Civ IV G5 Performance

5150 said:
Why were you running the Mac version in a window?
Click to expand...

Cause fullscreen 1280 x 1024 on 23" Cinema Display obviously looks fubar. And running the game at fullscreen (native) 1920 x 1200 brings same 'performance'. So I'm pretty sure it's not about the graphics chip but much more about the CPU. Or the lack of optimisation for the G5... or whatever... Fact is, it's not usable on the G5 :sad:
 
I have an iSight and an evaluation of Snapz X on my Mac Pro. I've never tried creating a video of screen activity, and I'm not sure how I'd host the resulting file, but I'll give it a whirl this evening.
 
While I'm not thrilled with the performance, it's disingenuous to say that it's not playable. That weakens any sort of credibility you might have had.
 
5150 said:
While I'm not thrilled with the performance, it's disingenuous to say that it's not playable. That weakens any sort of credibility you might have had.
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Well, it's playable for 5 or so turns but then gets really crappy - so when you only play Civ until the classical era then yeah... it's playable... :rolleyes:
 
comradeTJH said:
Well, it's playable for 5 or so turns but then gets really crappy - so when you only play Civ until the classical era then yeah... it's playable... :rolleyes:
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I play until the end of the game quite happily with all the graphics options on maximum. I have no idea what you are complaining about. It may be smoother ona pentium 4, I have no idea, never having played it on one, but it's perfectly playable on my Powermac G5.
 
I think it's unplayable once I get to Infantry, once the world is discovered and I've got more than 8 cities it's unbearable. Waging a modern war is next to impossible... I think it's safe to say that Aspyr did a terrible job, as much as I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. If my $400 video card can play call of duty flawlessly, then it should be able to handle Civ 4.
 
As promised, here's a video capture from my Mac Pro.

I don't have a save of my own that was suitable, so I downloaded Harkonnen AD-1961.Civ4SavedGame, which has been cited before as a fairly intensive stage of the game, and video'd the first interturn using Snapz Pro X. After the interturn I zoomed out to globe view and back a couple of times. I think performance on this test is heavily limited by the stock Geforce GPU.

The whole thing seems pretty playable to me at this level, but then, I don't actually *play* Civ4 :p

PS. This is a 200 MByte movie file. DOn't try it if you have a dial-up connection!

PPS. Civ4 was running in a 1280 x 1024 window on my second screen. All graphics settings were maximum.
 
I'm gonna jump into the fray...

For one, thank you Alan and Brad for intervening with that pc-using "vulcher" (lol).

Secondly, I would like a performance improvement and would like to be able to play the game on moderate or maximum settings for full benefit. BUT, the game has definitely been playable on my G5. I've played several games on standard and huge maps. Although the game was agonizingly slow pre-patch, it has been much better since the patch. My last game was even the Huge map of Earth starting in 1000AD scnario that game with the game. It did get slow by the end - but I won a space race with just like 5 turns left, so the huge world was very very populated and there were tons of units all over the place. I wage a massive world war in the 1900s with modern military units. It got sluggish, but performed fine.

Thirdly, I don't blame Aspyr, I blame Firaxis for writing the original game in some crappy code that isn't easy to port. I've said many times in these forums that I wish the makers of Civilization would do like Blizzard Entertainment (maker of World of Warcraft) and make all games in a language that works in all Operating Systems. Also, I would add that I was a pc user for years until I converted to Mac in Feb 2004, so I played all versions of Civ on pc first, and believe me the original Civ 3 was even buggier than our ported Civ 4 mac game is right now! I uesd to get weird color problems and choppy performance until they patched civ 3 a few times. So I guess all I'm saying is, let's be patient, we'll eventually get what we want :D

my comp: 1.8 single G5, 1.5 mb ram, ati 9600 256mb vram
 
AlanH said:
As promised, here's a video capture from my Mac Pro.

I don't have a save of my own that was suitable, so I downloaded Harkonnen AD-1961.Civ4SavedGame, which has been cited before as a fairly intensive stage of the game, and video'd the first interturn using Snapz Pro X. After the interturn I zoomed out to globe view and back a couple of times. I think performance on this test is heavily limited by the stock Geforce GPU.

The whole thing seems pretty playable to me at this level, but then, I don't actually *play* Civ4 :p

PS. This is a 200 MByte movie file. DOn't try it if you have a dial-up connection!

PPS. Civ4 was running in a 1280 x 1024 window on my second screen. All graphics settings were maximum.
Click to expand...

Wow... that's a MacPro? Quad Xenon? I'm not impressed. The video is laggy... the pieces slide choppily. It's not even close to as smooth as the PC video (and the PC had much lower specs.)

I don't know what to say other than... something is rotten in the state of Civ IV for Mac.

This is going to sound crazy, but the last few times I've played... it feels like my whole system just lags even after I quit the game. Like it's still eating resources after it quits... the ghost of Civ IV haunts my computer.
 
AlanH said:
As promised, here's a video capture from my Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Hey, thanx a lot for your screen-capture! :)
And I can say it runs a lot better than on my G5 although I use to play the game a bit more zoomed out. But then again, it does not even compare to how it runs on my old PC in the office. Wen you can provide me with the savegame I could capture another clip showing the performance the ol'PC - if interested?
 
@comradeTJH: I got that saved game file here. Ancestral posted the url in July here.

I think the performance limitations are largely down to:

(a) my video card. I didn't get a gamer's video card, as I'm not that kind of guy. I *might* upgrade my video when better cards are cheaper, but paying hundreds of dollars for a GPU that I'd use once in a blue moon doesn't compute. I'd rather spend on RAM and CPU.

(b) It may be a quad core system, but Civ4 only uses one core for just about everything, plus a fraction of another just for sound. It runs 100-102%, leaving 300% waiting for my next key press in another window (or processing a video capture :p ). So it really just sees a single 2.66 GHz system, but unencumbered by any background activity. Civ4 really needs more multithreading to take advantage of all these multi-core systems that are rolling out of Apple.
 
I noticed a HUGE improvement in performance when I dropped from the larger map sizes down to "Standard". I have a Dual G5/2Ghz w/1G RAM and ATI9800. I'm talking HUGE.
 
dojoboy said:
Well, I'm literally a week away fom purchasing a new iMac 17" 2.0GHz Core2 Duo, but now you guys have me hesitating.
Click to expand...

Why? this thread is one person claiming (incorrectly as it happens) that you can't play on a G5 - since the mac you intend to buy isn't a G5 I don't see how it matters ...
 
You can play civ on a g5, but it takes a lot of effort to not go insane from the choppy gameplay. It doesn't seem even matter what video card you have, the performance is pretty bad.
 
jdevo said:
You can play civ on a g5, but it takes a lot of effort to not go insane from the choppy gameplay. It doesn't seem even matter what video card you have, the performance is pretty bad.
Click to expand...

Well then, what other option is there?
 
:confused: This thread is about G5 performance. Unless you are planning on buying second hand kit you can't buy a G5 now, so this isn't the place to discuss new purchase options.

Moderator Action: I've split this thread to separate out the discussions on the new Core 2 Duo Macs. See this thread
 
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