Stuttering Wonder Movies: Fixed

[chris8b]

I too had the stuttering wonder movie issue on two computers. Both have SB Live! but one is running a ATI 9800 Pro 256 and one is running a ATI x800XL. Both use latest Omega drivers and current SB Live! drivers.

In both cases, I was able to fix the stuttering wonder movies by changing the anti-aliasing multisamples back to 0 in the Civ 4 Graphics Options window. (In the Omega driver control panel, I set both to Application Preference.)

If you're experiencing the stuttering movies, and you changed the anti-aliasing to 2 or 4, give this fix a shot.

-C

 

[chris8b]

Just to add, I've confirmed this fix working for at least two other people.

 

[LoneWolf5050]

There is an improvement, but it does not completely fix the issue for me. I noticed that the times in the movie when the sound drops out seem to coincide with hard drive access(?).

--Julian

 

[Adamal]

There is an improvement, but it does not completely fix the issue for me. I noticed that the times in the movie when the sound drops out seem to coincide with hard drive access(?).

--Julian

How much system memory do have?

 

[Zevus]

I've got p4 3.2 ghz, 1GB of RAM & geforce 6800GT. have stuttering movie problems. also have anti-aliasing set to 0 and graphic quality set to low. updated to latest drivers, and got lines across globe map and minimap, and still had stuttering movies. reverted back to older drivers, don't have lines across globe map and minimap, and still have stuttering movies. also there is the memory leak that slows the game down the further you progress, where you can exit and re-enter to fix.

the game itself has problems that it needs a patch to fix, changing anti-aliasing isnt going to do anything.

 

[civspain]

I've got p4 3.2 ghz, 1GB of RAM & geforce 6800GT. have stuttering movie problems. also have anti-aliasing set to 0 and graphic quality set to low. updated to latest drivers, and got lines across globe map and minimap, and still had stuttering movies. reverted back to older drivers, don't have lines across globe map and minimap, and still have stuttering movies. also there is the memory leak that slows the game down the further you progress, where you can exit and re-enter to fix.

the game itself has problems that it needs a patch to fix, changing anti-aliasing isnt going to do anything.

i agree with you 100 percent the game needs to be patched plain and simple the slow down in the 20th century is way to much even for my system"amd athlon 1.7 gig overclocked at 2.0 512ram fx5200 geforce" there is a leak and to many people are having the stutter problem me inclueded for it to be peoples sound cards and what not.hopefully the patch will be out soon i mean the game been out over a week already this is getting a little sad the patch is not out yet.

 

[LoneWolf5050]

In answer to Adamal's question: 512MB RAM (2 256MB sticks, see below)

Changing anti-aliasing will reduce the burden on the graphics card and could speed up overall performance, and if the sound issue is related to timing, and there is less processing going on per cycle due to no anti-aliasing, then perhaps that could have an effect. It does seem to have helped a few people (mentioned in another thread). It did not help my system.

Side note: I experienced terrible, terrible crash-to-desktop behaviour in Star Wars: Republic Commando. Frequent and without warning. Never happened in Pirates which I was playing at the same time. And never happened in desktop apps (well, maybe once). To make a long story short, the problem was that I have two sticks of 256MB RAM with a default timing of 400Mhz, and the front side bus of my motherboard runs at 333Mhz. The bios was set to a memory speed of "auto" but that was not sufficient for the memory and the motherboard to keep in sync. The memory speed in the bios had to be set specifically to 333Mhz. Change that one setting, and presto, zero crashes. Moral of the story, bugs and their fixes can come from the places you least expect!

I have not noticed any particular slowdown in the 20th century, though the more of the globe that is visible, the slower the globe view becomes, but that is to be expected. It is certainly not unusable in my case, I can rotate a standard sized globe with all cities visible nicely enough. Larger than standard size and I expect there might be issues.

--Julian

 

[Graun]

My card is (GForce FX 5700 LE) and also have problem during wonder movies!

 

[NerdBird]

I've got p4 3.2 ghz, 1GB of RAM & geforce 6800GT. have stuttering movie problems. also have anti-aliasing set to 0 and graphic quality set to low. updated to latest drivers, and got lines across globe map and minimap, and still had stuttering movies. reverted back to older drivers, don't have lines across globe map and minimap, and still have stuttering movies. also there is the memory leak that slows the game down the further you progress, where you can exit and re-enter to fix.

the game itself has problems that it needs a patch to fix, changing anti-aliasing isnt going to do anything.

Hey Zevus, I have the same specs as you and was having movie stutter problems and intermittent globe view image corruption. On a whim I tried an older set of drivers for my 6800 GT and, sure enough, both problems went away. The version I'm using is 67.66 and they can be found at www.guru3d.com if you're interested. For some reason those had performed well for me in the past which is the main reason I tried them. I haven't tried any between 67.66 and 81.87 with Civ4, though.

 

[chris8b]

the game itself has problems that it needs a patch to fix, changing anti-aliasing isnt going to do anything.

While I agree that the game has serious problems, the point is that changing anti-aliasing DID do something for me on two machines.

It obviously won't fix the problem for everyone.

 

[RoelzoR]

I'm experiencing problems with stuttering Wonder movies too :S. My Pc also gets laggy after playing for some time. My specs are, same as you: p4 3.2 Ghz, Geforce EN6800 GT and I have 1 gig of RAM too . I guess I just have too wait for a game fix.

 

[Nachtgestalt]

look at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=136779

may be a solution (for me )

 

[VippiN]

My problems were fixed by putting all graphic settings on medium, even if my rig can handle them all and more.

 

[venn]

My problems where fixed using Standard or smaller maps.
Seems there's a memory leak and it gets worse with the bigger maps.

 

[crazypooljunkie]

All the problems are just amplified on the bigger maps cause they take more memory to begin with. I don't think that they cause additional problems.

 

[DrJambo]

Setting the in-game anti-aliasing to 0 also seemed to help my stuttering movies!

Can one then use the graphics card control panel/settings to set AA without affecting the in-game wonder movies?

 

[Nightfang]

Patching can only do so much for the wonder movies. They are Bink files, and in the past my rig has had some problem replaying in-game bink movies. They work fine in Windows with nothing else going on in the background, but while the game is playing, it will chop and stutter. Games that did this for me -

Painkiller
Neverwinter Nights +expansions
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2
and now, Civ 4

I believe it is a flaw in the Bink software itself, which is nothing Firaxis can fix. They might be able to reoptimize the movies or provide a more recent version of the DLL files, but in the end, even those fixes did nothing to help me.

It is a small problem, so I just don't worry about it and enjoy the game.

Oh, setting back the AA did work for a while, but as the game progressed, and more things were going on around the map, it came back again.

 

[LoneWolf5050]

The 1.09 patch says it improved bink playback, but now I get the video and audio stuttering, not just the audio. Oh well. I just close them immediately anyway, it doesn't affect gameplay.

--Julian

 

[Rodatam]

Patching can only do so much for the wonder movies. They are Bink files, and in the past my rig has had some problem replaying in-game bink movies. They work fine in Windows with nothing else going on in the background, but while the game is playing, it will chop and stutter. Games that did this for me -

Painkiller
Neverwinter Nights +expansions
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2
and now, Civ 4

I believe it is a flaw in the Bink software itself, which is nothing Firaxis can fix. They might be able to reoptimize the movies or provide a more recent version of the DLL files, but in the end, even those fixes did nothing to help me.

It is a small problem, so I just don't worry about it and enjoy the game.

Oh, setting back the AA did work for a while, but as the game progressed, and more things were going on around the map, it came back again.

what is your rig?
with mine i only had problem with civ4....

 

[Nightfang]

Athlon 64 3000+
1GB Ram
Geforce 6800 AGP 128MB

These problems were also on my old machine, an Athlon 1.2 with 512MB of Ram and a Geforce 440 MX, and at the time, I thought it was my older system bogging it down. Come to find out, even with the new rig, it was still happening.