Beyond the Sword Performance Issues

I have 1.5ghz AMD; 2GB ram and currently an FX5500 graphics card (soon to update to 6600)

My problems are that the screen will go black and while I can hear the music and sounds, it's not coming back. I also get "inverse" graphics occasionally, like a photo negative on the backgrounds and have to save and restart.

I am glad that you other guys are having these problems, not just me and my pc. I suspect it's huge maps (which I play with Marathon) so I might just play on large or standard in future. But I hope the graphics card will help.
 
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.

Same here so far - although I haven't played through a whole game yet, but I'm using all the glitter stuff - (High detail - no graphic-options turned off!).
I started with Big_and_Small on a huge map with 13 contestors and everything is fine (around 400 turns ingame now...- much better than in Warlords where I occasionally had to wait -
running 1GB RAM , AMD 3000+ and NVidia 6600GT... So far it's much smoother than Vanilla or Warlords - Hope it stays like that...
 
I'm having the same problems with everyone else with the lag between sub menus etc which i can deal with but the one that has really bugged me is the wait for the diplomacy screen to come up between turns just for me to tell them to go away lol it is a lot longer than it was before bts lets hope they can get it sorted soon
 
I'm having the sub-menu lag, as well as a weird problem where the game runs fine, slows down until it is nearly unplayable, and then speeds up again, going through that cycle over and over again. The official tech support is pretty much worthless, and I was having no issues with vanilla/Warlords at all, even on high settings.

I really hope they do some optimizations in the next patch. I activated the 'memory saving' option in the .ini file, and it helped a bit, but not by much.
 
Same here so far - although I haven't played through a whole game yet, but I'm using all the glitter stuff - (High detail - no graphic-options turned off!).
I started with Big_and_Small on a huge map with 13 contestors and everything is fine (around 400 turns ingame now...- much better than in Warlords where I occasionally had to wait -
running 1GB RAM , AMD 3000+ and NVidia 6600GT... So far it's much smoother than Vanilla or Warlords - Hope it stays like that...

This is very odd, Im running with 1GB RAM (dual channel) AMD64 3800ish and 7800GS. I get like 5min loading times at some points in modern times, Im just not playing anymore huge maps :mad:

A question though, are you using Blue Marble addon?
 
Brando said:
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.

I am running a very similar setup. P4 3 Ghz, 2gb Ram and a 6800GT. My problems aren't quite as severe as yours, but CIV4 has never been so slow. Even now playing standard game, no BtS, it's so slooooooow.

I was playing a game last night and got memory leak/runtime error and the game bugged out.

I haven't gone through to see how much RAM it's using so far, but may check that out.

I may enable logging and see what the game is doing too.
 
I have 1.5ghz AMD; 2GB ram and currently an FX5500 graphics card (soon to update to 6600)

My problems are that the screen will go black and while I can hear the music and sounds, it's not coming back. I also get "inverse" graphics occasionally, like a photo negative on the backgrounds and have to save and restart.

I am glad that you other guys are having these problems, not just me and my pc. I suspect it's huge maps (which I play with Marathon) so I might just play on large or standard in future. But I hope the graphics card will help.

Back in the day, with vanilla and somewhat in warlords, I had the black and/or colorful screen issues. Those are more then likely due to heat issues or power issues in your machine. Civ4 is a very taxing game on the system, so you should make sure your machine is well ventilated and moisture free as well as having sufficient power. Also make sure the fan on your graphics card is not blocked by dust and/or another card.

I played through an entire 8 civ, huge map last night with full graphics settings. The game itself ran "smoother" then vanilla and warlords, however, the whole game stuttered exactly the same from beginning to end as I reported on page one of this thread. The mouse cursor would lag and stutter every move of a unit while map was uncovered and recovered by FoW. I've determined that it is an optimization problem in the processors and not graphics card related. The movies ran smoother then they have ever run in Civ4 except toward the end of the game when the map was cleared and such. Then they began to chug like they do in vanilla and warlords. Diplomacy went smoothly when the units werent moving.

I have to say, I love how BTS plays. Espionage and Corporations are just fun. Space race is a little more useful and the graphics are nice, but I'm still stuck on the Test of Time mod I made where I had multiple planets once my spaceship arrived. Then I would play and colonize the new planets as did my rivals. I just cant see spaceship destination as an end when its really a beginning. I didnt get a chance to try out the colonization features yet, but I did have a new civ form from a slavery revolt of a rival civ. That was just fantastic.

Once BTS gets and optimization patch for the fading effect on the tiles, BTS will be just about perfect. There were maybe a few balance issues with some things being too strong or too weak, but I'm sure those will get addressed by the modding community.

I'm looking forward to it!

Latah!
 
I should point out I had massive problems with crashes, even on Large maps, so many so that I brought my copy back and changed it for a new one, and (fingers crossed) so far have had no crashes even on the Earth18 map, also for some reason on the new copy I got there are more options in the custom game menu, on the first one no tech brokering wasnt there. I know this sounds bizarre, each copy should be the same as the last, but there you go.

Can someone in simple terms explain to me what the rendering level does, and what anti aliasing samples are?
 
Only get slowdowns after the armies build up into massive stacks, more so in the modern era. Final Frontier is slow after just 20 or so turns though, haven't found the reason for that though.

Specs for my machine is:

Vista Ultimate x64
eVGA 680i Black Pearl
Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 2.66GHz
4GB (2x2GB) OCZ PC6400 DDR2
eVGA 8800GTS 640MB SLI

32bit doesn't like the 4GB too much (only 3.25GB viewable & 2GB per application limit).

Anyone? anyone at all?
Since graphics is composed of triangles perfect straight lines & curves are extremely hard or impossible to get. Anti Aliasing basically fills in the gaps to make an object appear straight/curved.

Anti-aliasing Quick Study
 
The only time something doesn't happen instantly is when I open up the map from trading it with someone who's been exploring for me. Everything else runs perfectly smooth.

Running at 1920x1200 resolution and at 8x FSAA (16x is broke in Civ4)

Core2Duo @ 3.2GHz
Asus P5K3 Deluxe MoBo
2Gb 1150MHz RAM
3 Drives in RAID 0
BFG 8800 GTX OC2
Dell 24" TFT

All games will run nicely if you throw enough hardware at them :D

I'd say that 2Gb of RAM is a must for games like this. After that it's gonna be you VGA card that makes the most difference. If you don't have a high end VGA card (NV 8800 or ATI 2900) then don't expect to play at high res and at max settings, at least certainly not in the late game when there's lots going on. Also, most people's PCs are full of crap. Check your processes list: you shouldn't need to be running more than 20-30 processes at once in Windows. If you are then you've got too much crap installed. Delete some stuff from the startup folder and the registry (both for user and computer) and get Windows to a cleaner state. Better still - nuke Windows. I reinstall Windows from scratch at least every few months to keep it running nice and smooth and to stop it getting fat and Lazy.
 
Top Bottom