Extreme choppiness. What should I upgrade?

romelus

romelus

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my computer is struggling to handle civ4 on a standard size map. game is stable, but framerate is low, and gets very choppy after a while, especially after showing vidoes of other leaders on the diplomacy screen (memory leak?). if i press a key to move a unit, there would be a delay before the unit actually moves in a jerky way

here's my comp stat
athlon xp 1800, 512 mb ram, 10+ gb of free space on a secondary hard drive set as the scratch disk, geforce ti 4200 64mb vid card

time between turns is fast, and there is some pagefile access. hard drive can be heard cleaning up after i quit a game. the peak charge shown in task manager after a session is about 715 mb, so my ram is a little short. the video card is quite old now, but still can handle fairly recent games like unreal tournament 2004 and nhl 2006. i don't know how anyone could play civ4 with the minimum required card, which is a geforce 2...

i'll wait for the first patch before considering upgrading. but if i have to upgrade, which component would give me the biggest boost in performance? cpu, ram or video card?
 
Well, like you already said, wait for the patch and see if that doesn't help. However, the best thing to upgrade would probably be your RAM. Memory is cheap, and you could easily buy 512 more for less than $40. The problem with upgrading the cpu is that you also almost always have to upgrade your motherboard as well. Then you find out your new mobo doesn't support your memory, video card etc. which causes you to have to replace half your system. And thus upgrading your cpu costs several hundred dollars and you're usually almost better off getting a new system. The same thing goes for your video card as well. A decent card will cost you well over $100, and then there is the question of will your mobo and powersupply handle it. And even if they do, you probably won't notice a huge difference, since your processor and memory are such a bottleneck. I'm no expert, so someone correct me if i'm wrong. Hope this helps!
 
Get another 512mb ram. It'll cost about $50-90 at most.

Also, update your video card when you get the chance.

RAM is more important though, so do that first.
 
The amazing thing about these requirements are that the graphics are really not all that spectacular. Sure they look ok 2D wise- but there is not alot of rendering going on. I get alot of chopiness and have tried two machines-- One was a p4 3.2 ghz with 512 MB- and a radeon 9000 and a Athalon XP 2000+ with a GeForce 3 and 512 MB. Both were choppy.

Now, it very well may be the simulation engine is insanely complicated- which i do no beleive to be the case. I think that this game is extremely poorly written and puts huge hardware requirements out to cover up some poor software engineering.

I will try another memory module and see what happens because they are cheap and are a good thing to add every once in a while.
 
If you have to choose just one, RAM. Reasons stated in several of the above posts. It's cheap and it will benefit your entire system, not just the game. (XP runs so much better with 1GB RAM...you'll be amazed at the performance increase over 512MB.)

Second would be a video card. 128MB minimum...but you can get decent cards with 256MB on sale for under $100.

Last, CPU, as stated, it may require a mainboard upgrade...research it first.

But wait for the patch, I really think that a lot of the issues are due to unforeseen bugs, and it may clear them up enough so you do not have to upgrade anything.
 
It's something to do with the game, that system should be fine for a game like this. We're not talking stellar graphics here.
 
More RAM is the only thing that will really help you with game slowdown and 'choppiness'. Your current GFX card is just fine, no real need to upgrade that unless graphics aren't being rendered properly.
 
Get more RAM, Civ4 has the tendency of leaking memory causing the game to seriously slow down. If this happens even with 4gig of memory it will slow own..eventually..but it will take alot longer.
 
Up or downgrade to nVidia 71.89 drivers. I've got a Ti4200 and 512 MB as well and after I did that I've had no problems. No memory leaks either...
 
The game wouldn't even run on my PC at all until I upgraded from a 64Mb video card to a 256Mb one.
 
kandalf said:
In order of priority
1.ram
2.video card
3.processor
Click to expand...

after reading all the replies, i think that's what i'll do. will probably even get ram before the patch as i want to play bigger maps. but i'll hold off the other two until i see if the patch helps any (please please please...)

also forceware driver version 78.01 works for me. it's not the most recent version, which many say causes crashes, but it's stable.

from another poster's suggestion, i used rivatuner to force shaders to "force 1.1" and that gave a small improvement in video card performance
 
Dagoth Ur said:
Get another 512mb ram. It'll cost about $50-90 at most.

Also, update your video card when you get the chance.

RAM is more important though, so do that first.
Click to expand...

I agree, I did just that and it helped me a lot. The game runs excellent when Im zoomed in and there isnt a lot of stuff going on on the screen. It only lags a little when Im zoomed out. I upgrated from 512 to 768 ram. I have a GF4 mx 64mb card
 
romelus said:
after reading all the replies, i think that's what i'll do. will probably even get ram before the patch as i want to play bigger maps. but i'll hold off the other two until i see if the patch helps any (please please please...)
Click to expand...
Right. Go ahead and get more ram if you want to play bigger maps since huges map late in the game can peak over 1.5 GB. There is some doubts there is actually a memory leak so I doubt the patch will improve this. So atleast have 1gb of ram while your HD paging can make up the other 500mb.
 
well i went and got myself 1 gb more ram, so now i have 1.5 gb. gameplay has improved a little bit, but not as much as i thought it would.

just tried starting a game on a large map, and game started to lag pretty soon. i had explored my small home continent, found two other civs, and built a second city, then it started to get choppy again.

gameplay was tolerable on the small map game that i was finishing. lost the game by space race, but game was playable till the end.

i'm starting to think it's my graphics card, but looking at the screen i just can't justify "how". the graphics isn't even close to being as good as other 3d games i've played, which run perfectly smoothly on my rig.

and if it's cpu, why does it lag while it's my turn, and presumably the other AIs aren't "thinking". between turn times is also very fast

i'm confused now
 
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