How it cost me nearly £200 to make civ4 work?

[applelover]

Just writing to say that after trying nearly every fix that was offered within this forum I have finally got civ4 to work and finished a game on a huge map (10 civs). Starting with a Geforce 64mb video card and just 256mb RAM things weren't looking good. First I bought 512mb of RAM which improved performance greatly, so I thought what the hell why not treat myself to a new video card. Not being a man who needs perfect graphics and one whose finances were somewhat limited I opted for the reasonably priced Geforce 6200 256mb. Unfortunately I was about to receive a hard kick in the balls. With my new card I soon realised that the huge map save game I had used with my old card, just 19 turns from the end, wouldn't even get to the next turn without CTD or worse. Not only that, games on smaller maps much earlier on were also dying in a similar fashion with the most alarming sign in CTD being the state of my desktop. The resolution was always turned right down and all the colours on my tool bar were duller and my wallpaper was now a mix of red, yellow, white and grey. After constant dialogue with the helplines and much time reading and applying the fixes of many on this forum (who are generally the most helpful people one could wish to interact with) I began to lose hope, nothing was working. This is where the obsessive part of my character kicked in, I WOULD PLAY CIV EVEN IF IT WAS THE LAST THING THAT I DID. I decided that it was time to empty my wallet again a got myself another gig of RAM. Joy was mine when I managed to finish my game and get that first victory under my belt (admitedly only on noble), without anymore crashes and with reasonable performance.

This may not work for everybody but it has made the frustration, that has been a constant niggle to me, go away. While I must say that civ 4 is a fabulous game to play, I think that many of us deserve an apology from its makers. The detrimental effect that upgrading my video card had suggests that there are serious compatibilty problems with this software especially with Nvidia cards. I must admit that I say this with all the technical knowledge of a gerbil, but in this case even the logic of a gerbil can arrive at this conclusion whether ultimately wrong or right. There all also the hundreds of other issues regarding bugs of many diffrent kinds that are all over this forum, but there is also the RAM issue which in my case proved crucial.

If my fix provides valuable to others, then the main issue is that the makers of this game have lied to us over the recommended specifications required to play this game. I have a 2.66ghz P4, and after my first two purchases (which I understood were neccessary) I had 768 RAM and a 256mb video card, this was clearly above the required. Surely selling a game claiming that only 512mb is required to a mainstream consumer base is unethical, especially when predictions say that it will be the largest selling PC game, here in the UK, this Christmas (or winter holiday for all you Americans). As a gerbil I would very much like to read the thoughts of those more knowledgable of computers (and with better spelling and grammar) than me. I only worry that this series has become a whore to the now even richer capitalists that pushed it out, full of bugs and even worse without telling its loyal followers the truth. I apologise for the length of this message but being £200 less well off has really got me in the mood to rant.

p.s. can anyone explain to me why my ancient 64mb card performed better with 768mb Ram than my new one?

P4 2.66Ghz, Geforce 6200 256mb 64bit, 1.5gig RAM

 

[Underseer]

World of Warcraft similarly pulled a fast one on users.

The side of the box for WoW reports that the game will run on a computer with 256MB. However, even with all the graphics settings turned way down, visiting a large city (and in that game, you pretty much have to go to large cities frequently) produces an experience that is as painful as gouging your own eyes out with broken popsicle sticks. With a large number of players on the screen, your video card tries juggling a very large number of textures. Eventually it starts shuffling textures off into system RAM because it runs out of room. Then your main system RAM (with help from the bloated Windows XP) runs out of space and starts shuffling things off to the hard drive, resulting in the obvious. The only way around this is to have a video card with a decent amount of memory and at least 768MB of main RAM. Needless to say, a lot of WoW players were really angry about this.

Sounds like whatever is going on with Civilization 4 is even worse, particularly with huge maps.

(I wonder if anti-aliasing also affects this since [as I understand it] it does consume a certain amount of the video card's memory and there are generally a lot of overlapping objects on the screen at once.)