BTs now running way too slow (Quad Core & Vista)

[Weaves]

Hello,

I have been playing this game for years (mostly BtS).

However, a few weeks ago, the game started lagging even during the first few turns.

I thought it was a hardware issue- however, I am able to play all other games without lag (including BlackOps and Shogun 2).

Here are my specs:

Q9450 @ 3.2Ghz
4GB OCZ @1066
HD6850
ASUS Essence XT


I even updated to the latest drivers from ATI after the problem occurred- however, I have no luck.

Any Suggestions?

 

[1stcontact2035]

Unless you're running 64 bit Vista, you don't have 4 GB of ram and you don't have a quad core. Just saying.

 

[kiwitt]

If you run Civ IV BTS on Windows x64, you get the the full 4 GB of RAM, but you need to have more than 4 GB of RAM, like I have (i.e. 6 Gb of RAM), so the remaining parts of the RAM can run the other things required for Windows, etc.

 

[Weaves]

That's great guys, but neither one answered my question.

Can anyone explain why this game ran perfectly fine since I built the rig 3 years ago- and now lags (unplayable) starting on Turn 1?

The lag started within the last few weeks.

Could I have gotten some Direct X file corrupted? possibly when Shogun 2 provide a patch to update to Dx 11?

I made no other changes to the system.

 

[mintegar]

Could you describe a little more detailed how bad the lag actually is? I.e., how long does it take when you give orders to your settler for the game to register the action. Is it just a little laggy, unplayablish laggy or maybee it doesn't even work at all?

Have i guessed correctly that it isn't just long end-of-turn wait time, but instead the game beeing slow and unresponsive all the time?

I have not really much idea of what you could do, but you could try:
* Install fraps to display actual fps
* play with gfx-detail settings in the options. does it make any difference?
* Run windows performance monitor (perfmon.msc) while playing the game, add performance counters for CPU load, "physical disc - avg. disc queue length" and "memory - pages/sec". Set it up so it will record a nice graph of those 3 things. Probably won't help you, since as you say it's more likely something is messed up with your gfx-drivers or Direct-X, but i'd still do it to rule out these other things.

 

[Weaves]

It works- but unplayable laggy- From giving orders to the map movement. I am going to uninstall and try re-install.

Like I said, was working great on this machine for a few years now -then boom- Laggy

 

[1stcontact2035]

Could I have gotten some Direct X file corrupted? possibly when Shogun 2 provide a patch to update to Dx 11?

Civ 4 runs on Dx 9 and Dx 11 would have patched over Dx 10 (from what I understand Dx10 is the Vista version of Dx11... either that or the 32 bit version, either way anything with Dx11 wouldn't mess with Dx9)... however, just to be sure, I'd download and run DirectX 9.0c just to be sure: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9930efa6-9f7b-4c8a-aea2-97dd6ab307a2&displaylang=en

Personally I've had various versions of DirectX installed on my computer, ranging from DirectX6 with much earlier versions of Civ to DirectX 11, etc., and while I worried about it in the past it never really was the issue. Frankly I always seemed to have problems on Vista like this which is why I switched over to Windows 7. Of all things given Vista's track record it could be treating Civ 4 in a manner that its in a 32 bit OS - you might want to doublecheck to see that Civ 4 isn't set to run in something like Win XP. Vista is real screwy like that. It has a mind of its own.

Also, is it laggy on just Civ 4 or other programs. Of all things it could be you have some sort of malware, or among other things, if your PC is 3 years old and has seen heavy usage, one or more of the ram chips could have burned out (I assume each ram chip is 2 GB, so one ram chip burning out would put your onboard memory in parity with the maximum load Civ 4 can handle along with background operations). Possibly a way to tell if its either one of those and between them is if its malware it will just be generally slowing down your system regardless. If you have a hardware problem, the issue would only come up when you play Civ 4 or something that is graphics, memory, etc. intensive. If you have more games than Civ 4 to play, I'd definitely play test them to see how each one plays, find out what the typical memory usage is for that game, see what sort of graphics they use, and figure out where the problem lies from that. You don't want to be pulling out ram chips when you have a virus, or for that issue you don't want to be pulling out ram chips when you have a bad graphics card.

Sorry if my original post was a little short and to the point. I hope this post is a little more helpful.

 

[1stcontact2035]

OK, perhaps I didn't realize for one reason or another, but I seemed to have the same problem and just, possibly fixed it on my own computer. I had upgraded from Windows Vista 32 bit to Windows 7 64 bit, but in the process installed Civ 5 which requires Steam to install. I didn't immediately play Civ 4 as I got pretty busy, but when I did and played RoM A New Dawn mod on Giant Earth Map, ironically the game would CTD with about the same file-size as on 32 bit Windows, and be chugging along with the same or worse memory requirements for a map of that size, even if you add in the mod, lots of AI, etc. I took the liberty today of exiting out of Steam before opening up the game. That alone basically knocked off something like 10-20% of my memory usage, which I have 3 GB of ram so that's like 300-600 MB of ram that Steam wound up using up while Civ 4 was running. I have no clue why, but I think when you combine Steam and Civ 4 it acts to suck up a certain percentage of memory, as if Civ 4 was running on Steam, but in my case its not. Which, you know, if you have 8 GB of ram and Civ 4 is using up 4 GB, perhaps the way this would work, Steam would suck up 2.5 GB of ram or some obscenely huge amount like that and you'd be stuck with almost no memory at all, and your game would be sluggish, even if you have 64 bit Windows and a huge amount of memory. I'm wondering this because you mentioned installing a game recently... did it require Steam to install and did you have Steam installed before then? If this is the problem, disable Steam as a startup program, for one, and in the mean time, before you restart your computer, go to the taskbar and exit out of Steam. If I'm right that should fix your problems. Hopefully I'm right.

 

[AgedOne]

I had a similar problem when moving to a PC running Win7.
Very strangely, I got a much worse lag when playing Hall of Fame games using the Buffy mod than I did playing other mods e.g. Rhye's and Fall.
This set me searching for the differences between the games, and I found that autologging was a possibility. (Rhye's and Fall games don't log)
On further investigation, I found that I had set the auto-logging to create HTML format output files in Buffy. When I altered this setting to make the output plain text - Hey Presto! - the lag went away.

 

[kimira]

Curious if you ever resolved your problem or figured out what was causing it, Weaves. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit on an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 with 6GB RAM. Had Windows Vista 64 bit running on this machine for two years, and while I had several problems with Vista, Civ IV always ran on it fine. Then, since doing a clean install of Windows 7 a year ago, Civ IV has also always run fine. It was just this morning that I began having the exact issue you describe -- massive slowdown to the point of unplayability, even on early turns. I play on a standard size map and none of my settings were changed from the settings I always play with -- settings with which I've played hundreds of games on this machine and never had a problem with before.

I think it is something related to some Windows update, perhaps, as I just installed some updates last night and this morning. Unfortunately, when I went to attempt a system restore, found out I can't restore to the previous day because one of the updates was Windows 7 SP1 and it will only allow me to restore to right before that. I don't have Steam installed on my computer and I do have BUG installed but auto-logging is disabled, so I don't think either of those is causing my problem. I'll probably uninstall and reinstall Civ first to see if that resolves the issue, and if not, maybe reinstall Windows as well, sigh. (I'm so chagrined; up to this point I'd had no bad experiences with Windows 7 at all, and was so pleased with it!)

 

[kimira]

Hm, also, I've been fiddling around to see if I can figure out what's causing this, and the behavior is really weird. Sometimes when I start, it's fine. Then about 3-4 turns it, it starts lagging. It stays that way for maybe 10-20 turns, then suddenly returns to normal for a few turns before going back to the laggy behavior again. Argh.

 

[1stcontact2035]

I looked this up... it seems that Windows Desktop Management was kicking me off of SimCity 4, and there have been complaints of it kicking people off of other programs. Its apparently the graphics core behind Windows Aero, as I understand it. I had disabled Windows Aero, anyway, but this program kept running, and then I decided to go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services and scroll to Windows Desktop Management, disable it and click "stop" as well, and you should be good to go. At least it makes sense that it would be the problem. My understanding is that with 64 bit and decent enough memory you shouldn't be getting kicked off of something like Civ 4 with a CTD for anything like lack of memory. Worse that should happen is the game gets slower - that doesn't mean, like so many other people say, that the issue doesn't happen, it just means there's another, really serious issue going on. I hope this solves the issue (I have it too, so if it solves it for my system than I'm at least grateful for that).

 

[1stcontact2035]

You know, just a thought to anyone listening from the wonderful world of Microsoft, or closeknit suburbs... if you want to make people happy try making a feature, app or whatever that would turn Windows Desktop Management off as well as Aero whenever a fullscreen mode application is activated, as it seems that most fullscreen applications have a CTD bug associated with the WDM software (yes, slightly off topic, but you know, just in case someone is listening).

 

[kimira]

Couldn't find Windows Desktop Management in Services. And I've had Windows Aero enabled while playing Civ4 on this computer for the past year with no issues. Thought it might be a graphics driver program so I did a clean uninstall/install of the graphics driver to NVidia's recommended version, but the problem persists.

It's not the RAM, but I am noticing some interesting behavior on the CPU. Started Civ again just now, with Aero on and Firefox open with a dozen or so tabs. For a few turns it ran correctly and RAM usage was 34-35%. Then on my 3-4 turn, the lag started up. Memory usage stayed at 35% but the CPU usage jumped by a lot. I don't know, I'm stumped. Something weird happening with DirectX, maybe? I don't know why it would keep randomly starting and stopping again, though.

Oh, and I never run Civ full screen, always windowed.

 

[1stcontact2035]

Oh... Desktop Windows Manager Session... must have had a bout of lysdesxia, if you catch my meaning.

 

[kimira]

Understood. Well, tried that, and no dice. Same issue. And like I said, I've been running Civ and Aero and other applications simultaneously for a year with no problem, until to-day. I guess I could go through all the Windows updates I installed, do a clean Windows reinstall and then don't add any of those updates, or add them one at a time until I isolate the problem and then I'll know what's causing it. Frustrating, but maybe I'll actually be able to figure it out that way.

Here's an image of what's happening with my CPU when the lag starts:

If you look at the graph on the bottom there, the left half = no lag, and then the right half = when the lag in Civ starts. I'm not seeing lag or that CPU usage pattern in any other application (although I don't really have any other games installed right now to compare to see if it's happening with all DirectX applications or what).

Anyway, thanks for trying to help. If I do manage to figure it out I'll post in this thread again in case others encounter the problem in the future.

 

[1stcontact2035]

Stupid me... I'm talking about a completely different issue. Sorry.