[C3C] Does Civ3 utilize modern GPUs at all?

[SG-17]

I'm curious, my GPU is busted and if I play a game for too long I get a crash, this depends on the load on the GPU. Civ6 I crash in like 30 minutes, Civ5 I usually get 2-3 hours, with Civ3 I tested it and left if running for a full 24 hours and it never crashed.

So does Civ3 actually touch modern GPUs at all, does it just run from the CPU?

FX-8370 and RX480.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Civ3 was initially released in Oct 2001, before modern GPUs were widely available. My guess would be "no", Civ3 runs only on the CPU.

 

[justanick]

Civ3 was initially released in Oct 2001, before modern GPUs were widely available.

"widely available" is open to interpretation, but games requiring an at the time modern gpu were quite common in the late 1990s.

Civ3 does require an "DirectX® 8.0a-compatible video card".

Civilization III - CivFanatics

System Requirements | Expansion Packs | Patch & Updates | Frequently Asked Questions "How do you improve on perfection?" There was lots of confusion over the sequel to Civilization II. Some players thought Alpha Centauri is the sequel, while others thought Civilization: Call to Power is Civ3. It...

www.civfanatics.com

 

[Lord_Hill]

It uses almost entirely windows GDI with a tiny bit of opengl. I think all drawing technically is done by the gpu these days but yeah, no polygons pushing here.

What graphics API does the Civ 3 engine actually use?

This one has always been a bit of a curiosity for me. Clearly the Civ 3 engine is completely bespoke, and has never been used by any other game before or since. It has a mixture of 2d and 3d elements rather than being polygons everywhere. The minimum requirement is Direct-x 8 (at least for...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[WildWeazel]

It definitely uses GPU features for drawing, but given that it does no 3D rendering and ran on 32mb of RAM, its GPU load is probably negligible on a modern gaming card. You can use software like AMD Adrenalin or CoreCtl to monitor exactly what's going on.

 

[WildWeazel]

Here's a profile of my GPU, a RX 6700, over the course of launching Civ3 (around the middle of the graph), loading a rather large and busy save, and panning around madly. It barely registers.

 

[Quintillus]

^That chart and CoreCtrl look pretty cool. I have fond (rose-tinted?) memories of tweaking my GPU and CPU quite extensively back in the day, primarily using RivaTuner on the GPU side, and RightMark on the CPU side, though I experimented with various options for both of them. Part of the goal, naturally, was slowing down my system as much as possible to extend the battery life and thus enable me to play more turns of Civ before running out of juice. But IIRC, the lowest I could tune my GPU to was 100 MHz (from its default of 475 MHz) - 12 MHz was a pipe dream! I may have been able to play five more turns if I could have gone that low!

I also had no idea that such a UI-focused option was now available on Linux. There were various command-line options, but IIRC nothing anywhere remotely that user-interface friendly on the Linux front back when I was using Linux semi-frequently. For that matter, it's better than what Windows had then too.