Civ4 video problems!

[Atskuli]

Hello!


I've been having these problems. When I play Civ4 for about 15-30min it crashes to a strange splitted green screen and I have to reboot to gain control of my comp again. I have tried to download newest patches and drivers, but it doesn't help.

My system is:

Geforce4 64MB
RAM 512MB
1,7 gHz

 

[chan90]

I don't think your video card has enough memory for civ 4.

 

[Biges]

64MB VRAM is enough, I have the same. No CDTs, but slowdowns, which are clearly not related to the video memory. Btw, to fill up the entire video memory is a lot of work, usually done by 3D intensive games, not turn-based strategies. Althou Fireaxis genius programmers are capable of doing so. :-/

 

[Zydor]

Civ IV is a highly 3D intensive game and places huge load on the hardware. Whether or not its a turn based game is completely irrelevant. 64mb Video RAM is the bare min for Civ IV, 128 is recommended, 256 is wonderfull. There are many slowdowns that are attributed to the way the Video RAM is used. They will be fix in the next release.

Regards
Zy

 

[ti_mo_n]

64MB is far more than is needed to run any game. Every texture can be streamed through AGP when necessary. 512x512 texture uses ~350 KB of space, so you'd need tons of textures to fully fill the 64MB. You'd only need 64MB when you display much much much much of the whole terrain (consisting of very different textures). That's when the video card needs all the textures at once, so only then you need much video RAM. Every other situation requires few textures, and any unnecessary textrure may safely wait in system RAM until it's needed. Slowdowns have nothing to do with video RAM until you're VERY BAD coder/programmer. It's because Direct3d9 automatically manages the video memory very efficiently. Slowdowns are mostly because of intensive paging from HDD to RAM and vice versa (that's when a game lacks decent memory management and Civ4 is one of those games). Crashes are when asynchronous loaders assume that the data is already read, while it's not or when memory management sucks so bad that it doesn't know what it required and what is not and it frees the required stuff. In such situations the game's code tries to access unallocated memory what results in a General Protection Fault. The game is screwed up really really badly and Video RAM doesn't help here. I have GF FX 5200 with 128 MB and GF 2 MX 400 with 64 MB. The game runs equally horribly on both.

 

[Zydor]

Have a read of this thread, it will outline the Civ IV issues, System RAM / Video RAM, how its handled in Civ IV, ending with identifying many of the resultant issues - and not least Harkys v successful patch. 3D games bring forward many additional issues, as no doubt you are aware. Have a feeling it will prove interesting (or thought provoking!) from your viewpoint.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137706

Regards
Zy