I found out how to fix long loading times

[bhavv]

Im running Civ V on a 4 Ghz I7 - 920, 12 Gb ram and SLI GTX 460s, and I just started getting loading lag with my game freezing in between turns and with really really slow loading.

I defragged the drive that I civ V installed and it instantly fixed everything, loading times are now super fast with <2s of wait between each turn. Also, after loading up a game, the tile texures fill in much much faster than it did since I started playing.

I'm running Civ V on a pair of Samsung F3s in Raid 0 though so I would have faster load times than on a single HDD.

I also have a 64 Gb SSD, does anyone know if it is possible to move just Civ V to it without the rest of my steam folder?

If you have high specs in the CPU / Ram / GPU department, then try running Windows Performance Assesment. If it gives your hard drive a really low score, then thats the reason why you might still have really bad loading times.

 

[spicytimothy]

hmm Steam did advised me to defrag before playing. Of course I couldn't wait...

 

[bhavv]

The game uses multithreading well, although it doesnt benefit much from hyperthreading:

Spoiler :

If your looking to upgrade / get a new computer for Civ 5, ram and graphics are mostly meaningless. All you need is 4 Gb and either an ATI 5770 or GTX 450 and you should be able to max your graphics, but maybe limited to lower AA levels. (My ram usage was 4.5 Gb, but shared memory should be able to handle the extra bit over 4 Gb, 5+ Gb however is definitely more than enough).

What does improve performance is hard drive speed and also more cores will help.

I believe that a Hex core CPU, a fast SSD drive, 4 - 6 Gb ram and a graphics card around a GTX 450 or HD 5770 would handle the game much much better than a quad core with a normal HDD a top end ATI 5970.

CPU + HDD / SSD speed is what Civ V needs more, not graphics.

 

[Davor]

This is not a knock agaisnt you bhavv, but I am not so impressed with those graphics.

By this I mean, the graphics just look average. Nothing shattering. At a quick glance it looks like Rise of Nations. I am shocked at the high requirements for just average looking graphics. That is why I am not impressed.

 

[J-man]

I'm not surprised it doesn't use hyperthreading well but it does look like it uses 4 cores very well. to the developers. (Ihave a quadcore myself but I didn't bother to check)

I have a Q6600 4Gb ram a HD3870 and two HD's in raid 0. My graphix card is probably the bottle neck as it doesn't support directX 11 but I'm not going to buy a new gfx card just to run civ 5 on a bit higher gfx settings.

PS: you have one hell of a computer.

 

[bhavv]

This is not a knock agaisnt you bhavv, but I am not so impressed with those graphics.

By this I mean, the graphics just look average. Nothing shattering. At a quick glance it looks like Rise of Nations. I am shocked at the high requirements for just average looking graphics. That is why I am not impressed.

Did you miss the whole point that I already said that the game doesnt require a high end graphics card?

Civ V isnt a graphical beast, its very moderate with its graphics requirements and doesnt need a high end card.

People need to stop being silly and thinking that Civ V is a graphics hog. It isnt, it only needs a mid range card to run fully maxed out (9800 GT / 4850 are fine for DX10 mode, GTX 450 / 5770 for DX11 mode). It isnt meant to be Crysis or Metro.

The game however does make use or more cores and the drive you are running it on.

Its specifications arent indictive of graphics at all, but how much computation the calculations / AI turns / map size require.

BTW the terrain in Civ V is much more better than that in Rise of Nations or any game before it. It looks much smoother and better defined than terrains in any other strategy game. There is only so much they can do with improving terrain textures, and the tessellation really does help a lot.

 

[bhavv]

I just tried the game in DX9, and after having played it so far in DX11, the terrain looks blindingy ugly and horrible in comparison.

 

[Stalker0]

Does anyone know how a 3.0 GHZ duo core would compare to the 1.8 quad core in the recommended specs for the game?

I did try defraging and it didn't help me

 

[J-man]

It should be better. What amount of RAM do you have?

 

[tokala]

The game uses multithreading well, although it doesnt benefit much from hyperthreading:

Uum, your CPU usage looks like it won't even add up to two fully utilized cores

Did some quick tests myself, and it looks like I'm CPU limited with a 3.3GHz C2D and a GTX260 ... BUT the core scaling looks not very good.
Forced Civ onto only one core, got worst case 10fps, 16-17fps with 2 cores active. But during AI moves i see the CPU load dropping to ~60%, i.e the AI running mostly on only 1 thread

Could you be bothered to do some quick tests with 1,2,3,4 cores enabled, without hyperthreading? As the i7 should have a architecture that scales very well with core number, that should give us a "best case" cpu scaling idea.

 

[Stalker0]

It should be better. What amount of RAM do you have?

4 GB of ram

 

[J-man]

4 GB of ram

that should be enough. I don't what it is...
Try this forum: http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=409
Maybe people there can help you.