Civ IV G5 Performance

[AlanH]

Regardless, it seems to me that platform advocacy is wildly off-topic for this forum.

@wiglaff: I've bent over backwards to accommodate your contentious posting in this forum, but it really is getting very tiresome. As Brad says, it is largely irrelevant to people here, most of whom already have Macs and just want to run Civ4 on them.

Moderator Action: Final warning
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Please take your anti-Apple stance to a more appropriate place. There's a whole Computer Talk forum where you can extol the relative virtues of PCs over Macs.

 

[owarsson]

Hmmm... I guess "playable" is relative. From the looks of that movie capture, my computer has worse performance (although I have the settings on mostly high levels), yet I find the game very playable.

OW

(Dual 2.5GHz PPC G5)

 

[Zaimejs]

I just finished the Eastern U.S. scenario and it was very slow by the end. A PC owning friend of mine happened to walk by as I was playing, and I was a bit embarassed by the sluggishness because my dual G5 has better specs than his PC, but it is much, much slower playing civ IV.

Why?! Blame openGL!!

 

[Gatekeeper]

*snort* I suspected from the get-go that I "knew" Wiglaff, aka Wiglaf over at 'Poly.

Watch it, Wiggums, or I'll sic Ming and MtG on ya!

Gatekeeper

Moderator Action: Please do not make personal attacks.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

P.S. Regarding the topic at hand, I've played the 18-civ Earth map well into the 20th Century with only some slight noticeable slowdown on my Intel iMac (2GHZ, 2G RAM, 256MB VRAM)

 

[AlanH]

P.S. Regarding the topic at hand, I've played the 18-civ Earth map well into the 20th Century with only some slight noticeable slowdown on my Intel iMac (2GHZ, 2G RAM, 256MB VRAM)

Umm! Talking of Off Topic. This thread is about performance issues on a G5.

 

[Josh Wolf]

Use Cmd-H (OSX's Hide command) from within fullscreen. Cmd-Tab does the same thing, FWIW.

The MAJOR problem with this is that it doesn't pause the CPU. Other apps run dog slow if Civ isn't the frontmost app.

 

[Brad Oliver]

The MAJOR problem with this is that it doesn't pause the CPU. Other apps run dog slow if Civ isn't the frontmost app.

You're right! I'll fix that.

 

[comradeTJH]

Brad, do you think there's something that can be done in the future that improves performance on a G5 or is already everything pulled out of that processor of mine with the current version of civ?

And by the way, do you agree that the performance showed on that vid isn't really enjoyable or is it just me demanding too much?

Thanx a lot

The MAJOR problem with this is that it doesn't pause the CPU. Other apps run dog slow if Civ isn't the frontmost app.

oh well, that's the same on the PC side

 

[Brad Oliver]

Brad, do you think there's something that can be done in the future that improves performance on a G5 or is already everything pulled out of that processor of mine with the current version of civ?

I would imagine there's more we can do about that, but I don't want to promise anything.

And by the way, do you agree that the performance showed on that vid isn't really enjoyable or is it just me demanding too much?

I wasn't going to say anything, but based on that video, performance seemed "snappy" to me. If there was a performance issue, it wasn't clear to me exactly what it was from that video. If there's a moment in the video you think best shows a problem, point it out and I'll take a closer look.

oh well, that's the same on the PC side

That may be, but we can improve this quite a bit for the Mac. I applied a fix earlier today (when I read about this) that reduces CPU usage when in a game to 20% when you've got it switched out, which is much better than 98%.

 

[Bazzalisk]

Works wonderfully on my Quad G5. I think the OP has something settup wrong.

 

[Josh Wolf]

That may be, but we can improve this quite a bit for the Mac. I applied a fix earlier today (when I read about this) that reduces CPU usage when in a game to 20% when you've got it switched out, which is much better than 98%.

That would be AWESOME, thank you! I've been muddling by with CunningFox, but Civ doesn't always "wake up" properly...

 

[comradeTJH]

Works wonderfully on my Quad G5.

Let me guess... approximately 2 times faster than on my dual one? ;-)

 

[AlanH]

Let me guess... approximately 2 times faster than on my dual one? ;-)

Probably not. I doubt if Civ4 is highly multi-threaded, and its pretty unlikely to be able to take advantage of more than two CPUs.

 

[comradeTJH]

Probably not. I doubt if Civ4 is highly multi-threaded, and its pretty unlikely to be able to take advantage of more than two CPUs.

well, as an interesting matter of fact I tried to turn off one processor on the original (pre-patch) version of Civ and that had no effect.
With the Rev A though, turning one processor off brings the game to the slower speed of the prepatch version again. So there's definately something done there

 

[AlanH]

But you have two CPUs, and are cutting to one. I did say it's unlikely to take advantage of more than two CPUs ...

 

[comradeTJH]

Ah, ok - but does not the OS take care of this?

 

[AlanH]

The OS can only distribute threads across CPUs. It can't split a process up into more CPU processes than there are threads in the application.

Most programs are written to do one thing at a time, maybe two if you're lucky. Keeping two or more threads running requires careful programming to avoid lock-ups where processes end up waiting for each other, or timing 'race' conditions where one process assumes output from another is available before it actually is.

If you have several CPU-intensive applications running at once, such as a complex Photoshop transformation plus Civ4, then those can be spread across multiple CPUs, so a 4-core Mac will probably be able to chew gum and walk at the same time better than a one or 2-core system in those circumstances.

 

[comradeTJH]

Ok, I see - that makes sense. Thanx for your explanation

 

[Brad Oliver]

well, as an interesting matter of fact I tried to turn off one processor on the original (pre-patch) version of Civ and that had no effect.
With the Rev A though, turning one processor off brings the game to the slower speed of the prepatch version again. So there's definately something done there

It would have no effect in the original only because it was already saturating both CPUs by accident (the main cause of performance problems there).

It will help in the patch because our sound code offloads to other CPUs to the tune of roughly 8-10% on average.

 

[lateralis]

I'll pop in since I have a similar setup to you.

dual 2.5 G5, 4 gigs RAM. the main difference is the uber-card I have for video. as far as I know, the geforce 6800 ultra is the best AGP card available for an AGP mac bar-none.

since the patch, I keep most graphic settings at medium although to do show the health bar but I only use single unit graphics.

the main thing I've found in terms of performance is:

a) the later in the game it gets the slower it is -duh
b) the larger the map/larger the number of civs, the slower it is -duh
c) THE LONGER YOU PLAY IN ONE SITTING, THE SLOWER IT GETS - for me, a restart of the app provides a slight performance jump.
d) DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES attempt to play civ 4 while trying to render 3D video frames in the background. (this has been especially annoying this week as I've had renders running pretty much 24x7 and had to avoid civ for this reason. )

in general, I find the game very playable and only annoyingly slow after having played for several hours when I start to get into the later game. as I said, a restart of the app will bring some speed back, but a huge map warmonger game can be quite the exercise in futility.