Civ IV G5 Performance

[dojoboy]

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

Oh right, sorry for the confusion. For some reason I was thinking of the new processor when I wrote that.

 

[Bazzalisk]

Yeah... you CAN.. but the experience is like watching TV through a remote desktop connection...

This isn't true. Why would you say this?

I've tried watching TV through a remote desktop connection, the two experiences are not even comparable.

Either there is something seriously wrong wit your settup, or you have a very silly idea of what "playable" means. I don't think anyone is disagreeing that the performance on the G5 is worse than on a P4 - which is a shame, and hopefully something whch will get fixed in a future patch - but the fact that it runs better on a cheaper PC does not make it unplayable on the G5.

Personaly on a Quad G5 with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 6600 I find the odd very slight choppyness when scrolling and very occasionaly a pause after battle. This doesn't seem to depend upon what time-period in the game I'm playing at at all and since none of that bothers me I haven't tried turning the graphics settings down at all.

 

[comradeTJH]

This isn't true. Why would you say this?

I've tried watching TV through a remote desktop connection, the two experiences are not even comparable.

Me too and playing Civ on the late stage reminds me exactly to that experience.

Either there is something seriously wrong wit your settup, or you have a very silly idea of what "playable" means.

So I must have a very silly idea of a 3-4 fps game isn't playable...

Personaly on a Quad G5 with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 6600 I find the odd very slight choppyness when scrolling and very occasionaly a pause after battle. This doesn't seem to depend upon what time-period in the game I'm playing at at all and since none of that bothers me I haven't tried turning the graphics settings down at all.

I didn't even manage to end a running game at the modern age because it was EXTREMELY choppy and a real pain moving my infantry and tanks around, sometimes I have to press my keystrokes up to 3 times until they're recognized, I have HUGE lags from my clicks. So you'll see me hitting my keyboard very angry until I get so pissed of and furious that I just have to close the game so that nothing in my surrounding gets damaged...

 

[5150]

You really don't get that your hyperbole takes away from your point, do you? 3-4fps? Please. You don't have any way to measure that, so you're just guessing.

Would I like better performance? Sure. Is it unplayable? Certainly not.

What are you trying to accomplish by lying?

 

[Bazzalisk]

Agreed. 3-4fps is watching TV via VNC, the two aren't even comparable.

 

[jdevo]

Nobody is lying, the performance on g5s is unacceptable.

 

[AlanH]

Moderator Action: Please can we avoid emotive accusations. I'm sure no one is *lying* here. Keep this discussion civilized, or I'll close it.

 

[Bazzalisk]

Nobody is lying, the performance on g5s is unacceptable.

I'm sorry, but ComradeTJH is claiming that he gets 3-4fps on a G5. Unless his system is horribly misconfigured (which I admit is a strong possibility) this is rubbish.

Moderator Action: Lying is a deliberate act of deceit intended to mislead. Accusing someone of doing so with no evidence of such intent is commonly known as "flaming", it is highly likely to cause an escalating and irrational confrontation, and is not permitted on these boards. This is a warning to anyone intending to pursue similar actions.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
Please also note that the forum rules do not permit public discussion of moderator actions. If you wish to take this further with me then do so in a PM.

 

[jdevo]

Is there any way we can measure how many fps that the game is playing at? So far I've only attempted to wage war in the modern ages once. On a standard map, single units turned on, and all graphics at their lowest, the choppiness of not just the scrolling but the animations as well was unbearable. Although, surprisingly, their hardly isn't much wait between turns, unlike in civ3.

 

[AlanH]

Can I suggest that a few objective experiments are conducted here to try to reduce this somewhat pointless speculation?

If someone has a .Civ4SavedGame file that, on their system displays what they consider to be unacceptably bad performance it would be a simple matter to post that save here with (a) a brief description of the actions to take to see the poor performance and (b) a summary of their system specs, key Civ4 settings, and any mods they have installed.

Others can then download the save and attempt to reproduce the situation. From such experiments we can maybe determine whether the apparent confusion is caused by system performance differences, or by different player expectations, or by some combination of these.

 

[Melon Head]

Hey everyone. First of all, I'd like to note that I was running CIV off a G4 PowerBook a while ago, and while the performance was pretty terrible, the game did run. I mention this not because I recommend doing so, but rather because I have also run the game off a dual core 2gHz intel iMac, and experienced worse performance. Why?

I was running CIV off a firewire drive. Playing CIV off of my iPod (connected via FireWire 800), was much, much slower on the newer, faster computer than playing CIV off the hard drive on my laptop. I would check to see if there's another bottleneck popping up besides just your CPU or video card. Do you have enough RAM? Do you have enough hard drive space? Are you running off an internal or external hard drive? I would check all of these things first before I gave up trying to run CIV on a computer.

Also, remember that the G5 computers are getting a bit older at this point in time. While it's sad to think so, eventually we have to stop trying to run new software on old computers. Besides, they just released the expansion packs for Civ 3 for the mac. I've been waiting, anyways...

 

[Ganoen]

To throw my hat into the ring...I wonder if Civ IV's big problem is memory leakage/resource allocation. I notice that performance plunges as a gaming session continues. Performance degrades as I play, but if I quit and then re-load the game performance is restored, only to degrade again over time. I find that this is true whether my graphics settings are on Low or on High (in fact, the settings seemed to have little effect on my performance - time seems to be the overwhelming factor).

This is on 1.8 GHz G5, 256 MB VRAM, 1 GB RAM. No other apps running except Civ IV.

 

[Skippy_Kangaroo]

To throw my hat into the ring...I wonder if Civ IV's big problem is memory leakage/resource allocation. I notice that performance plunges as a gaming session continues. Performance degrades as I play, but if I quit and then re-load the game performance is restored, only to degrade again over time. I find that this is true whether my graphics settings are on Low or on High (in fact, the settings seemed to have little effect on my performance - time seems to be the overwhelming factor).

This is on 1.8 GHz G5, 256 MB VRAM, 1 GB RAM. No other apps running except Civ IV.

Certainly I have noted that my memory pageouts increase dramatically playing Civ IV and only on quitting Civ IV does it release all this stuff from inactive memory (I typically end up with a 1GB pagefile after playing Civ IV for a while). Active memory doesn't seem to grow without bound but it definitely seems to be leaving 'droppings' all over the system that can't be a good thing. Who knows if it is a memory leak - but no other program I have behaves this badly.

Thankfully, I can rely on Civ IV to crash or kernel panic before the system gets really compromised.

 

[Zaimejs]

Memory leak sounds about right. After playing for awhile, it just dogs, and the whole system dogs until I reboot.

 

[Gatekeeper]

Well, whatever the problem(s) is/are, they must be buggers to solve, considering how relatively quiet it's been as of late on the patch front.

Gatekeeper

 

[Bazzalisk]

I suspect that the effort is currently going into turning the code into something which can be warlordsised ...

(Just a guess, but I think an educated one)

 

[comradeTJH]

You really don't get that your hyperbole takes away from your point, do you? 3-4fps? Please. You don't have any way to measure that, so you're just guessing.

Hey, guys, I'm not just guessing! Unbelievable that I always have to make my point clear.

(Apple's Open GL Profiler that comes with the dev tools...)

What are you trying to accomplish by lying?

Obviously, I'm not! I'm just very disappointed by a product I bought and displayed my very obvious points here with the hope some developers could tell my why Civ IV on G5 is fubar and if some development is going on fixing the major performance issues. But unfortunately you don't take me serious and honestly, I can't take you serious anymore either - you're just denying facts here. Sad.

 

[dojoboy]

Obviously comradeTJH has problems with the game. I hope the issues can be resolved so he can enjoy the game.

But, I believe personality conflicts have developed here, which are rare in the Mac subforums. I may risk dragging myself into it, but why don't you guys PM the more personal views.

 

[AlanH]

@comradeTJH: Pleaase post a copy of the save that illustrates your point so that others can make objective comparisons on their kit instead of speculating about whether it's your system that is causing the problem.

 

[5150]

Personality conflict? No. Just a difference of opinion on how we choose to characterize a misrepresentation.

Why do I call it a misrepresentation? I just used the same methodology to see what I'm getting. Rather than pretending to have an average, I'll just give the range. I saw from 1.6 to 16.4FPS in the game I'm playing. Most of the time I'd say I was getting 6-12FPS. That's not great, but for a strategy game that is most certainly playable.

He's got a much more powerful system than mine. I've got a dual 2.0 G5.