Civ5 really zips on my ancient machine

[jjkrause84]

I don't get it. Lots of complaints that the game is sow and turns take forever to load by people with MUCH better computers than me. I have Dell XPS M1710 from 4 years ago and the game plays like a champ. The graphics are down to 'low' but I never have to wat more than a few seconds at the end of each turn.

Maybe people are setting their graphics too high?

 

[AetiusG]

I don't get it. Lots of complaints that the game is sow and turns take forever to load by people with MUCH better computers than me. I have Dell XPS M1710 from 4 years ago and the game plays like a champ. The graphics are down to 'low' but I never have to wat more than a few seconds at the end of each turn.

Maybe people are setting their graphics too high?

What are your specs? Mine are 2.2ghz dual-core, 3gigs of ram and a 256mb dedicated graphics intel card

 

[mattavich]

Dedicated graphics will be bad for this game really. You're not going to have a smooth game with that.

 

[AetiusG]

Dedicated graphics will be bad for this game really. You're not going to have a smooth game with that.

That's what I think too. But I wonder if slapping in a new video card will make it a difference or do I HAVE to get one of those Core i7 beast to play this game (which is weird because Civ usually used to be all about gaming on any machine).

 

[mattavich]

I think your dual core is fine and ram. You can get 8800GT quite cheap now and it makes a big difference.

If you really want to ensure you've got it covered go for a GTX260, that's hat I have and I max ALL settings on my game.

I run a q6600 too, overclocked to 3.2ghz. Which will obviously help but you will have no problems with a GTX260, it is worth the investment.

 

[AetiusG]

I think your dual core is fine and ram. You can get 8800GT quite cheap now and it makes a big difference.

If you really want to ensure you've got it covered go for a GTX260, that's hat I have and I max ALL settings on my game.

I run a q6600 too, overclocked to 3.2ghz. Which will obviously help but you will have no problems with a GTX260, it is worth the investment.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6488429&CatId=3670

What about something like that?

 

[RohirrimElf]

switching my graphics to default (low) doesnt matter much. I still have to wait 10s per turn early game on standard map. same as with high.

 

[NakedYoga]

So frustrating. I know my machine is well below recommended specs, but the very first time I ran Civ V, it was relatively smooth with the graphics turned down a bit. Everytime after that it's been very choppy, and have to wait a good bit between turns.

Specs: AMD dual-core 2.0GHz processor, 3.0G RAM, nVidia 8-series video card (256 MB I think). It's a laptop, which I know isn't ideal... HP G60 model, a couple years old I think. It's primarily used for business, but it ran Civ IV pretty well, so I was hoping that would carry over. Video card is integrated into the motherboard, so I'd have to replace the entire motherboard to improve it. I'm thinking that would probably cost similarly to an entirely new machine, and I guess some laptops aren't really built to let you replace the motherboard.

Really need to figure something out about this...

 

[dodgerphreak]

I have an i7 myself on my computer, and as I get later into that game, the wait between turns takes anywhere from 15-30 seconds. I don't know if that's high or low compared to other people, but it doesn't annoy me too much.

 

[AetiusG]

Not to complain (because complainers are REALLY unpopular on this forum, but I think it's silly a game like Civilization needs so much crunching power to play. Civs always have been "will run on anything" charm and I might just have to wait a year before I can afford/need a new desktop with enough specs to run this game. Maybe they'll optimize it a bit too by then. Gonna have to stick to Civ 4 till them. That game runs on anything and the kitchen sink!

 

[jjkrause84]

I have a dual core, 2.0 Ghz, 2.50 RAM.

Funny...since I posted that it slowed down a lot. Not horribly like some people have had but still a bit. Maybe 15 secons for the odd turn?

 

[AetiusG]

I have a dual core, 2.0 Ghz, 2.50 RAM.

Funny...since I posted that it slowed down a lot. Not horribly like some people have had but still a bit. Maybe 15 secons for the odd turn?

I'm just gonna wait till summer 11 and treat myself to some hardcore desktop and Civ5 lol. They will patched this sucked by then and computing should be cheaper too. I wanna play this game the way thr reviewers see it, with all the bells and whistles on.

 

[HeavyTwenty]

I don't get it. Lots of complaints that the game is sow and turns take forever to load by people with MUCH better computers than me. I have Dell XPS M1710 from 4 years ago and the game plays like a champ. The graphics are down to 'low' but I never have to wat more than a few seconds at the end of each turn.

Maybe people are setting their graphics too high?

Have you played through an entire game? What map setting.

I've tried settings low->high, there wasn't a performance difference between them (core i7 920 + gtx 260 + 6gb ram). Everything runs fine and dandy till around 1900s on standard map or 1600s on huge map; the game begins to bog down. Sometimes the game will just randomly sit there when I click on one of my units and not do anything for 15 seconds (it looks like the game was about to crash). On huge, the AI turns take about a minute.

 

[srvs]

I think your dual core is fine and ram. You can get 8800GT quite cheap now and it makes a big difference.

If you really want to ensure you've got it covered go for a GTX260, that's hat I have and I max ALL settings on my game.

I run a q6600 too, overclocked to 3.2ghz. Which will obviously help but you will have no problems with a GTX260, it is worth the investment.

What performance should I be getting with a 8800GT? I have one with a q6600 and 4GB of ram and the game doesn't all that great on mid settings with 1280 reso. From medieval and up turns take 5-6 seconds to complete (standard map) and framerate drops occur often.

 

[the343danny]

I have mostly max settings and turns go by much faster than Civ 4, probably because of multi core support. I also dont see turns slowing down near late game either. Only time I get lag is when I try to do too much in between turns (ie alt tab to gtalk or shift tab, and go into city overviews) and also once a save loads up it lags quite bad for like 5 seconds while its loading up terrain graphics. Between turn time is less than in Civ 4 and also the lag when I try to do something during that time is less, so I frankly dont see a problem at all with the performance of the game

 

[Sporhund]

On my laptop, the intro movie screwed up my game as it wouldnt exit properly upon skip. Disabling it made the game run like a dream on everything high, as well as reducing turn times by 50% at least. No idea why it wouldnt end the movie properly, but worth a shot for people who have trouble I'd say.

 

[WuphonsReach]

I think your dual core is fine and ram. You can get 8800GT quite cheap now and it makes a big difference.

If you really want to ensure you've got it covered go for a GTX260, that's hat I have and I max ALL settings on my game.

I prefer the 460 GTX 1GB as the replacement for an 8800GT 512MB. Not terribly expensive (about what the 8800GT cost), runs cooler then even the cool-running 8800GT did, and doesn't eat up a lot of power. Performance in full-screen is a definite step up over the aging 8800GT (subjectively 50-75% faster in various games that I've tried).

 

[anonyjjang]

I don't get it. Lots of complaints that the game is sow and turns take forever to load by people with MUCH better computers than me. I have Dell XPS M1710 from 4 years ago and the game plays like a champ. The graphics are down to 'low' but I never have to wat more than a few seconds at the end of each turn.

Maybe people are setting their graphics too high?

Turn lag is nothing to do with graphics settings.

What size of map are you playing? And what year have you played up to? Does it REALLY take only a few seconds for each turn past 1900+ AD?

 

[RRtexasranger]

Maybe the OP is comparing the load times to Civ 4, which I would guess would be VERY slow on a 2.0Ghz Dual Core since Civ 4 only used one of the cores.

Civ 5 absolutely flys by with a 5870 and a i7 860.

 

[WuphonsReach]

See also the thread over at 2kGames:

Post #2 has a big list of most current video cards from the past few years and attempts to slot them into "good / borderline / below par".
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83251