Anybody else playing civ4 on a low end system?

[Harlanite]

I'm on a Dell D600 laptop, 1.4ghz Pentium M, 512mb ram, 32mb ati mobility 9000 graphics (icing on the cake ) . Shameful isn't it, but it seems to work ok for me. Anybody else running it on anything similarly poor? Sorry if there's similar threads out there.

 

[Dairuka]

I originally ran my Civ 4 on a:

Emachines Monster 500a {1999 brand}
Pentium III 500mhz processor,
Sapphire Radeon 7500, 32mb Video Card
320mb Corsair PCI 2700 RAM
Windows XP Professional

I had the black terrain problems early on in the game, but it runs the game perfectly fine now.

I bought two brand new computers ever since I got my new job though, so I don't really use that for anything besides a back-up server for one of my websites.

 

[Vikings Diehard]

AMD Athlon 1100 with 256mb ddr with integrated graphics card initially and now a GeForce MX 4000 and 512mb. Wife got a new computer for CIV IV since I decided to get her addicted to it.

 

[Mista]

Athlon 950 with 1 G memory. Upgraded graphics to Geforce 6800 GT. Only problem is heat. CPU increases about 10 degrees C while playing. System shuts down if it gets too hot.

 

[Little Cardinal]

i don't know the exact specifications, but if i do get the black terrain problem, how could i go about fixing that?

 

[crunch]

get civ4 patch. already the first patch solved black terrain for my system

Centrino 1.4GHz, integrated intel graphics

 

[player1 fanatic]

I have friend with even lower specs.
It's something like 1g processor, 256RAM, some who knows craphic card.

And it works nice with low details and small maps.


P.S.
Although there are a few graphic glitchs like glowing flood plains in fog of war. And videos are choppy.

 

[3 EMS]

1.7 g cpu, 1.5 g rambus, Ge4 TI4200 video card.

The game always played fine. The sound on wonder movies was choppy until the patch. Still have some minor bugs. They happen infrequently so they are sometimes amusing rather than annoying.

 

[cthom]

Athlon 950 with 1 G memory. Upgraded graphics to Geforce 6800 GT. Only problem is heat. CPU increases about 10 degrees C while playing. System shuts down if it gets too hot.

Athlon XP 1.something 512mb low-end nvidia nforce card. SiSandra reports my machine runs hot *without* playing civ. i've noticed a couple of crashes i thought was down to no memory, but now i'm wondering...

 

[THARN]

256 ram? wow- hard enough to run win xp on that these days...
thought my 1600 athlon was low spec. nice job getting things running.
i found that tweaking vid card settings manually(not in game) really smooths things out.

 

[Mista]

I believe that the black terrain problem is due to a card/integrated graphics that does not support shadowing -- My laptop is entry level and has black terrain. That's OK, it's not for gaming anyway. My nVidia 6800 is fine.

 

[scienide09]

Athlon 1600+ (1.4Ghz), 768MB ram, Radeon 7200 32MB pci.

I can play on smaller maps. If I try a standard size map, there better not be a lot of active civs, or it gets really sloooooow.
Still the occasional CTD with "out of virtual memory" error upon discovery of a religion or built wonder.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

800mhz p3, 768mb ram, nvidia geforce mx4000 gfx card with 64mb mem. and the only problem is that sometimes the polygons enlarge and shoot across the screen in various directions. the game itself is playable, just not pretty.

 

[Salty Ant]

I have a cheap compaq presario that I bought for just $400, and Civ4 has run pretty flawless on it. I have an integrated graphics cardand the game only lags once in a while. It surprises me that people have systems for $700+ and wont run civ 4 right when I can go buy a compaq and it works perfect

 

[ULTIMATEGP]

My computer runs it fine but I don't know much about hardware and other things

 

[player1 fanatic]

256 ram? wow- hard enough to run win xp on that these days...
thought my 1600 athlon was low spec. nice job getting things running.
i found that tweaking vid card settings manually(not in game) really smooths things out.

Heh, in my country they are still selling brand new super cheap (read:trash) configuations with 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, integrated graphics (around 300euros with 17"monitor).

I'm really sory for those uninfomed "fools" who actually bought new comp with just 256RAM.

 

[tombeef]

1.4 Ghz intel celeron
512 MB of RAM
the ATI graphics card that comes in compaq presarios, since that's what I'm running

I run high graphics on everything except huge maps, where I have to change it to low settings. Some slowdown in large maps and wonder movies are choppy in late game, but otherwise no major problems.

 

[Reignking]

I went from an 866 pentium / GEForce 2 to a 2.0 ghz AMD and 6600GT. The old one played with fewer crashes.

 

[A Silly Goose]

I originally had a 64MB Radeon 7000, which doesn't even have the TnL support necessary for Civ IV, and 512MB DDR RAM. The game ran well enough, although it more often than not wanted to crash after a little while (but that's what auto-save is for), and I had the invisible animal resources thing going on.

With my CPU still the same (2.12GHz AMD Athlon XP 2800+), but a jump up to a 256MB Radeon 9600 Pro and 1GB DDR RAM throw in (for 1.5GB total), the game today runs like Forest Gump.

 

[Harlanite]

When I zoom out a lot the framerate seems to drop quite drastically, so I tend to stay a bit close but other than that I'm surprised that I haven't encountered a single problem. Thanks for the replies, good to hear others are in the same boat.