Civ IV runs terrible on a great computer.

joecinq03

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 30, 2005
Messages
6
FX-55
6800 ultra
1 gig of ram
raptor hd


When moving the camera over cities the fps goes down to 30 fps. This happens as early as the classical era. Have the latest patch installed as well. Every other game I have runs fine. :?
 
So what is your problem? you do know when you watch TV you only get 30 fps right? How many gamers here would love to keep civ4 from crashing let along 30 fps.
 
joecinq03 said:
You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

30 fps is your low point in this game?

Could you elaborate a little more how that effects game performance as viewed by the human eye? Does the game get choppy, slow down turns, etc etc?

Or, is the only thing that is wrong with the game 30fps?

You were not very specific as to any other sypmtons other than the frame rate low of 30fps.
 
30 frames per second is awful for a computer game. Some of you may find it acceptable with lower end computers, but when you have a near top of the line setup you expect smooth scrolling. Moving the map around in 30 fps is most definitely not smooth and is rather unacceptable. This is all the same regardless of graphical settings as well.

Yes, 30 fps is my low point.

I really do not need to go into detail about his tv and 30 fps comment. Might as well mention movie theaters running at 24 fps as well. Anyone who isn't half blind can tell you there is a very noticeable difference between motion blurred movie frames that give you the illusion of smooth transition, to a computer monitor running a video game at 30 fps.
 
Try moving the music files out of the game folder to a new folder on the C drive.
I don't know why this works but it enabled me to play huge maps with 16 civs without a single CTD.
 
Edratman did you move the entire Sounds folder or the Soundtrack subfolder? And what file(s) did you have to change to get the sounds?
 
I found these kind of threads more common in simulations forums ( which are system hogs) where someone wants to brag about their new toy. they will complain about their framerate knowing good well it's a lot higher than the average Joe.
As a PC gamer and a console gamer, I know some games are design to run only at 30fps. Even Pirates which civ4 has the same graphic engine only ran at steady 30fps. This also includes "The Battle for Middle-Earth", Hearts of Iron II, etc.
I do agree as so many here does that the scrolling isn't as smooth as it should be but if you getting framerate that high (especially late huge map games) I know it far from a game breaker.
 
Great no more!
Every "great" system obsoletes within a year, so did yours,so did mine... I have same GFX.
 
Some of you people are very rude to visitors to this forum.

joecinq03 is 100% correct, and Firaxis agrees with him, so do I.

1.) Civilization 4 is a resource hog.
2.) The polygon count on the 3D models are too high.
3.) The world geometry data consumes an enormous amount of RAM.
4.) Most of the problems associated with Civilization 4 is related to memory consumption due to massive amounts of vertex data (geometry)

If you read Thamers posts and the Civilization 4 changelog; You will notice that they state clearly that they have reduced polygon count of some of the models. You will also see them mention removal of unused texture data and fonts.

All of the changes Firaxis made in 1.52 was to reduce memory consumption and increase frame rate. This is turn will increase stability due to less fragmentation of video and AGP/swap memory.

In conclusion: Yes joecinq03 you are correct, Civ 4 does not have very high framerate performance and requires an extremely high-end game computer to achieve decent performance with the settings of "HUGE world" and "HIGH quality".

But look on the bright side, Firaxis is currently working on an optimal solution for paging out geometry data. They are also re-working some of the game models so they do not have as many polygons. Stay-tuned to the forum, within the next month or two there will be another patch which will further address these issues.

Best Regards
 
Zydor said:
Its a good setup he has - but far from a "great rig". He needs to stay clear of these guys, they will eat him

http://www.perfexltd.co.uk/forums/index.php

Regards
Zy

Oh stop it Zy!!!:D

You are giving me another bad case of computer envy.:cry: :cry:

Oh well, maybee when my financial situation changes for the better(My wife forgets where the Mall is), I will buy a new system.:D
 
Your second in the queue - my cranky thing needs a good shake :D

Regards
Zy
 
Scorpius_Ogre said:
Some of you people are very rude to visitors to this forum.
Sorry, I've seen too many of this bragging threads before on other forums. They complain about how good it runs on their pc.
joecinq03 is 100% correct, and Firaxis agrees with him, so do I.

1.) Civilization 4 is a resource hog.
2.) The polygon count on the 3D models are too high.
3.) The world geometry data consumes an enormous amount of RAM.
4.) Most of the problems associated with Civilization 4 is related to memory consumption due to massive amounts of vertex data (geometry)
Of course this isn't what he said nor is Firaxis addressing to gamers who has a PC that gets over 30 fps. He said it ran terrible on his great PC. 30 fps is far from terrible and other noted it questionable how great his pc is. It's those who has an average pc knows Civ4 is a system hog.
Pirates is made by Firaxis and it runs a steady 30 fps so I serious doubt they losing sleep over people who getting over 30 fps with Civ4. It's those who is CTD and getting less than 10fps that needs to be address.
 
I'm not bragging about anything. I'm complaining that the game isn't running well on my obviously sufficient computer.

You're right, it isn't the very best computer out there right now but it can run any game I want at max detail besides this one quite fine. If I sold my 6800 and my mobo I could upgrade to SLI and be on the very top again. That's the wonder of a processor that doesn't bottleneck you and wont for a long time.

Thank you all for your help.
 
joecinq03 said:
I'm not bragging about anything. I'm complaining that the game isn't running well on my obviously sufficient computer.

You're right, it isn't the very best computer out there right now but it can run any game I want at max detail besides this one quite fine. If I sold my 6800 and my mobo I could upgrade to SLI and be on the very top again. That's the wonder of a processor that doesn't bottleneck you and wont for a long time.

Thank you all for your help.

I scroll the map with the mouse and it goes where I scroll it at a constant speed. The speed of the scroll does not vary when I do this. If I want to get to distant part of map I just pan out a bit then go to minimap and drag it to where I want to go. ZOOM ZOOM it is very fast no mus no fus.

Maybe the scroll across the screen is locked to a certain speed that wont let you go any faster like a governor or something.

If thats not the case and the scroll actually slows down for you, then there is another issue at hand.

If you do have another issue then please post a dxdiag.
 
You are highly unlikely to get a PC game that is - by design - going to go faster than 30fps as a routine.

Is there any other aspect you want to improve ?

Regards
Zy
 
There are whole genres of games for which 30 fps is excellent. Not horrible. Turn based strategy is one of them. First person shooters are the ones that crank up to astronomical heights.

To restate: NOT ALL GAMES ARE MEASURED BY THE SAME FPS SCALE. Regardless of this fuzzy sense you have in your head that they should be.
 
I really do enjoy this delusional theory some of you are applying to acceptable fps vs genre. Perhaps i'll be as ignorant as the rest of you and assume that you're only defending the obvious performance problems because you're a diehard fanboy that couldn't be convinced of a problem if the game ran in negative colors. Ho ho how fun that was!

When using FRAPS to measure the frames it goes from 60 to 30 when I get anything more than a city and a half in my view. Having the fps DROP and RISE by 30 is NOT smooth gameplay no matter what type of game you are in fact playing.

The game has obvious problems that the developers tried to address and are most likely going to continue trying to solve. I can respect that and I do infact consider myself lucky i'm not crashing (as sad as that is). It is a great game otherwise.

Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear.
 
If it bothers you that bad then open civ4 config file and change SetMaxFramerate= from "0" to "30". Now your games will have a steady framerate of 30fps. Basicly games like Pirates have this as default.
 
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