Game crashes due to paging in/out of terrain/textures?

[Sumendar]

I'm getting random non-recovering freezes while playing, and reproducible similar behaviour when zooming completely out and letting the view scroll by pushing down left or right arrow button. When the game freezes, activity on one of the cores drops from 50%+ levels to <5%, while the other one is still fully occupied by the game. I'm also seeing lots of grey blotches of unloaded texture, and when slowly looking around, a previously loaded area gets unloaded, so could this be caused by a bug in the terrain/texture paging? What else could cause a crash when simply scrolling around? My guess is that the random freezes happen when the view moves to an unloaded area and paging bugs. I've had the freezes happen on strategic view too, but that seems to be a bit more stable. Memory usage is around 2.7GB (1.6 without CiV), page file usage around 3.7GB (1.8 without). The system meets the recommended requirements except for the GPU, but with DirectX9 version of the game and more than enough memory (both main and video), I don't think that could be a problem when using the lowest possible graphics settings.

Game specs:
Steam Deluxe Edition (Babylon is in game)
Huge map, 14 civs, 28 city states, turn 250 (has been randomly crashing for some time)
1280x1024 resolution (monitor native) fullscreen, also crashes in windowed mode
Lowest possible graphics settings!
Both DX9 and DX10/11 versions are crashing

Computer specs:
Vista 64 Home Premium, up to date
Intel Core 2 Duo 6850 3.0GHz
4GB memory, tested OK
Nvidia 8800GTS (640MB model), memory tested OK, latest beta drivers, tested also with latest official release drivers
DirectX updated with the setup that comes with the game
avast! antivirus, disabling had no effect on freezing

 

[boombaard]

I'm having a similar problem (it sounds the same).
Win7 x64, AMD x2 7750BE (unOC), 4gb ram, AMD 3300 integrated gpu. All video detail turned to low, 1280x800 or so resolution. Been getting the same freezes with 1 core at 100%, other 5ish%. Usually happens just after the start of a new turn, as the screen is moving around a lot at that time.. Seems to correlate strongly with my quickly pressing action keys selecting behavior, and then results in a frozen image.
Crashes happens much less frequently when I wait until the current view is fully loaded, and happen within 2 turns if I try to be as efficient as possible at ordering my units around.

 

[ainwood]

I'm having a similar problem (it sounds the same).
Win7 x64, AMD x2 7750BE (unOC), 4gb ram, AMD 3300 integrated gpu.

Integrated graphics at like to be too low for this game - the 3300 is quite a long way down this list.

As for the OP, there do appear to be some problems with the 8800 GTS, particularly on large maps.

 

[Zelig]

As for the OP, there do appear to be some problems with the 8800 GTS, particularly on large maps.

Gamespot reports these same problems with highend cards from both Nvidia and AMD:

Civilization V doesn't need much of a video card to run, and feeding it a massive GPU won't help to get rid of the texture caching issues that plague the game. No matter the GPU, you will see textures get drawn in as you zoom in and out around the map. Even with high-end GPUs like the GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 5870, you'll see blurry textures swapped out on a constant basis.

 

[Pyrion]

Even then it doesn't seem to really matter because the game has no problem keeping those textures cached in memory - set BlockOnLoad to 1 in your dx9/dx11 ini file and although the game takes longer to load, it doesn't suffer any noticeable performance hit from keeping the entire terrain in memory, as it would have to keep those individual tile graphics in memory anyways.

 

[Sumendar]

I've tested the paging-related options in the ini file a bit, and they don't seem to help. Even with BlockOnLoad=1, most of the map starts out gray, and still gets paged out. TerrainPageinSpeedMoving=0 (default) sounds like there shouldn't be any paging in while scrolling, but there is, changing this to 1 doesn't make a noticeable difference. Only changes I tested that made any difference at all were either lowering the texture-size-specific paging-in rates, which did slow it down (no help with crashes), and setting TerrainPageinSpeedStill=0, which crashed the game on load, instead of getting a fully grey map as I had assumed .

 

[boombaard]

Integrated graphics at like to be too low for this game - the 3300 is quite a long way down this list.

I am aware of that.. However, it seems rather unlikely to me that the city screen would suddenly become harder to render after turn 530 in and of itself, and the hang-ups happen even while drawing that. I imagine this is because of the fact that more textures have to be kept in the video memory by the time you've explored most of the map, but it seems to me to be due to buggy implementation (esp. if this also happens with high-end cards).

 

[Sumendar]

A small update, I just finished a 337-turn game on standard map and medium-high graphics settings without a single crash. The only other difference was that as suggested by someone (can't remember who or where, I read tons of threads about crashing in the last couple of days), I didn't zoom all the way out, but stayed in the mid-range zooms instead. I'll still have to test a couple of combinations, not zooming out (or artificially scrolling around either) on a huge map, and zooming out and scrolling on the standard map, but the probable causes of crashing in my case seem to be narrowed down quite a bit already.

Has anyone else had problems with huge maps on a system that at least in principle should be able to handle them? Or, has someone had no crashing at all on huge maps, and what kind of specs do they have on their machine?

 

[boombaard]

I've had 2 crashes that felt very similar to the ones I experienced much more regularly before using my (new) Club3d (Radeon) HD5570. So it's happening less with this card, but it's still happening, and the terrain loading and refreshing is still ugly as hell even using medium quality settings (which the card should definitely be able to handle?).

 

[Zelig]

Has anyone else had problems with huge maps on a system that at least in principle should be able to handle them? Or, has someone had no crashing at all on huge maps, and what kind of specs do they have on their machine?

No crashes here on an Athlon X2, 4gb, Win7 64-bit, Geforce G92, up to 1200 AD or so on marathon.

Huge map runs better than I expected actually. (Well, in comparison to small maps - every size of maps runs pretty poorly.)