Civ 4 maxing out GPU for no reason

[magicalsushi]

I had to retire my Windows 7 system this year, and bought a new Windows 10 PC; a fairly high spec one. I'm able to run BtS with the 3.19 patch. But...

It maxes out my GPU. Constantly. Regardless of how high or how low I set the graphics settings in-game. The game runs smoothly regardless, but I'm concerned about the power I'm wasting and the unnecessary fan noise. By way of comparison, the GPU hovers around 70-80% usage when I run Portal Knights, a voxel MMO released 12 years after Civ 4.

It's possible that I had same issue on my previous machine but never noticed - task manager didn't show me GPU usage in Win7, and the graphics card I was using didn't make noise. On both machines, the game maxes out one processor core while running (3.4GHz or the old machine, 3.8GHz on the new one).

Is there anything I can do about this? The game clearly doesn't actually need all the processor power it's eating. I can live with the high CPU usage, but the ridiculous GPU usage bothers me.


Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
4GB AMD RADEON™ RX 550

 

[magicalsushi]

I think I've managed to resolve this myself. I've set a custom performance profile for Civ 4 in the settings dashboard for my graphics card, and reduced the power cap down to the lowest possible level. It still shows 100% GPU usage, but I think that means it's using 100% of what is now a lower maximum speed, due to the power cap causing throttling. So, it's running cooler, using less power, and the fan doesn't come on. The game still plays fine.

Edit: It's worth noting, I've probably voided the warranty on my graphics card by applying this manual setting, so keep that in mind if you consider trying this yourself.

 

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Hello magicalsushi,

you could also try to limit the frame rate in Civ4 itself:
Edit SetMaxFrameRate = XX in {User}\My Games\Beyond the Sword\CivilizationIV.ini.

But…
Are you sure the game uses the graphic card? I assume you just got a very high cpu usage rate, but no GPU load.
The 3D-redering is done in software rendering mode if the (old) DirectX version 9 is not installed correctly.