A Tale of Two ATI Cards (With a happy ending)

[ctiberius]

OK. Here's my story of how I was finally able to play the game and all of the associated weirdness.


My desktop is configured thus:

Pentium 4 2.4ghz
512MB Ram
ATI Radeon 9500/9700 pro 128mb
Omega driver dated 14 Sep 05
SB Audigy sound card
WinXP sp2
Windows swap size manually set to 1.5GB
Directx 9.0c
Only tray program is Norton Antivirus 2005
Civ4 graphics set to low, no animations, quick moves, no movies, no autosave


and my laptop:

Pentium M 1.7ghz
1.5GB Ram
ATI Mobility 9000 32mb
Omega driver dated 25 October 05
SoundMAX digital audio onboard
WinXP sp2
Windows swap size manually set to 1.5GB
Directx 9.0c
Only tray program is Norton Antivirus 2005
Civ4 graphics set to high and all other settings are default (autosave enabled, animations, etc).


The game is crappy and choppy as hell on the desktop to the point of being unplayable. On the laptop it works flawlessly. Yes, the laptop graphics card with 32mb of ram makes Civ4 work perfectly. That's without modifying any of the ini file settings mentioned here in the forums and without changing any of the ingame graphics options.

The laptop does have more ram than the desktop. Is it possible that the game requirements are horribly understated and that it actually requires over a gig of memory?

The other difference of course is the Omega driver date. Is it possible that there is some magical difference between the driver from the the 12th of September and the one from the 25th of October?

Naturally there are a bunch of other differences inherent between the laptop and the desktop, but from the perspective of the stated game requirements (i.e. video card, cpu, memory), there aren't too many major differences.

Any thoughts?

 

[Tempete]

Set the graphics on the laptop to low and compare the image quality (most notably the terrain) to that of the desktop. See if there is any difference. My guess is that your desktop's video card uses Pixel Shader 2.0 in the game, which could really kill your frame rate, whereas the ATI Mobility 9000 uses PS 1.4 (or lower). I know for certain that forcing PS 1.4 or lower could boost the frame rate in Civ 4.

 

[Comraddict]

512MB is insufficient. Think that windows needs 200MB of it already.

 

[MeNeedsHelp]

OK. Here's my story of how I was finally able to play the game and all of the associated weirdness.


My desktop is configured thus:

Pentium 4 2.4ghz
512MB Ram
ATI Radeon 9500/9700 pro 128mb
Omega driver dated 14 Sep 05
SB Audigy sound card
WinXP sp2
Windows swap size manually set to 1.5GB
Directx 9.0c
Only tray program is Norton Antivirus 2005
Civ4 graphics set to low, no animations, quick moves, no movies, no autosave


and my laptop:

Pentium M 1.7ghz
1.5GB Ram
ATI Mobility 9000 32mb
Omega driver dated 25 October 05
SoundMAX digital audio onboard
WinXP sp2
Windows swap size manually set to 1.5GB
Directx 9.0c
Only tray program is Norton Antivirus 2005
Civ4 graphics set to high and all other settings are default (autosave enabled, animations, etc).


The game is crappy and choppy as hell on the desktop to the point of being unplayable. On the laptop it works flawlessly. Yes, the laptop graphics card with 32mb of ram makes Civ4 work perfectly. That's without modifying any of the ini file settings mentioned here in the forums and without changing any of the ingame graphics options.

The laptop does have more ram than the desktop. Is it possible that the game requirements are horribly understated and that it actually requires over a gig of memory?

The other difference of course is the Omega driver date. Is it possible that there is some magical difference between the driver from the the 12th of September and the one from the 25th of October?

Naturally there are a bunch of other differences inherent between the laptop and the desktop, but from the perspective of the stated game requirements (i.e. video card, cpu, memory), there aren't too many major differences.

Any thoughts?

The choppiness and crappines can safely be attributed to the rediculous amount of trees on the world map. Press escape while in the game, go to map editor, and delete all trees on the map, then resume game. If your frame rate doesn't double I'll give you $50.