Improving Civ5 performance on already decent hardware

[Berek]

The moment I got my hands on Civ5 I played through one of the largest maps, quickly realizing my computer was way underpowered for late game stages.

I upgraded to an ATI 6950 (previously a 4850) and was disappointed performance hardly changed at all. The largest issue was the slow loading (and reloading after returning to a location after a turn or two) of textures as you move from one part of the map to another, causing choppiness all-around.

Then I upgrade to a completely new subsystem with a Core i7 2600k, 8GB RAM from a Intel C2D 4GB system. That changed almost everything. It was smooth all the way to very late game, but still there were a few loading delays, not nearly as bad though.

I finally upgraded to an SSD from a reasonably fast 7200RPM hard drive for the Windows/game drive. That improved load times considerably and removed (almost) all late stage performance issues. There are some latent texture loading areas that are still noticeable, but it's negligible.

I'm happy with the current build, but I had to beef up my system quite a bit to play CiV 5 smoothly. What other upgrades at this stage would someone want to go with to further smooth out performance? I was thinking an Ivy Bridge CPU maybe or 16GB RAM perhaps?

My current build:

Intel Core i7 2600k CPU
8GB DDR3 RAM
120GB SSD w/7200RPM HDs
ATI 6950 2GB Video Card
Windows 7

Thanks!

 

[FeiLing]

RAM will do nothing. GPU very slight improvements, not worth the money. CPU also slight improvements, not wort the money. Your CiV is running as good as it can. A further ~1%-ish improvement for a thousand or so dollars sure would be a stupid investment.