Civ4, Multitasking, and TV Tuner

[Zumino]

Ok, so a bit of background, I am hyperactive, to the point of nearly being hyperkenetic. So I'm ALWAYS doing more then one thing at once, if I do one at a time it drives me crazy.

That said, picked up Civ4, and like all the other Civ games before it, I love it. However, I'm having an issue which is affecting my enjoyment due to my hyperactivity.

Basically, I can ONLY play Civ4. If I try to run anything else, the system bogs to a standstill. Sure I'm not running the most powerful system hardware-wise, but even little things will bog Civ4 to nothing. And that doesn't work for me, it drives me nuts.

The most common thing I'm trying to run is Hauppauge's WinTV2K, which is a program that allows me to watch TV on the second monitor. This monitor is hooked up to it's own older video card, and the only thing it really does is watch TV/Movies on. The Tuner card is a Hauppauge PVR-150, which has hardware encoding to take the load of the processor, and when I'm just watching TV on the puter, I get VERY little load on the CPU. If I'm playing any other game(be it 2boxing Everquest on 1 computer, Mech4, ect) I notice no slowdown from having the TV on, but with Civ4, the system just crawls to the point of unplayable(and even unwatchable for TV).

I figure this can't be hardware because I play other games that are way more system hoggy then Civ4, it just must be something I've set wrong. I notice no spike in system operations when this happens if I've got ASUSProbe up(MB monitoring software), no spikes in Temp/Voltage/etc, system just crawls.

Figure I'm missing something obvious, but any suggestions?

System Spec's
AMD2500 OC'd to 3200
1 gig DDR400 running in Dualchannel
1 100gig HDD
1 60gig HDD
BFG 6800 AGP card
Hauppauge PVR-150 TV tuner Card
Windows XP Pro, fully updated.
Drivers updated less then 1 week ago

 

[robaughjr]

Better buy at least another gig or two of ram if you want to run anything with civ. Have you installed 1.52 patch? That will help some but if you must run other programs with civ, gonna need more ram.

I figure this can't be hardware because I play other games that are way more system hoggy then Civ4

LOL Nothing is more system hoggy than civ4. I can play Star wars Battlefront 2 and GTA San Andreas without anywhere near the slowdown of civ4.

 

[Smidlee]

Ok, so a bit of background, I am hyperactive, to the point of nearly being hyperkenetic. So I'm ALWAYS doing more then one thing at once, if I do one at a time it drives me crazy.

And you don't have a duelcore processors yet? What are you waiting for? hmmm.... money right?

I have run both civ4 and doom 3 demo on two monitors with the same graphic card ( for testing) with no problems. Also play civ3 and civ4 both at the same time. (civ3 AI took 20+ minutes per turn in WW2 game so why wait when I could be playing civ4) ok it was more or less to see if I could without civ4 from crashes or slow down. It didn't, no differance in preformance. (whatever cause 3fps globel view late in the game wasn't becuase of my hardware)

I got a duelcore processor ( the cheap one 3800+) plus 2gb of ram.

IMO civ4 is a hog when it's comes to ram (even more than processor) just as much as flight sims. Flight sims are ram hogs because of the mapping the landscape and needs quick access to memory which shows the biggest flaw to virtual memory; it's speed. Civ4 seems the same as it demands quick access to memory when it come to the map.

 

[Zumino]

heh, yeah, I keep pricing upgrading to Dual-Core, but between needing to buy a new CPU/MB/Video card, and being a brokeass college student I can't afford it.


That said, I've turned the map quality all the way down to see if that helped without luck, and I can't think Civ4 would be more system demanding then 2 full verisons of Everquest but /shrug.