For another data point: I'm playing Civ IV on an iMac G5 (iSight, 1.9GHz, 1.5 GB ram; MacOSX 10.4.6), and it's awfully slow.
Running it in a window seemed to help, although (as others have said) it's difficult to tell if that's for real without a frame count or some other reliable metric. My wife thinks it slows down for her as the games run on; I can't speak to that. When there's enough going on, the UI is generally sluggish -- scrolling is choppy, zooming in and out is choppy. Double-clicking on a city to see the full details and then escaping back out again is a [edit: 10 or 12 second] round trip, depending on whether or not it needs to scroll to an active unit when it's done.
One curious thing is that when I'm running in a window, I can see my CPU status in the toolbar (running MenuMeters). The CPU is pegged at 100% no matter what it's doing, and it looks like 40% of that is kernel time. I don't know if that's informative at all.
Another note about running windowed: when you switch to another program, I can see that Civ is nice'd, because the CPU gauge turns green. When you switch back to Civ in the foreground, the gauge stays green, implying that either the OS or the game itself don't re-nice the program back to normal levels afterwards.
I've tried quitting absolutely all other programs when running, to not much effect. Sound is still very choppy; when I zoom in, I can hear the environmental/city sounds, but those are lost if I've zoomed out to what'd be a reasonable view distance.
Graphics are, of course, set to the lowest possible settings. 1024x768, low res, &c. After editing the .ini to turn on the "mouse scrolling in windowed mode", I did edit another couple ini settings, turning on the "don't show background when showing movies" option. That makes movies play properly, which they weren't doing before.
Is there any other information that would be useful to anyone?
Edit #2: screenshot of game conditions (zoom, CPU usage, memory usage) at: http://ottemann.haggisnet.org/~mrh3/civ-screen.png
Running it in a window seemed to help, although (as others have said) it's difficult to tell if that's for real without a frame count or some other reliable metric. My wife thinks it slows down for her as the games run on; I can't speak to that. When there's enough going on, the UI is generally sluggish -- scrolling is choppy, zooming in and out is choppy. Double-clicking on a city to see the full details and then escaping back out again is a [edit: 10 or 12 second] round trip, depending on whether or not it needs to scroll to an active unit when it's done.
One curious thing is that when I'm running in a window, I can see my CPU status in the toolbar (running MenuMeters). The CPU is pegged at 100% no matter what it's doing, and it looks like 40% of that is kernel time. I don't know if that's informative at all.
Another note about running windowed: when you switch to another program, I can see that Civ is nice'd, because the CPU gauge turns green. When you switch back to Civ in the foreground, the gauge stays green, implying that either the OS or the game itself don't re-nice the program back to normal levels afterwards.
I've tried quitting absolutely all other programs when running, to not much effect. Sound is still very choppy; when I zoom in, I can hear the environmental/city sounds, but those are lost if I've zoomed out to what'd be a reasonable view distance.
Graphics are, of course, set to the lowest possible settings. 1024x768, low res, &c. After editing the .ini to turn on the "mouse scrolling in windowed mode", I did edit another couple ini settings, turning on the "don't show background when showing movies" option. That makes movies play properly, which they weren't doing before.
Is there any other information that would be useful to anyone?
Edit #2: screenshot of game conditions (zoom, CPU usage, memory usage) at: http://ottemann.haggisnet.org/~mrh3/civ-screen.png
