How Did I fix my nVidia Lag trouble...

[JackTheNarrator]

Hi,

I have too laptop, one with a radeon 345m(P4 2000 Mhz 512 Ram) the other with a Geforce FX 5650 (Centrino 1,7; 512 Ram).

The 345m still display black terrain... But I have hardware T&L support !

The Geforce one was extremely laggy, and the Ctrl-Alt-Supr panel has told me that Civ4 uses around 400 Mo...

Here is the procedure to obtain a faster - well playable - Civ4 with only 100 Mo of memory occupation.

1. Meditate
2. Defrag your HD / Format It
3. Install your manufacturer last drivers - For me it was Dell inspiron -

Here I ve obtained a 266 Mo occupation at 1024x728 @ normal setting, AA = 0, it's still very laggy, I'm depressed.......

Then, and this is the magic point
4. Turn AA to 2 (Anti-Aliasing)
5. Pray (note that civ4 handles religion)

Miracle the game is now very playable, with no lag ! And the memory occupation is at 90 Mo !

(Note that with an AA = 4 the game is a bit more laggy but much more playable than with an AA = 0.)

 

[playshogi]

How do you turn AA to 2 and where do you find AA?

 

[tea41]

How do you turn AA to 2 and where do you find AA?

You can access this from the graphics preferences window of the game. AA is a dropdown with choices 0, 2, or 4.

Jack, thanks for the tip. This seems to have helped my performance too. But then I upped the resolution from 1024x768 to 1200x1024 and it was laggy again. Guess I'll bump it back down

For reference, my system is AMD Sempron 3000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce6200/128MB

 

[Ruffin]

Tried it. Seems to trade causes for the same lag.

I was getting massive lags after meeting foreign leaders. Until then it just slowed down marginally. Changing AA to 2 didn't do anything there. Changing AA to 2 -and- moving all the graphics from low up to medium got rid of the leaderhead problem. Ran smoothly, great scrolling, etc. etc. Until I moved a few units, then it went sideways. Seems to start with workers on my border. Dunno if the problem is the workers or the border, but it's back to a slow crawl instantly. But for a minute there it works great!

2.8G Pentium-4, 1.25GB RAM, GeForce FX 5500 w/ 128MB, current drivers, directX 9, etc. Using 455-460MB of memory to run the game. The CPU Usage meter in task manager is usually spiked from the moment I start it.

 

[letitallbe]

howdy, JackTheNarrator.

i'm running a dell inspiron myself (1.6 centrino, 512mb, geforce fx 5650 ie. basically the same specs as yourself).

i haven't bought the game yet due to it not being out in stores here yet, so i'm just wondering exactly how playable is it on your machine?? have you tried huge maps with a large number of civs; or played late game at all???

it's just that being a student; buying this game would result in my inability to eat for a week or so; and I don't particularly want to be in that situation owning a game where i can't play more than six or seven civs on a small map with lag coming out of my ass.

thanks!

 

[JackTheNarrator]

Well, I have started a game on a Large Map with 8 opponents, It's now nearly 200 AD and the game is very playable (no lags, even with heavy zoom or when you meet a guy)

By the way, Try to eat something before playing, cuz' when you are in the game it's absolutly impossible to do anything else (including eating, washing... )