I'm seeing black... Please don't let it end without one game of Civ!

[Brandon]

Hey there- After looking at this message board for a few hours here, i've found nothing to help my situation out. Looks like I'm just one more stranded Civ fan looking to play a product that, for what the requirements are, should be running on my computer right now.

First, my problem:
Installation went fine. When I launched the game, all seemed to go well until the game actually started. My monitor went blank for a second, then went back to my desktop. In the right hand corner is the launch (or initialization) window that says 'Done'. Civ 4's music begins playing (and from the sound of it, the intro cinema sequence is 'skipping'), but thats about it. After hitting Alt-Tab (to get into the application), my monitor goes blank except for the Civ 4 mouse icon, which seems to work just fine. I click, and then the main menu african-rhythm begins, but the screen remains blank.
So. It seems like i have a video driver problem... but i cant seem to get the Catalyst driver to work... after starting the driver setup, it gives me a "Severe" error, saying that it can't find my video card.
I don't know. Maybe this patch isn't even for my card. I'm not too computer literate... so, please, if you can, help me!

Here's my specs...
Gateway laptop
Windows XP, Pentium M 1400MHz
796MHz, 512 MB RAM
Chip: ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 AGP (0x4C57)
DAC: Internal (350MHz)
Memory: 32.0 MB

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
-Brandon

 

[Brandon]

oh, I forgot to mention- I did download and apply the patch... heres my diagnostic- I hope it helps!

 

[Willem]

So. It seems like i have a video driver problem... but i cant seem to get the Catalyst driver to work... after starting the driver setup, it gives me a "Severe" error, saying that it can't find my video card.

Try the Omega driver. I had problems installing the one from ATI, but had better luck with the one from Omega. It's the same driver, but the Omega version has been tweaked. Just do a Google search for Omega, you'll find it easily enough.

 

[Zydor]

Your main issue is the on-board graphics, the Mobility Radeon 7500, it will not be powerful enough to run Civ IV with any degree of acceptable performance. The Mobility Radeons share cpu time & main system RAM to run. The video RAM in the 7500 (32Mb) is too low for the game.

It may run - just - but to do so as its below the game Hardware spec, you will need to reduce the load on the CPU & Graphics as much as possible. The Omega driver above is part of that. Further suggestions to reduce the load are at
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=3652577#post3652577

Regards
Zy

 

[Akhenaton]

Your main issue is the on-board graphics, the Mobility Radeon 7500, it will not be powerful enough to run Civ IV with any degree of acceptable performance.

Note that this is only Zydor's opinion, for which he most likely has never played anything with a Mobility Radeon 7500. The performance is better than the MSR and many people find it "acceptable" with much reduced details.

The Mobility Radeons share cpu time & main system RAM to run.

They don't share CPU time any more than card Radeons and system RAM only when the dedicated video RAM is not enough (btw, every card does this through the "AGP aperture" or "PCIe aperture" feature anyhow in a similar situation, so it's only a matter of how much dedicated frame buffer RAM there is, not what kind of a card/MB embedded chip/IGP it is).

The video RAM in the 7500 (32Mb) is too low for the game.

This is the only somewhat credible statement, but with "too low" it just means "it could use more", not "it won't run at all" or "the performance level is going to drop more than a few 10 %".

However, all this is not to say that CivIV might not support his HW configuration, but it is NOT a performance issue! Getting a black screen is a bug, not a performance issue. Brandon, try to get a graphics driver update from Gateway. Catalyst Mobility drivers for Mobility Radeons only support certain manufacturer's laptops, Gateway is NOT one of them. Also, you should check the BIOS/Gateway system tweaking utility that the Radeon is really able to allocate up to at least that 32MB of main RAM (64MB total) which according to MSR the game needs. You'll get a lot of paging with that amount of main RAM being eaten for the graphics, but you should be able to play at least small maps with low detail if it can be made to work.