Insane Civ IV System Requirements announced

[ancestral]

It's my understanding the RAM requirement is for the whole system. Besides which, would you be doing anything else besides playing Civ IV at the same time?

The Aspyr Game Agent hasn't been updated yet, but when it does, you'll be able to find out if you meet the requirements or not for Civ IV.

Download the program here.

 

[Gatekeeper]

Hmm. Well, if the RAM requirement is for the entire system, then it's reasonable.

Regarding multi-tasking, I do it a lot, even at home. Sometimes I get bored of playing a Civ game, take a break and browse the Internet, or resume work on one of my unpublished "novels" (I fancy myself something of a writer on occasion). That's why I intend to max out the RAM on the new Intel iMac I get, and upgrade the VRAM to 256MB. That should future-proof the machine for, oh, six to eight months.

Gatekeeper

 

[awb]

Um, is this for real? Can we get any comment from Brad about this? How the hell is any respectable share of the Mac community even going to be able to RUN Civ 4?

Summary: AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

[ancestral]

I stand corrected. You can't meet these req's with a Mac mini Intel either.

 

[AlanH]

Regarding multi-tasking, I do it a lot, even at home. Sometimes I get bored of playing a Civ game, take a break and browse the Internet, or resume work on one of my unpublished "novels"

Me too, but OS X is very effective at multitasking as well, using virtual memory. So long as you have space on your hard drive it swaps programs and data between memory and disk in the background. You don't need real memory to keep lots of programs running, as long as you are prepared to wait a few seconds when you switch back to one that has been on the back burner for a while and has lots of data to pull back into RAM. Civ just drops back to disk to make way.

But I repeat, i GByte is worth having for its performance effects, regardless of Civ4. It's as good as a CPU upgrade, and far cheaper.

 

[Gatekeeper]

Well, I'm definitely maxing out the Intel iMac's RAM and, besides that, I don't do much with movies, photos or music, so my HD won't exactly be filled to the brim, either. IOW, I'd better *not* have memory issues!

Gatekeeper

 

[one_hoop]

Pretty depressing. Tell me about the Boot Camp option again???

Anyone have a computer that'll run it in Colorado who's making the purchase? It'd be nice to test drive a $3050 game!


M@

 

[Nixnutz]

Shees.....I'm certainly outta the picture on CIV. My poor ol' 1gig G4 upgraded Beige box isn't in the same universe.

Heck, I've gotta do some upgrades before I get C3C......

 

[Dudedudeyo]

My G5 makes the recommened execpt it only has 1.8 Ghz. Well at least i can play Civ4

 

[pjdodd]

I agree the system requirements are ridiculous...I work as a graphic designer and only one mac in the studio is a G5 that can play Civ4...the home market for this game has been completely obliterarted.

I think typical home market specs are G4, 1Ghz 512meg ram...32mb video memory (basically covers almost everything for the last 3/4 years).

Aspyr have not just lost the plot in this one, but also the study notes, film adaptation, academic analyses and one wonders what has gone wrong...well when this game doesn't sell on the mac perhaps the morons (executives) will sit round a table and wonder themselves.

The system specs: A complete balls-up.

 

[pjdodd]

Additional note: where is the forum for Civ 4 Mac??

I'm tired of putting posts for Civ 4 mac in the Civ3 section...come on moderators, you've known this version was coming since November 2005 and no bloody forum!!!!

 

[promethean_beta]

I think typical home market specs are G4, 1Ghz 512meg ram...32mb video memory (basically covers almost everything for the last 3/4 years).

Well... your quoted specs would fail to meet the minimum system requirements, much less the recommended requirements for the PC version.

Minimum system requirements for the PC:

Processor: 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent

Video: DirectX 9.0c-compatible 64 MB video card with Hardware T&L support ( GeForce 2/Radeon 7500 or better)

Recommended System Requirements for the PC:

Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent

Video: 128 MB Video Card w/ DirectX 8 support (pixel & vertex shaders)

So yeah, it's frustrating that the specs are above what my present computer could handle, but if I were a PC user, I would have been in the same boat 8 months ago.

 

[Beamup]

Aspyr have not just lost the plot in this one, but also the study notes, film adaptation, academic analyses and one wonders what has gone wrong...well when this game doesn't sell on the mac perhaps the morons (executives) will sit round a table and wonder themselves.

Let's be realistic here. The people at Aspyr are not morons - far from it. And if you go back and read Brad's previous comments, there appeared to me to be a tone suggesting he was hopeful the sysreqs could turn out significantly lower.

My personal speculation is that the project was started in the hope that the sysreqs could be gotten significantly lower, thereby increasing the potential market. Once it became clear that this wasn't going to be possible, the project was almost done anyway, so they went ahead and released it.

But if you think the folks at Aspyr either don't fully understand the implications of these sysreqs or that they're happy about it, you're so completely off base that you're not only out of the ballpark, you're entirely off the planet.

Let's also keep in mind that, overall, these sysreqs aren't all that high. They're high for a TBS specifically, sure. But they're well in line with other big new titles. (CoD2, for example.)

 

[Nicci]

@beamup
good point about aspyr not being morons. they release Civ4 for a small market, but the market will grow. they will not make a lot of money on this one, but go ahead anyway.
the sysreq just fall in my iMac G5, so i'm happy.

 

[pjdodd]

@beamup
they release Civ4 for a small market, but the market will grow. they will not make a lot of money on this one, but go ahead anyway.

That's my point...it doesn't make financial sense to release a game for a very small market...and the number of people with Macs that meet the minimum is too small to surely break even. I'm not an economist so I'm guessing, but have been with macs and the mac market for nearly 20 years.

Therefore I can add with reasonable confidence that unlike PC users, Mac owners are not going to charge headlong for upgrade macs etc for just one game. Well I'm not.

Lastly I think that the comparison with the PC specs just doesn't compare...look at the comparison between Civ3 on PC and Mac for example. Crass numerical comparisons of processor speed, ram and video cards do not equate. Therefore when a turn based game says it needs 1.8 Ghz G5 then I am forced to conclude that Aspyr have ballsed-up and should look again at their coding.

I am slightly optimistic that the end specs will drop but if they don't there is the faint hope of the game containing options to turn off a lot of the visual gimmicks.

 

[JoAT]

The more I look at the numbers, as well as past comments by Brad on the web, the more this makes sense to me.

I've seen lot's of game developers in the past talk about there sometimes being no substitute for raw MHz when porting PC games to the Mac. (This conversation was a little more relavent/important when Macs were languishing with 500MHz G4s while the rest of the industry was smoking along with 1GHz+ PIIIs and such, but still holds true today.) Sometimes system requirements can come down during the porting process, sometimes they can't. So let's start from there.

Now, look at all the reports that have peppered the web since Boot Camp was released that show framerate disparrities between the Mac and PC versions or games. (PC versions under XP are getting substantially better performance than the same game under OS X on the same machine.) Hypothesis there is that OS X is "vastly unoptimized"/"incomplete"/"broken" for games. OS X's sluggish game performance could be causing the bump UP in system requirements.

or

Brad has talked a little about all of the different libraries he has had to work on to create Mac versions where none existed. Some of these libraries may be very mature on or optimized for Windows. Who knows what kind of performance hit the game might be taking from use of these ported libraries, or from the sound switch to OpenAL. There could be a bump UP in requirements from that.

and

Add to the fact that Glenda has stated on several occasions (regarding several games) that Aspyr likes to post system requirments that are more conservative/realistic...

And here we sit.

 

[awb]

I like Aspyr too. But these system requirements are absurd. And no one has come here to answer questions about them.

 

[AlanH]

Additional note: where is the forum for Civ 4 Mac??

I'm tired of putting posts for Civ 4 mac in the Civ3 section...come on moderators, you've known this version was coming since November 2005 and no bloody forum!!!!

The fact is that the volume of activity has not justified a separate forum to date, not surprisingly, since there is no product to talk about yet. Generic Civ4 discussions are already catered for in the main Civ4 forums. Other than system requirements, there is no other Mac-specific discussion to be had yet. This thread is the first one to generate any significant post volumes ... mostly by people saying they won't be able to run it.

 

[Beamup]

That's my point...it doesn't make financial sense to release a game for a very small market...and the number of people with Macs that meet the minimum is too small to surely break even. I'm not an economist so I'm guessing, but have been with macs and the mac market for nearly 20 years.

You're assuming Aspyr must be omniscent and able to predict ahead of time what the sysreqs will be. This is not at all true.

Again, what I think may have happened is that they took on the project thinking that the sysreqs would end up being lower. Then it ended up not being possible to get them as low as they'd thought. But since optimization and tweaking are typically the very last things to happen, the great majority of the cost of the port had already been spent. And so it made sense to go ahead and finish up anyway.

Also remember that it's perfectly possible to make a good profit off of a game with those sysreqs - CoD2 is certainly expected to do well, for example, last I heard. TBS is less popular than FPS, true, but it's not like there are so few Macs out there that meet the specs that a profit is impossible.

So those are the two bottom lines. First, nobody could have known for sure how the sysreqs were going to end up until very late in the development process. Second, the sysreqs are not that atypical of many games these days - serious TBS gamers can simply no longer get away with using MUCH older systems than all the other serious gamers around, it appears.

 

[bio_hazard]

I hope some brave souls with G4's will give this game a try (and post their experiences here!). My impression from the PC version was that it was a) the video card, and b) amount of RAM that determined how well the game functioned. Are the g4 and g5 chips really so different that we'd expect the game not to run at all on a g4?