Anyone have an answer to this????

[MattJek]

Ok, so I guess I dont have some of the major problems other people seem to have with this game ( which I was 90% sure I would after reading all the posts on this forum). I have a AMD athalon 2.2 G with 448 ram and a GeForce 4 mx 64mb card. ( Its intergrated so the card uses 64mb of my 512mb ram leaving me with 448mb ram available). My game runs well with no graphic problems but it is extremly slow and laggy. Now my question, how do I speed up the game, do I need more ram or a better video card. Any help and tips would be greatly appreciated.

PS. I heard you can allocate some of your harddrive space to be used as RAM by your computer. Is this true or is this just crazy talk?? And if its true, does anyone know how to do it??

 

[ainwood]

Ok, so I guess I dont have some of the major problems other people seem to have with this game ( which I was 90% sure I would after reading all the posts on this forum). I have a AMD athalon 2.2 G with 448 ram and a GeForce 4 mx 64mb card. ( Its intergrated so the card uses 64mb of my 512mb ram leaving me with 448mb ram available). My game runs well with no graphic problems but it is extremly slow and laggy. Now my question, how do I speed up the game, do I need more ram or a better video card. Any help and tips would be greatly appreciated.

PS. I heard you can allocate some of your harddrive space to be used as RAM by your computer. Is this true or is this just crazy talk?? And if its true, does anyone know how to do it??

What OS are you running? Windows XP?

I really would recommend getting some more RAM - that will give you the biggest performance boost for the least money. Get yourself another 512 MB.

Your video card is a bit old - and I'm surprised (honestly!) that you have no graphics problems. If you want to upgrade your video card, there are lots of suggestion threads around here.

 

[alamo]

No loading, starting or video problems?! That's amazing!

Your card is barely minimum. I don't get the sharing part. Your card has 64MB. (MX4000?)

Check your AGP aperature in the BIOS, turn down some of the game graphic options, and twiddle with the video card options.

More memory always helps. If your willing to spend $$ then consider a serious video card upgrade.

 

[Shadowlord]

If you have a GeForce card, you can also tell it you want maximum performance in Civ IV and see if that makes a difference. Here's how to get there quickly:

Start menu->Control Panel->Display->Settings->[advanced]->the GeForce (your card name here) tab->Performance and Quality Settings

From there add a profile for Civ IV (that shouldn't be too hard, and it differs slightly with different driver versions, so I won't go over it unless someone asks), and try tweaking the settings there. The first thing to do is go to the 'Image' setting and change it to Performance. Then try Civ IV and see if it's any smoother. You can also try High Performance. Quality and high quality would be slow, but you can try them if you want to experiment.

You're also able to change the antialiasing settings there, but it sounded like you could change the antialiasing in the game itself, so that might be fine. On the other hand, any antialiasing with a Q at the end of its name, e.g. 2xQ, is higher-quality antialiasing for the same speed as whatever the number is. 2xQ for instance is supposed to be antialiasing as good as 4x for the performance cost of 2x. If you can't set 2xQ in Civ IV, you might want to try forcing it here, since it may improve your performance (if you had civ on 4x antialiasing, which IIRC some people have said is necessary to fix glitches).

Edit:
The other options you should probably leave alone, except perhaps to force anisotropic filtering off just to make sure Civ isn't using it (since it's slow).

 

[MattJek]

What OS are you running? Windows XP?

I really would recommend getting some more RAM - that will give you the biggest performance boost for the least money. Get yourself another 512 MB.

Your video card is a bit old - and I'm surprised (honestly!) that you have no graphics problems. If you want to upgrade your video card, there are lots of suggestion threads around here.

Im running Windows XP. And I do have a very very minor graphic problem. When there are floodplains on an unexplored area of the map they actually show up on top of the "fog of war". It kinda gives away the fact that there is land and a river there but once you explore the area there is no problems. I guess with all the other problem people have with this game, this is one I am willing to live with.

 

[MattJek]

No loading, starting or video problems?! That's amazing!

Your card is barely minimum. I don't get the sharing part. Your card has 64MB. (MX4000?)

Check your AGP aperature in the BIOS, turn down some of the game graphic options, and twiddle with the video card options.

More memory always helps. If your willing to spend $$ then consider a serious video card upgrade.

Integrated means that it doesnt have its own ram and has to use my computers ram. Meaning that 64MB of my ram is always used so that I only have 448MB available for all my other programs.

 

[MattJek]

No loading, starting or video problems?! That's amazing!

Your card is barely minimum. I don't get the sharing part. Your card has 64MB. (MX4000?)

Check your AGP aperature in the BIOS, turn down some of the game graphic options, and twiddle with the video card options.

More memory always helps. If your willing to spend $$ then consider a serious video card upgrade.

What is AGP aperature and BIOS mean?

 

[Northstar5757]

NOT BUY MORE RAM, at least not yet...

What you are experiencing is what most nvdia users are going through right now. Many of us have over a gig of RAM and it does not help. It seems to be a video card issue. For one reason or another players with these cards seem to be experiencing memory leaks (as to why i'm not sure).

 

[MattJek]

So whats the solution then?? Sit tight and wait for a fix to this problem, get new drivers????

 

[Pyrion]

What is AGP aperature and BIOS mean?

"AGP Aperture" is little more than a setting for reserving a certain amount of system memory for the video card to use should it use up all of its own memory.

 

[MattJek]

"AGP Aperture" is little more than a setting for reserving a certain amount of system memory for the video card to use should it use up all of its own memory.

so how do I access this in order to tweak it?

 

[ainwood]

so how do I access this in order to tweak it?

Through the BIOS. When your PC is booting, you might get a message like "Hit Del to enter setup" or it might be "F1" or similar. That lets you into the BIOS, and there will be a screen somewhere that you can tweak the aperture size.
BTW - I'm not sure that there is much benefit in doing that. Have a search on the internet about it.