All right...so my specs are bare minimum...

[Yusaku Jon III]

This is recommended reading for just about anybody with the minimum recommended system requirements spelled out on the box. However, without becoming a risk of multiple postings of the same basic complaint, perhaps we should make a sticky of this. Anyway, here goes...

First off, let me list my PC system specs:

2.53 GHz Pentium 4 processor
Asus P4SE Socket-478 motherboard, 400 MHz fsb, 4x AGP graphics port
512 MB PC2100 SDRAM, 100 MHz 184-pin DIMM cards
60 GB Ultra ATA hard drive
64 MB Nvidia GForce MX440 graphics accelerator AGP
Soundblaster Live! sound card​

Now I've found that my system specs are just barely at the minimum recommended for Civ4. The biggest issue may well be the graphics card, though I also wonder if the front-side bus is choking processing time as well. These are the two things I found are almost certainly caused by my system's limitations:

• Choppy sound and video animation quality on the opening sequence. Sound cuts in and out. The animation stutters. I can see the graphics card having an effect on the latter, but I suspect that the bottleneck in my front side bus and the RAM controller is affecting the latter.
• Even with settings minimized, scrolling movement is still a bit choppy. It's clear that I'm going to need at least the recommended 128-Megabyte graphics accelerator to be able to enjoy at least some of the animation effects, but the problem here is that my motherboard only supports 64-Meg AGP cards. I don't know of any 128-Meg AGPs which would function well enough on the 4x slot provided.

The other problem, I hope, is merely another sign of my system's inability to cope with the new graphics:

• I had just completed a wonder (Stonehenge at Rome). But when the wonder movie was about to play, the game crashed back to my desktop. If this isn't associated with my system specs, it might be a bug.

Just about the only thing I can do for this is to try playing different ways and seeing if I can't cut out the wonder movie if the system crashes from that. It might be the installed anti-virus and anti-SPAM software having an effect, too. The only other solutions would be to try and get more RAM or to find that 4x APG-compatible video card upgrade somewhere.

Otherwise, I'm better off waiting until I get the newer, better system before I try playing Civ4 again...

 

[alamo]

Wow - that is suprising.

That pretty much means no hope for people below minimum.

Too bad.

 

[cernDog]

So far so good for me...... and I have worse specs than you on the machine I'm using to play:
Dell 8200
1.7 ghz pentium iv
512 meg nVidia RAM
gforce3 64K 4X AGP
Windows XP Home Edition

I did try to clean up my system a little bit before I installed the game, most notably went to msconfig and did a disable all on the the startup menu to minimize background processes that were running ( and not needed!)

I think I could play on my work laptop if I had too...... but the graphics on that would even be skimpier than the Dell destop, though the other specs would be better.

 

[Comraddict]

Gf3>>gf4mx