Beyond the Sword Performance Issues

[hicpotboy]

Hey, guys. Quick question for all of you: I played a game against the computers, and it's having a hard time working properly. For some reason, it keeps stuttering, and large delays in telling something to move, and it actually moving. I have a much better computer than is required to play it, and enough RAM to make sure it goes smooth as silk.

Anyone have any ideas on what I can do to fix this? I tried turning down the graphics, but that has no appreciable effect. Switched to only a single core on my CPU, and that seems to have helped somewhat.

 

[vodlaian]

Hopefully the next patch will have some optimizations. From my own tests, these events seems to cause major slowdowns between turns:

- War (especially now that they often create larger armies)
- Map trading between civs
- Creating a blockade (only tested with privateers)
- Moving after being previously in blockade mode
- liberating cities


One thing which seems to make the game overall less choppy is by locking the FPS in the config.

 

[agoodfella]

I'm definitely experiencing some quirks.

For instance, one of my units is currently exploring an icy region. there should be footprints in the snow, but there aren't any. at the very same time, there is another unit in the desert and they are leaving footprints.

small nitpick i know, but still, i notice it.

 

[Kinseek]

I`m mostly aggravated that whenever I access one of the sub-screens (tech-tree, civics, diplomacy etc...) the game pauses for a couple of seconds.

 

[Verkinix]

I'm having similar issues. Warlords and vanilla ran perfectly on my machine until late game after world map is discovered etc... Now, it stutters at the beginning of the game unlike civ4 has ever stuttered before. Like the mouse itself lags across the screen when a unit is moved and it takes several seconds (sometimes 10+) to regain smooth control. So I decided to try it at minimum graphics settings. No noticable difference in the performance.

I cant seem to figure out what is going on other then maybe its not fully optimized yet. I have noticed that when the uncharted tiles become charted, it fades away differently then it did in previous civ4's. Personally, I like how it worked before better, and if that is responsible for the performance hit, I hope they give us the option to turn it off. I would really like to play this game, but right now its not practical to play. One turn should not take 20 minutes to complete, especially in early game.

My machine is decent with 2 1.6ghz processors, a gig of ram, 6800GT nvidia, and drivers that are as updated as possible.

Any other thoughts on this?

Latah!

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

Glad it's not just me! >.< This has to be one of my main complaints about BTS, the random lag.

 

[skallben]

I can't play huge maps anymore, they just take sooo long. 5 min to load next turn, heh. I thought that was due to increased map size but I guess they allways were like that.

 

[DAKH]

hicpotboy: Do you play on Huge maps? I always do this, and IIRC BTS uses up to 1-1.5 GB of RAM in middle-late game according to my experience. In general, BTS is a real memory-hog, and installing another GB of ram or 2 might help your problems.

My specs:

Intel Core2Duo 2.6GHZ
2GB corsair-something RAM
Radeon X1900

Custom-built version of Windows XP (only necessary Services enabled, no media player or internet explorer with only firewall running as an extra process)

The only slowdowns I get is when trading for a map when I haven't explored much (discovering 40%+ of the map on a huge map), liberations (1-2 seconds), and blockades (1 sec), but I consider those acceptable since those are rare events.

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

Civ 4 uses waaay to much memory IMO. This game eats up more memory than a lot of FPS'

 

[agoodfella]

It's definitely a major memory hog. I usually have to unload and restart the game after a few hours and I am running a decent system:

Intel Core Duo 2.0GHZ
2GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce Go 7600

(not the best, but very good for a laptop and certainly well above the system reqs for this game)

 

[PieceOfMind]

Civ 4 uses waaay to much memory IMO. This game eats up more memory than a lot of FPS'

So if I'm running on a system with 1.00GB then that's most likely an issue? It's dual channel if that makes any difference.

How do you measure this by the way? Is there a good utility for doing this?

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

^ I wish I could offer more, but I'm mostly a tech-tard >.< All I know is that my system ran WoW fine, can run FPS fine (I'm currently into BF 2142), but Civ 4 causes it to stutter mid-late game.

I can't give you any real help I can just complain lol

 

[Proteus]

I suspect many of the problems we face now have to do with the Shader 3.0

I assume BtS uses it and some othernew featured Direct X 0.0c provides and many graphic cards (even if they don´t seem very old) aren´t good in supporting these features.

 

[kokoras]

I have the same problems, delays in loading the game,turns and opening info menu like diplomacy,military advisor etc.I didn't have these problems neither with vanilla or warlords and i think that my system is more than enought for the game
AMD 4600X2
Nvidia 8800GTS
2GB RAM

 

[DAKH]

I have the same problems, delays in loading the game,turns and opening info menu like diplomacy,military advisor etc.I didn't have these problems neither with vanilla or warlords and i think that my system is more than enought for the game
AMD 4600X2
Nvidia 8800GTS
2GB RAM

There goes my theory of low memory being the culprit here. Hmm...

It can't be the GPU (Nvidia), I really doubt it at least. The game isn't very graphics-intensive unless you use 6x anti-alias, and it is designed with Nvidia in mind. At least they will have you believe that, since one of the opening videos is an Nvidia feature. (Excuse my English)

How about anti-virus? Or some strange Windows background service interfering? As I (neglected) to mention in my earlier post, I don't run anti-virus.

Try to disable your anti-virus and any other background applications like bittorrent and applications that accesses the hard drive, and/or post your Services list. (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Choose Action, then Export List, and upload the file here.) I might figure out if there's something interfering, since the game runs (almost) flawlessly on my system, and it's pretty much the same as your system. Of course, if you don't know about the windows services application don't bother with it, messing with it could be messy..

 

[PieceOfMind]

Well I thought I'd take a closer look. I downloaded a free ram monitoring utility called FreeRam xp. Anyway, I noticed that without running civ I was running with roughly 630MB of RAM free. This is out of 1GB.

I then proceeded to load BtS and loaded a save I had just before a victory on a large map with 16 civs, in about 1910AD or so.

When I went back to the utility to check how much RAM was now used, only 30MB was free! The game was using roughly 600MB! And I'm pretty sure even more virtual memory was being used too. For those more daring players who play huge maps this must get monstrous.

Anyway, I'm guessing I'm gonna need a RAM upgrade.

EDIT I think XP alone uses roughly 200 to 250MB of RAM, and my firewall was also using about 100MB. So I'd recommend if you're playing single player to turn off your firewall, as long as you can disconnect from the internet. For me it's easy - I just disable my wireless.

 

[GoodGame]

Overall BTS seems to be running better for me than Warlords and prior. I haven't upgraded my system since Warlords, but I habbitually had to play with low graphics, even turning off combat zoom, multi-units, and animations.

I haven't tweaked BTS once---everything was auto-setting---and it's working quite nice, animations and all.

Be sure to get 3.0 GHZ CPU and 2 GB ram and most should be ok. I'm even running a 32 GB video card instead of the recommended 64 GB card.

 

[Saint Sarai]

I`m mostly aggravated that whenever I access one of the sub-screens (tech-tree, civics, diplomacy etc...) the game pauses for a couple of seconds.

Mine pauses for much longer than a couple of seconds, sometimes 30-60 seconds or more when accessing sub-screens.
It seems that once you open up a sub-screen, close it, then open it again, it opens rather quickly. If you go to another sub-screen, there is a wait, and then if you go back to the first sub-screen, there is a wait again.
This is a problem. I have to think twice before opening up a sub-screen and sometimes choose not to because of the long delay.

My computer is capable of running any game currently in production so it is not my computer that is the problem, plenty of ram, dual graphics cards, quad processor...etc...

I am sure that I did not notice a delay in warlords or vanilla but I will have to check once I finish the current BTS game.

 

[Brando]

I seem to be having the same problems you have all been having but mine seems very severe. I have a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, 2GB Ram and a 6800Nvidia video card. It's late game on a huge terra map, 1886 AD, I just made peace with the Dutch and it took literally 10 minutes before all of our allies made peace and the game could commence. This wait is rediculous! It also takes about 6 minute to load a game. I like many others had turned my graphics down but it didn't seem to help. I hope they come up with a solution to this poor performance problem.

Oh yeah... check out my join date and this is my first post.

 

[CTH]

I also has some performance problem, and I got a ATI card (1800xtx 512 mb) so it isn't any nVidia problem. I wonder if there is any dual core optimaztion in BTS?