civ 4 - memory hog?

drsafety

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 25, 2005
Messages
14
It seems that civ 4 is quite the memory hog. Is 1 gig ram suffcient or will 2gigs offer significantly faster framerates. I will be running an athlon 3500 venice and a geforce 7800gt.
 
I've got 1gb and it still slows down to a crawl about half-way into the game on large maps and above.

Personally I could have done without the 3D graphics in return for a game that is fast and responsive. I hate playing on maps smaller than large and I haven't been able to finish a game, been playing for two days and have had my 3rd game crawl to a halt and die on me...
 
Before running out and buying more RAM, wait til the first patch comes out and see if it fixes most/all of these problems being reported.

There is definitely something in the game on maps where you get towards the end of the game and it starts to bog down. It may not be a bug, may not be a memory leak but whatever it is, Firaxis may be able to do some tweaking in this next patch that will correct the problem. There are far too many people reporting this on here and Apolyton for it to be a "random" occurrance.

However, like with most games nowadays, give Firaxis some time and this game will be fine :goodjob:
 
lol Take a look at your process manager and look at the resources it sucks up.
 
Isostran said:
lol Take a look at your process manager and look at the resources it sucks up.

I've seen that too. I have 1Gb of RAM and cIV easily takes around 600-700Mb and that is not including Virtual Memory, however that does not mean you need more RAM in all cases. I dont think I need more RAM. Sure 2Gb would be nice but there are other things in my system that need to be upgraded first (such as the video card). I am sure those rare people with 2Gb of RAM could say the same thing about the memory usage of CIV4.

Besides, such behaviour in task manager can also be explained by a memory leak or screwed caching of the textures and other graphical bits that are needed or that the program needs to be tweaked by the developers which I am sure will happen over time. I would be very surprised with the patch that it wouldn't have some tweaking besides the movies in it - and anyway, you can always turn those off. You cant turn off the 3D effects as such on the map besides a few things such as quick movement, 1 instead of 3 folks running around etc, quick battles.
 
drsafety said:
It seems that civ 4 is quite the memory hog. Is 1 gig ram suffcient or will 2gigs offer significantly faster framerates. I will be running an athlon 3500 venice and a geforce 7800gt.

I honestly think by having 2Gb of Ram on my system is my saving throw. I can play the game pretty much without problems. I still crash during Multi-Player...or better put my game on my side freezes and the other player is waiting for me to re-connect which never happens. I have to cold/hard boot out of it.

I did try to crash my game by playing a huge map, adding many resources to the map(yes..cheating). Never a problem there in single player. If there is a memory leak (Which I believe there is) having extra Ram will help it. IMO.
 
I have 2 gigs of RAM and around 1800s on a huge map I would slow to a crawl if I zoomed out to the Globe View. Was fine once I zoomed back in.

Around 1900 or so the game crashed for the first time when I tried to load a saved game from within a game.

Later I checked processes and resources - the game uses 300-3300MB when loading and initing. Once my game was in full swing a for a few turns I checked again and I was using 1.04GB of Memory - processor, a 3.0Ghz was only at 15% usage. Clearly the resource that is being hogged is memory.
 
FuerzaDePoder said:
Later I checked processes and resources - the game uses 300-3300MB when loading and initing. Once my game was in full swing a for a few turns I checked again and I was using 1.04GB of Memory - processor, a 3.0Ghz was only at 15% usage. Clearly the resource that is being hogged is memory.

that proves it then, this program has to have a memory leak. firaxis should have had a patch already on release.

seems to me only the best top of the line computers can run this game well because they can compensate enough for the memory hoggage.

im leaving this game alone till tehres a patch--and oging back to playing FEAR. which runs better.
 
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