Civ 4 BTS severe frame lag, any solutions?

[PandaPandaPanda]

So I recently acquired Civ 4 BTS, and I have had a serious problem come up while playing it. Basically when I create a new game or load a previous save the game loads with extremely low frame rates.

I would estimate the game gets about 2-5 FPS on any resolution, from 1920x1080 all the way down to 1024x768. I have a fairly good gaming machine, so I know this is not a performance issue. I was also able to play the game with no framerate issue the first day I played the game, ever since then it has been slow going. I have found several other posts on various forums describing this same issue, but I have yet to find a solution. The only solution posted to this problem was changing the fullscreen variable in the CilvilizationIV.ini file to 0. I have tried this, and it didn't seem to work. It also did not run the game in windowed mode either, so I'm not sure what is up with that.

Some other important information
-I am running this game on Windows 7 64bit
-I purchased Civ 4 BTS via Steam
-I don't think this is a performance issue as I can run most games natively at 1920x1080 without frame lag. This seems to me like Civ is not being allocated enough memory or something.

 

[Chimera]

So I have a similar issue. I recently built a new rig with windows 7 64 bit. Civ 4 (BTS 3.19) has incredibly low frame rates ~2-4, but only in the game. The main menu is ~60 fps, and if I bring up any menu or adviser screen it jumps to 60 and that screen runs just fine. The only exceptions to this are the military adviser window, in which there is a lag opening and the fps drops to 1 before climbing back to 60, and the options screen (i.e. if I hit escape the frame fps goes to 60, if I click options it goes back to ~4). This is on the first turn of the game on a tiny map, so my computer can definitively manage it. Any help is appreciated.

 

[PandaPandaPanda]

Hok, so I decided to run Warlords last night to play with a friend. After the game I decided to launch BTS to see if I could find a fix. To my surprise the fullscreen variable actually kicked in and asked me if I wanted to run fullscreen or not. I'm not sure why this is because I attempted to launch the game with different configs several times to no avail. Anyways it looks like the variable

fullscreen = 0
or
fullscreen = ask

in CivilizationIV.ini in the BeyondTheSword folder of your game directory should trigger windowed mode. Once I have the game launched in windowed mode the frame lag goes away. I am not sure why this is or why my config settings weren't detected sooner, but this solution appears to solve the problem. I discovered this late last night, but I haven't had an opportunity to change the fullscreen variable back to 1 to check if the fix works in restoring fullscreen play. I will post later tonight when I figure that out.

 

[ori]

@PandaPandaPanda:
Welcome to CFC

@Chimera:
your graphics driver is not installed correctly (it shows no file size or date): get a new one and install that

 

[Twunt]

Hok, so I decided to run Warlords last night to play with a friend. After the game I decided to launch BTS to see if I could find a fix. To my surprise the fullscreen variable actually kicked in and asked me if I wanted to run fullscreen or not. I'm not sure why this is because I attempted to launch the game with different configs several times to no avail. Anyways it looks like the variable

fullscreen = 0
or
fullscreen = ask

in CivilizationIV.ini in the BeyondTheSword folder of your game directory should trigger windowed mode. Once I have the game launched in windowed mode the frame lag goes away. I am not sure why this is or why my config settings weren't detected sooner, but this solution appears to solve the problem. I discovered this late last night, but I haven't had an opportunity to change the fullscreen variable back to 1 to check if the fix works in restoring fullscreen play. I will post later tonight when I figure that out.

I had the same issue on my rig - all of a sudden after a CTD, Civ 4 lagged terribly and I couldn't force windowed mode via the in game options (the check box would change but every time the program started it would revert to full screen). I adjusted my .ini file as described above, ran the game in windowed mode, then quit and restarted the game in full screen mode. Issue was resolved.

Apologies for the thread resurrection, however this thread features prominently when you google Civ 4 and lag, so I figured I'd post confirmation that the above fix works to help out others with the same issue.

 

[ezzlar]

Another resurrection.

I started a game of Civ 4 when suddenly one of my other hard drives failed which caused a reboot of the system. After removing the faulty hard drive I couldnt play Beyond the Sword without severe lag.

I can confirm that the above solution works. However, saving some time, there are three config files one for each of the games Civ 4, Warlords and Beyond the Sword. First I was only looking in the actual game catalogue where you only can find one config (ini) file and its a link to the config file for Civ 4 (the standard game). This config file isnt used when you are playing BTS. The correct config file to change is the one in the BTS folder in the /documents/games/beyond or similiar (not in program files (x86)/firaxis/civ4/bts). And note that the Warlords and BTS folders arent inside the Civ4 folder in the documents/my games section.

And while at it I could change the parameter with online chat to "0" to skip the annoying "unusuable audio device" error message at start.

 

[SavioursSamurai]

I've had this problem too. In my case it was precipitated by repeated hard drive crashes. I had the problem in August, and ended up sending in my computer to have the processor replaced. The problem recently cropped up again, this time when I updated my drivers after I was getting repeated bluescreen errors.

The solution was what is given in the above posts, changing "FullScreen = 1" to "0" or "ask". I'm not sure how this bug crops up, but that's how to fix it.