Will more RAM help with this setup?

[matthewguidry]

This is my first post on the boards, and hopefully have a good first question for all of you. I have a PowerMac G5 1.8 dual with 1.5GB of RAM. On my machine Civ 4 runs pretty badly, at first things are ok but in the mid to late rounds the game tanks.

I am thinking about getting another 1GB of RAM, and am wondering if this would help the performance of Civ 4. Does anyone have any experience with a similar setup?

Any advice is appreciated, I don't really need the extra RAM, but if it will help Civ, I'll be ordering it straight away.

 

[AlanH]

Hello. Welcome

Buying more RAM just for Civ4 makes it a rather expensive game!

You really need to give us some more information:

- What graphics card do you have?
- Which versions of OS X and Civ4 are you running?
- What graphics and other settings are you using in the Options panel?
- How does the slow-down show itself? As long delays between turns? Or just when moving around the map?
- I think a lot of players see Civ4 slowing down as the game progresses, but they find that some of this can be fixed by save/quit relaunch/reload. Have you tried this?

 

[s.bernbaum]

As far as system speed and memory go, you are already running a superior system to mine, which is a 1.5 mhz G4 and 1 GB of memory. I find that CIV runs quite acceptably on a normal map. If I run a large or huge map, things slow down sooner than at normal but are still acceptable to me. In all cases it slows down late in the game but not unacceptably. If I have been playing for several hours the game tends to get really slow. I have found that if I quit the game and reboot the Mac, the game gets a great deal faster. If I don't reboot, relaunching CIV does not help, as even other programs are running slow. There seems to be some kind of cumulative memory leak in CIV, which only a reboot solves. The other possibility could be, as Alan suggested, the graphics card that you are using. Or it could be that you want a much more zippy game than what satisfies me.

 

[Welnic]

I doubt that more RAM would help your situation. If your problem is the amount of time that the game takes when the AI does its turns, then you will just have to live with that. If the problem is that moving around on the map gets jerky and the map scrolls poorly, that could be helped with a faster video card. If your rig has an AGP slot, then the fastest available card would be an ATI Radeon X800XT.

 

[kjpg@ucla.edu]

I used to play on a 2 GHz G5 iMac. Adding more RAM definitely helped - increased from added 1 Gb to the base of 1/2 Gb, cut down on pauses and the game was smoother. However, I still couldn't attempt large maps (18 civs) and had everything turned to low res, etc. The intel chips are waaaaaaay better, if that is an option.

Kevin

 

[AlanH]

Adding more RAM definitely helped - increased from added 1 Gb to the base of 1/2 Gb,

0,5 GBytes is barely enough to run OS X these days, so adding a resource-hungry program like Civ4 you would certainly need more. However the original poster says s/he already has 1.5 GBytes.

While you can never have too much RAM, I think the advice given above is valid, and more RAM will not make as much difference for this user as it did for you.