Game running slowly for you ? this worked for me

[EricTred]

(I have win xp pro) Go to... start... control panel.... system.... advanced...(the 1st "settings tab" in the "performance section" ...then hit the advanced tab "again" you will see a "virtual memory box " torward the bottom ... click the setting tab and enter a higher number... mine originally was like 2056mb , I bumped it up as high as it would let me to 4096mb...and then ran the game and it decreased my lag quite abit.

On that same page there is a button called "system cache" I decided to click that seeing how it said it would use use more memery for my programs so I did and It helped me alot.

Now for the disclaimer.....

A.) I did not figure this out by myself I believe in the 4 days while I was having trouble I happened to have lurked on to it .. I don't remmember the post.

B.) It worked for me....might not work for you ...or may cause harm to your machine so only use or try if you know what your doing ....I for the other hand... DO NOT know what I'm doing.... I did it out of fustration cause I said to myself whats the worst that can happen, if it didn't work I'd just put the buttons back the way they were....nothing happened YET

I hope this may help some of you cause I know how it is to want to play this awesome game (when it works right)

Peace

 

[Donderwolkje01]

should i try this at home?

any "real" nerds advice on this?

otherwise i'll just take the chance like you did and hope for the best. I'll let you know (i'll blame you if it doesn't work! hehehehe)*


*just kidding

 

[EricTred]

should i try this at home?

any "real" nerds advice on this?

otherwise i'll just take the chance like you did and hope for the best. I'll let you know (i'll blame you if it doesn't work! hehehehe)*


*just kidding

Its not as bad as I made it sound to be so don't worry about it , I just want peeps to understand that its not bullet proof. It won't wipe out your harddrive or anything like that. But it worked for me, huge maps thou with a lot of AI's and units it will still bog down. But at least you will have the 1st half nice and smooth . Later hope it works for ya .

 

[Pellanor]

I've actually done the exact oposite thing, and am running with no virtual memory. But then again I have 2gb of RAM, so I can pull this off.

What you're doing is increasing the Virtual Memory that you have available. Virtual Memory is stored on the hard drive and as such is slower then RAM. If you are running out of memory, then increasing your virtual memory will help. If you aren't having memory problems (like myself) then it doesn't do anything. Of course this does use more hard disk space. Increasing the virtual memory from 2gb to 4gb like you did means that you're allocating 2gb of HD space for the purposes of memory. If you don't have 2gb of free HD space, then this doesn't work.

The ideal solution is to go out and buy more RAM. This saves you the hard drives space and is faster then virtual memory. Of course it costs money, so there is a downside to it.

Hope that helps

 

[EricTred]

I've actually done the exact oposite thing, and am running with no virtual memory. But then again I have 2gb of RAM, so I can pull this off.

What you're doing is increasing the Virtual Memory that you have available. Virtual Memory is stored on the hard drive and as such is slower then RAM. If you are running out of memory, then increasing your virtual memory will help. If you aren't having memory problems (like myself) then it doesn't do anything. Of course this does use more hard disk space. Increasing the virtual memory from 2gb to 4gb like you did means that you're allocating 2gb of HD space for the purposes of memory. If you don't have 2gb of free HD space, then this doesn't work.

The ideal solution is to go out and buy more RAM. This saves you the hard drives space and is faster then virtual memory. Of course it costs money, so there is a downside to it.

Hope that helps

I would'nt tell peeps to use Virtual memory if they didnt have too ,,,ok,,,

I have read the game DOES not use more than 800 mb of ram , then it graps the VM from the HardDrive for the rest ( so I have been told ) So your 2 gigs is worthless, trust me I know I have 2 gigs of ram in my rig also. What I'm telling these peeps is a walk around until they can patch a fix for that.
I was having major problems until I followed the steps mentioned, so don't undermine it by telling them to go out and buy more ram they don't have to . ( you should have at least have 512 , and thats on the wimpy side, 1 gig optimal, but thats just my opinion)

There are a few more steps you can take also to free up more mem,

1.) go start ,,,run ,,type ,,msconfig... click start up tab and select disable all , this will free up more mem that you dont really need running to those programs, it will prompt you to restart do so ,,,,

2.) When you start the game up, as its loading hold the "shift key" down that clears the game cache and free's up more mem. So its not a question of more ram, cause the games not using it anyway, its a matter of using less to get more if that makes any sense to you.

3.) I got these steps from lurking on these boards for about 4 days so I'm not going to take any credit for them and they DID work for my system. I went from unplayable to being able to play for about 1-3 hours before crash and sometimes I needed to reboot and clear cache more than once to.

And that 800mb is also being shared by windows to and maybe your anti-virus programs too , so now you even have less mem to work with.

Trust me peeps this worked for my rig and I hope it works for yours.

Later

 

[Pellanor]

I have read the game DOES not use more than 800 mb of ram , then it graps the VM from the HardDrive for the rest ( so I have been told ) So your 2 gigs is worthless, trust me I know I have 2 gigs of ram in my rig also. What I'm telling these peeps is a walk around until they can patch a fix for that.

I hadn't heard that it used a max of 800mb.

I was having major problems until I followed the steps mentioned, so don't undermine it by telling them to go out and buy more ram they don't have to.

I wasn't trying to Undermine it, just giving my $0.02 on the issue.

And that 800mb is also being shared by windows to and maybe your anti-virus programs too , so now you even have less mem to work with.

I have no idea where you heard this, but I have no reason to believe it. Assuming there is the 800mb limit to civ IV, I see no reason for it to not use 800 of your 1024 (assuming 1gb of RAM) leaving the other 224 for Windows, Virus Scan, etc... Just because you're running Civ IV, it shouldn't mean that your memory gets choked for all other programs/services as well.

Here's one other suggestion for you:
You say that you have a lot of RAM, but needed to increase your virtual memory. In patch 1.52 it sets a lot of things to use the page file for a lot of tasks, rather then memory (to make the game less memory intensive for those who have less ram). If you open the config file and set dynamic unit paging to 0 and dynamicanimpaging to 0 then it should make better use of your extra RAM.