BtS running very slowly

[speerross]

Recently re-installed BtS so I could play Road to War, the games performance is so bad it's completely unplayable. I far outstrip the necessary requirements and I have updated graphics drivers and BtS to the latest patch. At first I tried RtW's World map and thought it might be down to the large amount of units, but even starting a vanilla game from scratch has the same issues. Moving around the map is jerky, going to cities is unresponsive and units take several seconds before they even move. Once I'm on a city management screen of a diplomacy screen it is much more responsive.I have also tried lowering all graphics settings to low to no avail. I'm convinced this is not an issue with resources as I watched Windows Task Manager while playing and neither RAM nor CPU time reaches excessive levels.

System specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
Radeon X1900
4GB RAM
Vista 64 bit

can anyone help me with this?

 

[PieceOfMind]

What clockspeed is your CPU? Does it reach 50% usage when playing civ?

Isn't Road to War a fairly demaning mod? You have to expect it to be reasonably slow... can you lower your resolution?

 

[speerross]

When I played it before (when I first got it) it was perfectly playable and the only difference is this is now the latest versi0n of BtS and the latest RtW, and I have doubled the amount of RAM since I have since then. I have tried putting it on the lowest resolution (1024 x 760 I think was the lowest, unsure why I can't go lower?). My clock speed is roughly 2.8 I think, also, the problem is the same with all games of BtS, its not RtW specific

 

[PieceOfMind]

You might be best taking this to the Technical Support forum. The problems you're describing don't sound like they can be explained by your hardware specs (which should be running the game better than that IMO).

Do you have any suspicions about what is causing the problem? After all it is more than likely specific to your machine as most people with computers similar to yours would not have the same issue.

 

[ori]

please post you dxdiag results file

Moderator Action: moved to Civ4 Tech Support

 

[speerross]

Here is my dxdiag file, I ran the 64-bit dxdiag becuase, well, this is a 64 bit machine with 64 bit OS. Does this go any way to diagnosing my issue?

 

[ori]

is this just Road to war or also the core game?
the specs look fine - though one reason *might* be that the graphics card is eating all your memory (half of it actually) as shared memory and RtW starts using the page file a lot - but that is just a stab in the dark...

 

[speerross]

"is this just Road to war or also the core game?"

It's both. I at first assumed this was RtW being resource-intensive, but I've tested just running a normal BtS vanilla game and it's dead slow when all I have on the map is a settler and a warrior (i.e. from turn 1)

"though one reason *might* be that the graphics card is eating all your memory (half of it actually) as shared memory and RtW starts using the page file a lot - but that is just a stab in the dark..."

The last game I played on this PC was Crysis, I don't think I could run the graphics at full spec but it ran fine. I've tried lowering the graphics in the game to minimum settings to no avail. What do you mean by the gfx card is using half my memory? That's quite odd it would be using 2GB seeing as I upgraded from 2GB (to 4GB) a month or so ago (And BtS used to work fine about 6 months back). Is there a way for me to limit the amount it uses? I wil run defrags etc. at the weekend but the fact that basic BtW games are terribly slow implies to me this isn't that simple.

Thanks for your help so far, have you come across this before? do you have any other suggestions?

 

[ori]

its just that the graphics card as 2048 MB of memory of which 1792 MB are "shared" i.e. taken away from your RAM if the card needs it - and BtS will make it need it - that just inherently makes the graphics calculations slower and takes away memory the game needs. I am not sure this is the real cause though - did you try disabling animations (use "frozen animations" in the game options)?

 

[oynaz]

Make sure your new RAM is not defective. Grab a copy of UBCD from www.ultimatebootcd.com and run Memtest86 from it.

A reinstallation of the game might solve the problem.

But the real culprit is the video drivers, I believe. Civ4 have issues with ATI cards, and that DXdiag log makes me suspicious. What would an X1950 want 2 gig of video memory for? That seems like an error.

Try installing the newest drivers. If the problem persists, try installing older drivers instead. You might also want to ask ATI (I believe they have been bought by AMD) is there are any known issues.

 

[GVBN]

It's not an error or a problem with your video card hoarding system memory. In Vista your video card's total memory is dedicated memory + shared system memory, which is WDDM's way of handling available video memory. It can be used as either video memory or non-video memory. It is *not* the same thing as SMA where part of your system memory is dedicated as video memory for your onboard graphics chip

Faulty memory? Not likely. It would likely result in blue screens. It's probably a video card problem. Radeon X1 series seems to be horribly incompatible with Civ4