Game slows down approx midway through, & video insufficient memory

[xvlee]

Hi

I've had a look through these forums and it looks like a few others are having this problem (particularly those with laptops?). I'm not using a laptop and thought I had a PC that should easily run the game. However, midway(ish) through, i start gettin major slowdown. It takes probaby 5 times longer to do things then it does at the start, the animations are slow and the scrolling choppy. It's a right pain but I play on, only for the game to terminate, usually with a message about insufficient memory and occasionally something along the lines of 'runtime has terminated this in an unusual way' (that may not be precise!)

So... any ideas? I've lowered the graphics, turned off animations, shut down background programmes, you name it! I'm on patch 1.52 (which seems to have worsened things) and have updated all my drivers (i think). The dxdiag is below, if anyone can help it'd be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

lee

 

[Zanmato]

I think it's possibly the video card is slowing things down for you and eventually it's just running out of memory hence the crashes. The system spec, RAM, CPU seems ok to me. What size map(s) are you playing?
Could try increasing the AGP aperture size through the BIOS to 128mb, usually found under 'Advanced Chipset features'. This might hopefully speed things back up for you that's if your card uses the AGP. The only other things I can suggest is either play on smaller maps, or upgrade the card at a last resort. I assume the 9800 series is a couple of years old now.

 

[xvlee]

thanks rob

i forget which map size its on, but its either the biggest or 2nd biggest. maybe i'm just expecting too much. i checked the agp aperture size, it's already on 128, so no joy there. so really i guess the next thing to do would be the gfx card then... doh!

 

[Zanmato]

Give it a few weeks first, by which time we hope the new patch will be out and that might improve things further without having to get a new card.

 

[xvlee]

will do, wasnt sure when the next one was out, a few weeks you reckon? i'll pin my hopes on that for now then. it'd be a shame to upgrade card as only upgraded it 12 months back, plus it runs most other things so well.

cheers for the info!

 

[mee123104]

I don't think its your card as I have an x1300 Pci-E card with 512mb of memory on the card itself and am getting the same problem as well, looks like we gotta wait for the next patch...

 

[xvlee]

i was hoping someone would say that!

fingers crossed for the patch then...

 

[gene4228]

I don't think its your card as I have an x1300 Pci-E card with 512mb of memory on the card itself and am getting the same problem as well, looks like we gotta wait for the next patch...

I don't know if the x1300 is better than a 7800, but my 7800GS (AGP 8x, 256mb memory) handles civ4 fine. Maybe the crash is just random?

 

[cepheus42]

For game slow down issues, do the following:

1. Update your video card drivers.
2. Launch the game, go into Advanced, Options, then click on the graphics tab.
3. Click to turn OFF full screen mode on the right (make it unchecked).
4. Make sure the game resolution matches your desktop resolution.

Now relaunch the game. It'll be choppy until you click on the top right to Maximize the window. After that you'll notice vastly faster speeds on those huge maps. Worked wonders for me. It was totally unplayable prior to doing these things, it would literally take 20 minutes just to load the map, and every time you scrolled in the map even one tile it took 5 to 10 minutes to refresh. And don't even ask how long it took after you finished a turn before you could do anything again *Grin*. I never did have the "out of memory" error, but I have VM set very very high so that's not usually a problem for me.