1GB RAM for Standard, 2GB RAM for Huge recommended memory!

[Sorceresss]

Good evening Sorceresss

THxxx for your lengthy reply...but I may not continue the discussion : we would both be guilty of "thread highjacking" by being too much off-topic.

The forum is about a computer game (Civ IV) and this thread is about the ideal amount of RAM that game could require.

All sophisticated speculations about Epistemology, Turing Machines, and Timbuktu belong elsewhere.

 

[Clown2TheLeft]

Hey, no apologies necessary. You know what a shift key is and can spell "you," "your," and "see" correctly. Your English is fine. Heh.


Later!

--The Clown to the Left

 

[VimesUK]

Well I use 1GB of memory and when I have tried huge maps I have found that the game has not used all the memory available before it started to thrash the hard drive. Adding another 1GB of memory made absolutely no difference for me in the type of behaviour that the game used when playing. I didn't think that it would have as it hadn't used all the 1GB that I had in before the additional memory was fitted. My wife is pleased though as it meant that she got her memory back for her PC

I would suggest that the optimum memory that the games uses, rather then should use, is 1GB and the resolve for this issue lies within the coding of the game.

 

[Antonius]

I have stumbled to this thread accidently, by having expirienced the same problems playing the game.
I have 512 MB of ram on my PC and I used to have 768-1000 MB of virtual memory when I saw that the game is eating it all away. Therefore I increased the virtual memory up to 2000 MB, because I have expected that would solved my problems with lack of memory (and game hanging up on me for that reason), just that I have found up that CivIV goes and uses all the available virtual memory there is (all 2GB of virtual memory).

Btw, I play huge map, for I belive that is the only way the game is supposed to be played and what happened with the philosophy of Civ games being able to be played on as many PC's as possible?

Is there anything else that can be done to improve my gameplay by not buying additional ram?
Some of you mentioned increasing virtual memory "trashes" (destroys?) your HDD, how?

regards,
A.

 

[Antonius]

ok, it seems there is a quazzy-fix explained here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=134027&page=2

which involves cleaning ram.

still info on "increasing virtual memory trashes hdd" would be welcome.

regards,
A.

 

[VimesUK]

I changed my wording from 'trash' to 'thrash' as I didn't want to give the impression that the game damages the hard drive in any way. When I used the expression 'thrash' I meant that the game would access the hard drive for a 'long' period of time creating an impression that it no longer had sufficient memory to run, and thus needed to rely upon the virtual memory. But, as I mentioned, adding more memory up to 2GB made no difference for me.
As I also mentioned I do believe that 1GB is the optimum memory for XP for the 'average' game player, there are exceptions though as Battlefields 2 for example seems to perform better when using 2GB over 1GB, but games like that aren't in the majority.

See below for an example of the 1GB to 2GB 'upgrade'

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/fear_cpu_performance/page6.asp

 

[Charles 22]

I have just upgraded my RAM from 512MB to 1 GB and, I have to say, it did make a worthwhile improvement to the running of the game. It did run on 512MB but once the world opened up and a lot of stuff was going it did feel 'heavy' and unresponsive when scrolling around. I hardly ever get that now, though it does still pause for a moment when zooming out (beyond the point where you can see your units on the screen). Closing the game is a bit quicker too now... far less disk thrashing as it tidies up after itself.

I checked Windows Task Manager and discovered one of my games was using 443MB of RAM... no wonder my PC was struggling when I only had 512 in total!

I have 1GB in my machine and it never gets past whatever the era after medieval is on ahuge map. I stepped down to a large map and right now I'm at the furtherest I've been with a large. It's noticeably slower now that I'm in medieval but not annoying, and I can't see it lasting much longer then it did when I played with a huge map. Bascially the game is invincible with my setup up to that point, but within two eras it's sayonara. I really hate those sort of CTD's too, because they actually don't go to desktop, but shut off the computer instead. I may have had one or two genuine CTD's out of the 12 or so crashes I've had to date.

 

[Isostran]

712MB here from playing last night.. I have 1GB RAM, I fell sorry for you blokes with less than that. Must be a real Bugger.

 

[thorgaard]

I hope they fix this problem soon, or else

 

[LadyTetsu]

Try "Pi in the Sky", John D Barrow, if you think math is more logical and correct than any other discipline. There's a touch of religious mysticism to math to, especially in light of Godel's theorems. You can't prove math, but you can prove that you can't prove it. Plus, math is but one way of looking at things - try quatum logics sometime if you're truly in for a mindblow, trust me, it's what I do.

At any rate, I'm running Win XP, 1.7GHz AMD 2000+ overclocked to 2.0GHz, 200G on two harddrives, 1.5G DDR RAM, and a crappy old S3 ProSavage with I think a whopping 256M onboard. I hope to get a new card, something cheap, because it seems that the black screen and lagging is indeed entirely due to the card in my case. I tried the BIOS fix (and artpak and every other blasted thing), and when I upped the memory used by the card, it slowed it down even worse.

btw, I run all my services, including McAfee (which does indeed SUCK) and didn't notice any big difference between having them on and shutting everything I possibly could down. And with that, and all the monitoring I use on my overclocked processor, and a bunch of fruity stuff running constantly in the background, I expected a BIG difference. Nada. I've played through to Future Techs with some sizable rivals on huge maps. I'm going to retest after I get the card, I'm wondering if rendering the terrain properly will chew through some speed in the later parts. Stupid blackscreen/lag/chop aside, the game iteslf really does seem to fly, although memory leaks (which I've not really noticed, maybe some of the tweaking I've done over the last year sewed up some of that) are personally offensive to me and they had BETTER fix that so I can start running Monte Carlos in the background.

If it DOES slow down after I get a new card, I may just have to get used to the black screen!

 

[limpkit]

Well I use 1GB of memory and when I have tried huge maps I have found that the game has not used all the memory available before it started to thrash the hard drive. Adding another 1GB of memory made absolutely no difference for me in the type of behaviour that the game used when playing. I didn't think that it would have as it hadn't used all the 1GB that I had in before the additional memory was fitted. My wife is pleased though as it meant that she got her memory back for her PC

I would suggest that the optimum memory that the games uses, rather then should use, is 1GB and the resolve for this issue lies within the coding of the game.

From the symptoms you describe, I would say that you diagnosis is correct.

 

[Tcho]

AND....XP will take up almost 256Mbs of memory...don't forget that...

Only if you allow it. I have XP fully booted only using 94 Mb of my RAM.

I'm also running this game on a system with 512 Mb RAM, and other then the wonder videos stuttering (oddly enough the opening vids don't stutter) I'm not having a single problem with the game. I can play large sized maps without too much of a hit to my frame rate. The lowest I've seen is 15 FPS which I still find playable.