CIV 4 runs great on your comp? What are you specs?

AMD64 3800+
2GB ecc ram
Nvidia 6800GT (AGP)
Nforce3 chipset, MSI board.
audigy X-fi

(only issue is sound card disappears sometimes when starting multiplayer game. MP games tend to crash at the start. (They load fine but i don't get the PLAY NOW button).

Also runs fine on following:

AMD XP 2100+, Nforce2 board.
AGP ATI 9800 Pro
1 GB
Onboard sound
 
Athlon XP 2000+ @1.69GHz (the 'Palomino' version)
ABIT KV7 motherboard (VIA KT600 chipset)
1.5 GB DDR266/PC2100 RAM (3 512MB modules)
ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB with Catalyst 5.11 driver
SB Live! Value
Antec Sonata case with stock Antec 380W Power Supply
Windows XP Professional with SP2

I run at 1280x1024 resolution with all quality settings set to "high" and 4x antialiasing enabled. I have the 1.09 patch installed, but my wife and I ran the game for some time without the patch as well.

Even though our machine certainly isn't state-of-the-art, the game itself looks beautiful, runs pretty smoothly, and is stable. I've played for hours without a crash. In fact, the game has never crashed on us. The in-game movies, on the other hand, are pretty much a disaster. The intro movie is fine, and the short religion movies are fine, but the wonder movies only play correctly about half the time. Sometimes, they work perfectly, but other times the sound is fine but the video abruptly stops for a second or two and jumps ahead to catch up. I've tried playing with all the Bink video settings in the .ini file, and nothing fixes the problem. The videos play perfectly in the standalone Bink video player outside of the game, so I seriously doubt this is a performance problem with my machine.

One last note: when we originally purchased Civ4, we had an Nvidia FX5200 128MB video card. The game was pretty much unplayable on this card. We had to set all the quality settings to "low" and turn off AA. Even then, we had bad 3D artifacts. I couldn't stand it, so I bought a used ATI Radeon 9800XT for about $100. The only reason I mention this is that a lot of people are trying to run this game with old and/or low-end video cards. It's a DirectX 9 game, and it needs a card that implements DirectX 9 _in hardware_ to run well. While a 9800XT is probably more card than you need, I wouldn't run it on less than a Radeon 9600 or Nvidia 6600 if you want to see all the eye candy.
 
P4 640
2GB DDR2
Nvidia 7800GT (81.85 WHQL)
1280X1024 4XAA 8XAS

This system does not know the meaning of stock settings. A little stutter and it slows a bit in later stages of game but never have come close to a crash. One caveat, I have played all but the huge map, normally on standard and large.
 
A64 2.6 GHz
1 Gig Mushkin Ram
Nvidia 6600GT
Audigy 2 Soundcard

Game locks up during later periods. It doesnt CTD, just locks.
 
My computer is: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 2800+; 1.81 GHz, 512 MB of Ram
Sony CD-RW CRX320EE
Realtek AC97 Audio
Invideo GX FX5400

Note: all information listed above is considered reliable but not guaranteed. It is completely dependant upon my abysmal skills at finding this stuff out.:blush:
 
my computers
P4 3.2GHz
1.5GB RAM
GeForce 6800 Ultra

AMD Sempron 2600+
768MB RAM
Radeon 9700 Pro

Runs great on both on 1280x1024
 
athlon 64 3200+
ati x800xt 256MB
1.5 GB of ram
msi nforce4 mobo

runs great here. just upgraded from amd 3000xp, geforce 6600gt, 1 gig ram, and crappy mobo. but it ran fine on that one to after i did the recommended fixes.
 
Game on order and I am scared - lol

W2K SP4
Athlon 1800+ overclocked to about 2000
1GB DDR
Nivida GeForce2 32MB AGP

that video card might have to be replaced - aaaack
will know when I go to install


hopefully it will run on the laptop at least

XP Pro SP2
AMD64 2800+ no overclocking
384MB
SIS 128MB 166Mhz video

Both machines run Railroad Tycoon 3 without issue - and it is 3D. I am really hoping that they both work. Will update when game arrives.

Should I have 1.09 handy to start or wait to install patch?
 
Hmm, I can't really see a pattern here.... we've got both new and old hardware working well and not. Maybe, just maybe, it's not the hardware?

Let's try listing (or start a new thread) softwares that we installed in our machines this time, especially antiviruses. Maybe one of our softwares doesn't like Civ4, hence causing CTDs. I mean, I can't see a pattern in the hardware... unless it's the dvd/cd drive that's causing the CTDs.
 
mass T said:
Hmm, I can't really see a pattern here.... we've got both new and old hardware working well and not. Maybe, just maybe, it's not the hardware?

Let's try listing (or start a new thread) softwares that we installed in our machines this time, especially antiviruses. Maybe one of our softwares doesn't like Civ4, hence causing CTDs. I mean, I can't see a pattern in the hardware... unless it's the dvd/cd drive that's causing the CTDs.
Click to expand...

Highly unlikely to be the CD/DVD since they're basically not used during the game. The CD just has to be there to satisfy the copy protection.

We all know that Civ4 has VERY heavy RAM usage. My opinion is that there are a lot of machines out there with unrecognized bad RAM. I wish that everyone who was seeing consistent crashes would run memtest86 (www.memtest86.com) overnight to verify that their system RAM isn't the problem.

I think this problem is compounded by the fact that a lot of people who play Civ4 are not traditional "gamers" (I'm not), so they have machines with inadequate case cooling and cheap power supplies. A machine like that will work just fine for MS Office/Quicken/web browsing/etc, but will start to fail when heat builds in the case up due to heavy CPU/system RAM/video card use. This is easy to test, too: just run the game with the system case open and a fan blowing on the machine's insides.

Also, don't discount the simple stuff. For example, my CPU temperature was over 60C for quite some time but the system was stable, so I didn't worry about it. A couple weeks ago I opened up the machine and blew all the dust out of it, especially the dust in the CPU heatsink. The CPU is now running around 52C.

All that being said, I agree that there could be problems with antivirus and other software, but I think that should be a separate thread.
 
Is there any of you who can complete a huge game without running in to stability problems?

Jens
 
My PC:
AMD Opteron 146 ran at 10x280
1GB RAM
ATI 800 Flashed to 16 pipes 850XTPE and clocked at those speeds

Wife's PC:
AMD XP2500 Overclocked to XP3200
1GB RAM
NVidia Ti4600


Son's PC
AMD XP2600 Mobile Overclocked to 11x200
ATI 9800pro
1GB RAM

The game will play fine with no CTD's or reboots on each of the three PC's. I will get better performance from my PC when playing with a huge map in the later stages. I have completed a huge map game many times with ZERO stability problems.
 
The game runs reasonably well on my computer. I always play huge maps (10ish civs), I have all the graphics settings maxed out except for anti-aliasing which I have at 2x instead of 4x. I run at 1024x1280 in full screen mode, or 1152x864 in windowed mode. Sound is set to 5.1.

Near the end of games, I get a bit of sluggishness (for instance right before another civ contacts me I get a couple seconds of "duh" time... probably stuff loading on and off of virtual memory to make room for the leaderhead graphics). Before the patch, wonder movies and the final space race victory movie had stuttered sound. Since the patch, both the audio and video stutters on those movies. If I play in windowed mode (1152x864) with anti-aliasing turned off, then the wonder movies in the first couple of eras play fine, but eventually the stutter comes back.

My system really isn't that spectacular.

System Specs:
  • AMD Sempron 2400+ (1.67GHz) (VIA Hyperion 5.00A drivers)
  • 1GB PC2700 RAM
  • 256MB GeForce 6600GT (AGP) (81.95 drivers)
  • Hurcules Game Theater XP (6.09 drivers)
  • Windows XP SP2 (all updates installed)
  • 120GB SATA Western Digital hard drive
 
Game works flawlessly. Do have some slowness when playing in a huge map.


MSI K8N Neo Platinum mobo w/ AC'97 sound onboard and marvell gigabit
AMD 3200+
MSI NX6600TD128E LITE GF6600 128MB PCI EXPRESS video card
1GB RAM
Windows XP PRO SP2
Basic CivIV install, no modifications or anything, before and after latest patch.
 
My system:
P4-2.4GHz
512mb Ram
G-Force ti4200
Win2k - SP4. (I have also tried reinstalling a fresh WinXP on this system but that changed nothing).

The game was completely unplayable for me before the patch and still is. The game runs so extremely slow even with all graphics options and resolution set to minimum, and even when playing single player on the smallest maps.
The strange thing is that when I scroll all the way out on the map then it seems to run much smoother - but then again you cant play the game from that view.

I can play many other games with 3d graphics that are far superior to Civ IV without any problems at all. It still beats me why you should need a high-end system in order to play this game. If this is the case, then the system requirements printed on the box are false, and Firaxis has moved away from the target audience for their previous civ games.
 
MB: ASUS A8NSLI Deluxe
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4400+
RAM: 4 Gb
GPU: Nvidia 7800 GT


Runs perfect even in late game.
 
Kotan said:
Game on order and I am scared - lol

W2K SP4
Athlon 1800+ overclocked to about 2000
1GB DDR
Nivida GeForce2 32MB AGP

that video card might have to be replaced - aaaack
will know when I go to install


hopefully it will run on the laptop at least

XP Pro SP2
AMD64 2800+ no overclocking
384MB
SIS 128MB 166Mhz video

Both machines run Railroad Tycoon 3 without issue - and it is 3D. I am really hoping that they both work. Will update when game arrives.

Should I have 1.09 handy to start or wait to install patch?
Click to expand...

W2K machine got a warning about not meeting specs and that options were reset to reflect this. I checked and the graphics were set to LOW. Ran the tutorial fine

Laptop had no issues and ran Tutorial fine

what about 1.09????

Should I load it or not???
 
Here's an interesting case... I JUST upgraded my machine.

Machine1:
ATI 9800SE
Intel P4 Prescott 3.2gig
2 gig of DDR400, Kingston RAM, Dual Channel
2 Serial ATA drivers
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Asus P5P800 Motherboard
Antech 480 Watt Server grade Dual Fan Powersupply

Latest Drivers for Motherboard, etc..
The ATI drivers were a nightmare... I've spent over 10 hours total rolling back throung different drivers to get it to run properly...

Any ways, on to the new machine :)
Machine2:
Intel P4 (630) 3.0gig
2 sticks of DDR2 533Mhz Matching 1gig Corsair memory (dual channel setup)
1 Serial ATA driver with 16mb of cache
Asus P5LD2-Deluxe Motherboard
Antech Server Class 480Watt Dual Fan Powersupply
BFG 6800 GT OC (256mb of DD3 RAM, over 350Mhz Coreclock, 32gb bandwidth, PCI-Express 16X)
Latest NVidia Drivers 81.95, latest BIOS and motherboard chipset drivers
This machine slows to a hault majority of times after diplomatic talks with other Civs, like the trading screen is what does it.

I run the game on high graphics settings, No Anti-Aliasing, 1280x1024. Both run Windows XP Pro.

The ATI machine has no problem at all, no lag at all running same settings.

Oh well, hopefully another patch will fix this :(
 
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