Official System Requirements

[tokala]

Obviously it will play civ5 just fine (for a laptop). But if you travel a lot, a 17" notebook is quite a bit of luggage. There are 15" notebooks for about half the price and weight that will play civ fine as well.

For example that one.

 

[Barrataurus]

Obviously it will play civ5 just fine (for a laptop). But if you travel a lot, a 17" notebook is quite a bit of luggage. There are 15" notebooks for about half the price and weight that will play civ fine as well.

For example that one.

Thank you! I do appreciate your suggestion.
I work with photography - a fhd 17" monitor is a must for me - and I always keep the heavy bulk in a wheels luggage. Also, I like the alienware design. I was worried about some forums indicating some sort of issue with the crossfire card.

 

[tokala]

OK, if you need a big screen for work, no way around it.
Have overlooked the Crossfire cards; in my opinion those are usually not worth the hassle. There are still unsolved principle technical problems with multi-GPU setups in general, and even a single mobility 5870 should be "good enough" for any game. At worst you will have to lower the settings slightly.
Dual 5870s will produce quite a lot of heat, which will in the confines of a notebook chassis lead to shortened lifetimes of some components.

If you are aiming at Civ5 with that machine, Civ5 is mostly CPU limited, and does not make good use of more than 2 cores, so it will be the CPU that limits your framerate.

 

[Mundungu]

HI
I play on a 2-3 years old DEll Latitude D830 with T7300 2Ghz and only 1 GB Ram
Video NVidia Quadro 140M

The game is very slow on standard view with all settings on low, but the game is still very playable using only the tactical map.

Still I will upgrade to 2 GB RAM and see what happens...

 

[Just Checking]

For me alt-tabbing and playing in windowed mode is producing similiar effects, or even some background program popping up a notification.

Unfortunately with a brand-new in-house game engine, things like that are to be expected, and might take a long time to get ironed out. It could have been worse, as in the Elemental launch desaster.

Re b) With a halfway decent video card like the 3850, on lower graphics settings Civ5 seems to be almost completely CPU limited, and a X2 4400 is indeed a bit on the weak side.

What effect does alt-tabbing produce for you? FPS dying down or being restored?
Last night i alt-tabbed it and after bringing the game back up again the FPS went back to normal. Don't want to tempt fate because i only did it once and it worked then, but hopefully this will continue working since restarting my PC every hour is kind of a game-breaker.

It's a game engine problem then, at least that's a bit comforting. Hopefully it will be fixed sooner rather than later.

 

[tokala]

What effect does alt-tabbing produce for you? FPS dying down or being restored?

For me it's usually a one-way ticket to choppyness. It stays still playable, though; as I have a bit more horsepower in my rig to begin with. Sometimes it goes back to normal, sometimes not, but I have gotten used to the fact that Civ5 really really hates my GTX260

Good that it was as least helpful for you
It looks like you might have an unrelated issue, maybe running out of VRAM which then gets cleared again by the alt-tabbing. Do you have the 256MB 3850?

 

[Just Checking]

To be honest i'm not sure.
I'm pretty sure i bought the 256mb one, but the Catalyst says it's 512MB. I'm guessing it's the 256MB one though.

It seems to help when i alt tab the game but unlike last night, right now the FPS slows down every couple of minutes so it's really impossible to play like this. Used to be every hour or so, now it's a matter of minutes. Really annoying, for me it's not playable, it's like 20FPS and south, extremely choppy.

 

[tokala]

If the catalyst says its 512MB, it should be correct. And a 3850 should be more than fine with that. Speaking of catalyst, you might be a victim of a screwed up driver installation. Already tried the uninstall/install routine?
You could also try to play with the video settings.

 

[Just Checking]

Yeah, my driver installation is pretty screwed up. I somehow manage to update my drivers regularly but i just can't open the CCC anymore. Right clicking the desktop -> CCC seems to do nothing and it's been like that for a while regardless of my driver updates.

Tried basically everything, various driver cleaning programs, screwing around with the registry, trying to delete any trace of the current driver before installing the new one by any means necessary, but nothing seems to help. I just recall it saying i have 512MB the last time i actually managed to open the damn thing.

Could that be related?

 

[CMKMStephens]

Trying to play. but having a few issues. Not so much about the specs specifically, as to what quality I should play on for the best looks/performance:

AMD 955 Quad 3.2ghz
Sapphire 5850
8GB Ram

And it seems it has defaulted itself to 1680x1050 (full screen) with everything high, and 8xMSAA anti-aliasing (what is there to anti alias anyway, visuals are kind of mediocre...)

Performance wise I get a lot of crashes loading and saving, or infinite loading that requires a good old alt-f4. It also chugs the further on I go.

Any specs I can drop to medium and so off that won't detract visually?

 

[civ_king]

Hi folks,
I Travel pretty often, so I will need a better portable machine, and I'm about to get the alienware m17x with the following config. Could someone share your opinions or share experience with a similar machine... Thanks in advance!

Intel Core i7 840QM Quad Core Processor, 1.86GHz (3.20GHz Turbo Mode, 8M Cache)
8GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 4GB DDR3)
17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 RGB LED (1200p)
Crossfire 1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870
256GB SSD - Samsung Solid State Drive
Windows 7 home edition

ouch a 11.68lb. minimum laptop
I'm thinking a Maingear might be nice,
i7-820QM 1.73GHz
8GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 4GB DDR3 @1333MHz)
17.3" HD+ 16:9 LED Display (1920x1080)
GTX 480M 2GB
256GB SSD Crucial
W7 Home Premium
$3846.25

Better service!

 

[cardgame]

$4000 wow...

 

[tokala]

Tried basically everything, various driver cleaning programs, screwing around with the registry, trying to delete any trace of the current driver before installing the new one by any means necessary, but nothing seems to help. I just recall it saying i have 512MB the last time i actually managed to open the damn thing.

Could that be related?

There's a slew of things you could try in this tread.

Any specs I can drop to medium and so off that won't detract visually?

For me everything set to medium doesn't look much worse than max. Set AA to 4x, and drop fog of war, tesselation and leader scenes to medium. The 5850 should be able to handle max settings, though. It's more likely the CPU is the bottleneck
The slowdown in the lategame is normal.

 

[civ_king]

$4000 wow...

What he wanted was $3,949!

 

[Jikanu]

So if we're in the "well below requirements" spectrum, does that mean we CANT run it, or that it'll just be at the lowest possible graphics thing and it may or may not work?

 

[tokala]

Unless you have some REALLY old/crappy video card it will run somehow, as long as you have at least 1GB main memory, it seems.

 

[Jikanu]

well... its an Nvidia 9400GT.

I decided to just save up for fable III instead, and get it with a new video card at christmas.

 

[phlight]

If you are aiming at Civ5 with that machine, Civ5 is mostly CPU limited, and does not make good use of more than 2 cores, so it will be the CPU that limits your framerate.

I do agree about the CPU limit of frames for the "near top-end" machines BUT I want to say again to all of You guys who are willing to run CIV 5 on Your machines that are near the minimum spec and slidely lower, that even with a P4-C 2.4GHZ and 2GB RAM (DDR266) I manage to play the game fine on standart and smaller maps with a Sapphire RADEON HD 4650 at an AGP slot (4X because it doesn't support 8X). So even with a single core processor (2.2 - 3.4 GHZ Pentiums and Athlons) it is still possible with 2GB RAM and a GOOD GPU (at least ATI RADEON 4650 based or equal NVIDIA). We are talking about 14-22 FPS depending on zoom level. Early in the game around 25 and late game 12-16FPS BUT it is still PLAYABLE!! For that kind of machines consider the use of the 32bit XP SP3!!!!!!

I have another machine way in the middle of the required specs and soon I'll buy a top-end one BUT from curiosity I tried it on my old P4. I asked other friends to let me try CIV 5 on their machines and from my experience I can state that "at least to run so in a matter to be playable" you will need to set all at "Low" and to have a good GPU. Something that I couldn't understand is why at some dual-core at 1.8 and 2.0GHz with the same GPU and RAM (on same OS Win XP 32 bit) as mine, worked slower than my single core P4 (the only reasonable explaination is that maybe it uses only one core). The dual core 1.8GHz has on paper near double MFLOPS production than the P4 single core and so even not using one of the cores it should be at least at the same frame rate. So NOT USING ALL OF THE CPU CORES is really a big issue. Hope they will fix this with a patch/update soon. The latest one didn't fix it. I tried it

 

[Barrataurus]

What he wanted was $3,949!

I work with photography, and a large screen is a must for me. Yes, it is a salty price, but I only buy a laptop every 3-5 years, the time the asset actually almost fully depreciates on my balance sheet.
My biggest doubt was actually related with the graphic cards. After reading as much as I could about it - and about the alieware m17x itself, I just went ahead and ordered it with the ati radeon mobility crossfire 5870.

Can't wait to get the new (and expensive) toy.

Thanks you all for the in-puts.

 

[civ_king]

I work with photography, and a large screen is a must for me. Yes, it is a salty price, but I only buy a laptop every 3-5 years, the time the asset actually almost fully depreciates on my balance sheet.
My biggest doubt was actually related with the graphic cards. After reading as much as I could about it - and about the alieware m17x itself, I just went ahead and ordered it with the ati radeon mobility crossfire 5870.

Can't wait to get the new (and expensive) toy.

Thanks you all for the in-puts.

>.< In Civ V Nvidia GPUs are vastly better because they can actually handle tessellation, it in fact has the performance of a desktop GTX 460