Civ 5 not booting up with GT 555m graphics card

[DoesNotCompute]

Hi all,

About a month ago, it was with great pleasure that I ordered a new laptop for school. I looked around and got one with some specs suitable to play some games. With great delight I installed steam and looked at what games were available. I found Civilization V and instantly downloaded it (Civilization is easily my favourite computer game series).

Anyways, I have installed the game through steam, yet the game will not boot up with my optimus GeForce GT 555m graphics card. I have updated my graphics card driver and I have downloaded the newest version of DirectX... still the game will not boot.

Interestingly, the game will boot up if I DO NOT use my graphics card but rather just use the onboard integrated graphics card. This would be fine, however the game runs quite slow and it is frustrating that I bought this laptop with a decent GPU but I am unable to use it for this game.

Are there any suggestions I can get to fix this problem?

I have the Lenovo y570:
i5 2410m
GT 555m 1gb DDR5 (Optimus)
6gb ram

By all accounts my system far surpasses the system requirements for Civ V. Any help would be appreciated and I will personally grant you 5 internets.

Thank you very much!!

 

[DoesNotCompute]

I found a fix.

Go into /documents/My Games/Civ 5/ UserSettings

Find the line SkipIntroVideo : 0

change it to SkipIntroVideo : 1

This worked for me. I can now play the game off my 555m GPU.

 

[timtofly]

I am not questioning the fact that this did not solve your problem, but I would like to go on record as saying that not playing a video is an interesting concept. Does that mean that the video was not properly dumped from memory when it is supposed to, or that the file was corrupt and freezing the computer graphics chip? Just my 2 cents.

Hopefully that will be the only issue you face.

 

[The_J]

IDoes that mean that the video was not properly dumped from memory when it is supposed to

Probably that. There are people who have reported that they see an image from the into if they alt+tab back to the game, and similar things. There might be a memory problem associated with the video.

 

[DoesNotCompute]

Yes, I found that simply disabling the intro video is a very strange "fix". However, I have been playing the game since and have experience no subsequent problems.

The person who told me to disable the intro video was actually 2k games tech support. The 2k games agent said that the intro video appears to cause a lot of problems with Nvidia cards. He also suggested to me that the next Civ V update should address some of the problems with nvidia cards. Take from this what you will...

Either way, it did work and I'm quite happy about that.

 

[timtofly]

Yes, I found that simply disabling the intro video is a very strange "fix". However, I have been playing the game since and have experience no subsequent problems.

The person who told me to disable the intro video was actually 2k games tech support. The 2k games agent said that the intro video appears to cause a lot of problems with Nvidia cards. He also suggested to me that the next Civ V update should address some of the problems with nvidia cards. Take from this what you will...

Either way, it did work and I'm quite happy about that.

It is even stranger, since nvidia was offering the game as a bonus at one point in time. My geforce go 7600 occasionally has problems whith "artifacts", but for the most part, it is a lot better than in previous months.