Graphics slowdown in mid/late stages of the game

[pulzar]

I have this problem in BTS only. Somewhere around the discovery of combustion or so, the game will slow down to a crawl and start redrawing things really slowly on the screen... It usually begins when scrolling around some particular part of the map, and later on it "spreads" to the whole thing and gets worse and worse to the point where it takes 5-10 seconds to display the main menu when ESC is pressed.

I had an old Radeon X1950 card, and I replaced it last week with an HD4670, hoping that it was a hardware problem... unfortunately, it wasn't -- I get the exact same problems with the new card.

I have an XP6000+ CPU with 4GB or RAM, running XP, latest Catalyst driver. This happens in any size map, so it's highly unlikely that I'm running out of memory or something like that.

Rebooting and reloading a saved game sometimes relieves the problem for a few turns, sometimes for one turn, and sometimes not at all.

Changing resolutions, turning effects on and off, details to low and high, AA to 0 and 4X, etc. does not help. Well, running at 1024x768 seemed to work for about 15 turns or so and then it came back .

Anybody seen anything like this? I can't find any similar problems in the forum at all... I don't have any graphics problems with any other games.

 

[Woody1]

I have a similar issue when using the recent ATI Catalyst drivers with Simcity 4. I rolled back to an old 5.8 Catalyst download (a couple of years old), and it's much faster.

I don't know if Civ4 has the same problem, since I only test against Simcity then roll back. I never tried the new drivers against Civ4. It might be affected the same way. Give it a shot.

 

[pulzar]

Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a shot!

 

[pulzar]

Unfortunately, HD4670 is such a new card that no driver before 8.7 or so will install .