Gamplay is very choppy and laggy... Need explanation

[OMGDoUgHnUt]

I downloaded this game from Gamestop years ago for an older computer. I recently bought a laptop and wanted to see how well it would play on it. The laptop specs should be more than sufficent to run the game but it runs very slow even at the minimum resolutions. The laptop has an i7 2820qm cpu, 8Gb ram, nVidia 555m gpu, 7200rpm Hdd. I don't remeber having issues playing it on my old computer other than the short movies played slow. On the laptop the movies play smooth, just gameplay is slow and choppy. I pretty much tried everything I could think of, which isn't that much. The computer also has intergrated graphics that utilize the cpu, tired that no difference.

View attachment DxDiag.txt

 

[OMGDoUgHnUt]

I'm still having issues during gameplay. Things I have tried: Disable Speedstep, overclock gpu with MSI Afterburner, run with Intergrated GPU, Installed Throttlestop and set CPU turbo to max. Also have tried with minimum graphic settings at min resolution compared to max settings at max resolution is no difference. I noticd alot of people have asked similar questions with no answers. I went to 2k's website and they directed me here, I suppose I'll try to email them and hope they don't mind helping with an old game.

 

[mintegar]

I took a quick look at your DxDiag vs. mine, and noticed you have System DPI Setting: 120 DPI (125 percent), while i have 96/100. Don't know if that's something that could give civ trouble, but maybe try if resetting that (i think it's font size setting) helps.

Also i would deactivate or uninstall any (anti)virus-software that may be running, and defragment the HD (theres a defrag included with windows, but better is to use the free MyDefrag from www.mydefrag.com as that has some clever optimizations built in on where to put frequently used files).

Do you have other games installed on the system? Have a look on how those run, because if they also run like crap it's problem with the system setup (either OS/drivers or hardware) in general, OTOH if the issue is only with civ4 it may be some civ4 specific incompatibility.

 

[OMGDoUgHnUt]

thanks for the reply. I just finished playing Civilization V demo on steam and it runs perfect at max settings. I have a demo for crysis and it runs good high quality. I have REFLEX rc simulator that runs at 60fps and RealFlight G5 demo which is a bit more demanding at max settings that runs about 20fps. I believe you might be right and civ 4 just doesn't like my laptop. I will try the fixes you mentioned, I had already defraged my hdd about a week ago but i'll check out that program you mentioned. Do you think it matters if it was a digital download? Does the disk based game utilized information on the disk during gameplay? My thought is maybe if I had a disk it would run different because it would read/load information from both the cd and hdd. Does it work like that?

 

[OMGDoUgHnUt]

I found a demo for beyond the sword: final frontier also on steam. I guess thats an expansion?? Also plays perfect, but it probably doesn't compare to Civ IV's cpu and memory load.

Thanks for the tip about the dpi, i was wondering why my desktop icons were so big. It didn't effect gameplay though. I might mess with the ini file, found some posts refering to choppy gameplay. I'll probably end up turning off all the animations just so I can play it without aggravation

 

[OMGDoUgHnUt]

I found a CIV 4 demo on gamefront.com, also runs perfect. Also might be not as demanding as the full version. I might try to uninstall and reinstall. All of the patch files I found say "The setup has detected that no version of Sid Meier's Civilization 4 is installed". I have the direct download version, are there different patches for that version?

 

[OMGDoUgHnUt]

problems Solved: Uinstalled and reinstalled following directions in this post http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=408537. I thought I had did that initially but I might not have. Thanks