was about the same still, but the game looked nicer (I used vga adapter in integrated video and hdmi on 5670). lag started getting worse around turn 250. I then copied a save to the current i7 system and the lag actually got worse! wtf? maybe it just felt worse since I was expecting improvement. but it was at least the same again.

Now it's just insane at turn 303. Maybe I'll connect my second monitor to this machine and see if it is cpu or GPU maxed causing the lag or what not.

Are there any game files I can view for for added insight on the issue(s)?

I suspect that its the AI routines as the number of units / cities etc grows. Not sure if there is much that can be done about it (other than play smaller maps)

It's absolutely not a load issue. If I play the exact same game on two largely different computers and get the exact same results, then their is another factor. What that factor is I have no clue. Plus it happens during movement with the exact same lag period. Plus conquering cities. Those should take almost no resources at all.

I just finished connecting the other monitor and win 7 resource monitor reports strange things. I see that CivV dx11 exe is not responding during the freeze up lag and my video card goes idle. all my hyper-threading cores go idle, then all my remaining 4 cores run at 25% which means it seems to be only using 1 core. and that's what it feels likes too.

I would think the code would also use the GPU to calculate a lot of cpu actions to offset the load of the CPU (Kind of like Physics cards do), but that doesn't seem to happen either as the GPU is idle (although a very light load will keep the GPU in power saving mode)

CivV DX11 exe seems to run only 26-27 threads. Even during bad lag.

Let me know of any other things to try.

I think its just the price you have to pay for playing huge maps. I'll merge this with your other thread on the subject.

Edit:

Did some trials on my game (i7 860, 4 GB RAM). I am also getting only 4 logical cores being loaded. I note that there is a config.ini setting:


So should load more than 4 cores. Memory usage was peaking at around 3 GB. Windows 7 64 bit, so shouldn't be hitting reserved memory limits, either.

Did you try playing my save from other thread? I notice only the hyper-thread cores are working under a load. at idle it shows 4 cores at 20%. Between turns it show u9 to around 40% and all 8 threads working. I get the same on memory as well. for you though, the 4gb may become an issue as this is a 32-bit program which means you may tap out under 3gb. I have 6gb on this rig and should be OK to 3gb, but over 3gb I don't think you can get far past, if at all. 32-bit is going to really limit this game I think. Hopefully they release a 64-bit version as things should play out more smoothly. well, in theory - lol

I''m at turn 306 and my turn times are getting worse fast. I'm at 2min 20secs now on each stutter and it is doing it on skipping my units turn using the space bar.

I forgot to note the lag spikes occur during the barbs turn evey single time. If there are no barbs active for me, it happens just after city-state turns.

The other lags are just random but fairly often, but not every turn. maybe every 3-4 turns.

I just tried turning steam's offline lode and disabling internet access and no difference, so steam doesn't seem to interfere.

I have a spare hard drive, so I'm going to try a fresh install of windows 7 ult x64 and see what happens with a clean slate.

well, new install of windows didn't help. It did cut my time from 2.5minutes to 2 minutes.

I reconnected my ssd and overclocked my i7 920 from 2.66Ghz to 4.2GHz and lowered my times from 2.5 to 1.6 minutes. which seems to support only 1 core is being used during/after barbs.

I enable strategic view and times went up from 1.6 to 2.0 minutes. I figured it would go lower.

MarkJohnson said:

I reconnected my ssd and overclocked my i7 920 from 2.66Ghz to 4.2GHz and lowered my times from 2.5 to 1.6 minutes. which seems to support only 1 core is being used during/after barbs.

Click to expand...

That actually makes sense. Because its a turn-based strategy, one move affects the next, so I guess the AI logic has to be linear - probably it is sequential, and would therefore only need a single thread.

ainwood said:

That actually makes sense. Because its a turn-based strategy, one move affects the next, so I guess the AI logic has to be linear - probably it is sequential, and would therefore only need a single thread.

Click to expand...

To some extent that may be correct, but not to this extent. There is a serious bug in the code. the turn seems to be over at the barbarian phase. the AIs go first, then the city states, then the barbs, then the turn should be over? This is where the lag is, after everything seems to be done.

also, it doesn't explain the lag spikes during troop movement, fortifying, etc...

new problems are arising. Now every turn during the first next turn phase for the unfinished movement of troops, now gets the lag spikes, plus after the barbs, plus any random lag spike.

I have task manager running and every time lag spikes occur it reports "Not Responding". also the lag times seems to increase every turn by about 5 secs. currently at turn 349(1920AD) it takes over 4 minutes for each lag spike, I finally put the game on my dual core processor and overclocked it to 4.4GHz and now it takes about 3minutes per lag spike.

I've included a previous save that has given me lag spikes at the start of the next few following turns. There will be two lag spikes, one at the start of the next turn phase and another in the middle of the turn. be prepared for long waits.

well, the save was older than I though, so I created a current save from 1920AD.

Finally on turn 1951AD the game locked up and I can't continue without constant lag and lockups.

Now I have started a new game and I got all the way to turn 266 without issue, but this time I left my system running without turning it off and no saves. It ran out at 1.95gb and think t may be hitting the max since this is a 32-bit program. I'll have to find a way to check this for win 7 64-bit. I thought it was sewt to 3gb by default. maybe not.

I've restarted the game and I'm on turn 266 without issues still. I get 30-40 second between turns as I'd expect with 12 AIs and 24 CS plus barbs. I just takes a while to processes all this. but zero lag spikes at all. so I'm sure it is the game save everyone is having.

I'll update more as I go along.

I too get a lot AI turn lag. The later game goes on the more lag I get (huge earth map, 13 civ's 6 city states) no crashes yet but still early in my game :/

Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q6700 @ 2.66GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Graphic's: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512mb Vram
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Steam civ5 v1.0.0.20

Bummer, it locked up at turn 307. Only 47 turns and civ V was only using 1.2GB this time. I was starting to get lag spikes as well after about turn 275 or so. None lasted over 10 seconds, but the whole screen froze the whole time, and all after the barbs again.

What turn are you at Boney?

I can also confirm this behavior on my own PC (which is admittedly somewhat slower).
The annex/puppet/raze screen also causes (75% of the time) 20-30s lags here, and when I 'wait' units there will be additional 10-15s lags randomly, sometimes more than once during a turn.

Currently playing marathon on a Huge Pangaea map.
I've been mucking around with the game a bit, and the problems mostly seem to be coming from the non-CS AI. I'd killed all other players by turn 130 or so, and I've been playing solo with CS and barbarians (quite a few, for some reason). There are no more intra-turn lags, and turn endings take about 30s (quite long considering the CS aren't really doing anything), with about 4 new barbarians spawning every turn.

well, now at turn 340ish my system all of a sudden starting getting lag spikes of 30seconds from the 8ish seconds the turn before.

Now, I'm at turn 358 or 359 with 1minute lag spikes and it has locked up completely. I was able to alt+tab to the desktop and fire up task manager and again it reports civ v dx11 exe is at 1.9GB. I think it is crashing at the 2gb barrier. although there may be a memory leak, or the game just needs a lot of memory as the game progresses.

I'll try the /3gb switch from the MAF thread and see if it works for win 7 64bit.

I have nearly same specs except 1 generation behind on GPU. The freezing behavior starts up around turn 250, near turn 300 I no longer have the will to sit through and finish the game.

I remember there was some sort of large address aware mode that you could toggle in the .exe for other games with similar problems (it was an unofficial way to patch X3:TC till the developers released an official patch, there was also a mod in Fallout 3 that did the same thing). I guess I'll give that try.

Its frustrating having to play the game is such a limited way (small/standard maps) when the game is already gutted/streamlined.

Edit: nvm, LAA already enabled http://imgur.com/1Dml4.jpg Guess its time to put down Civ 5 till patches.