Increase Memory on 64bit Machines

I got a little caught up in civ5 and completely forgot about this thread, so I apologise for the late reply.

Regarding issues with other games, I've realised that I face a fairly similar issue with Vox Populi (civ5). In-game performance is completely fine, my laptop is above the recommended specs for the game, and I've played civ5 on a far worse (almost ancient) tower CPU. But beyond a certain point in the game (around turn 250 for standard maps), save games don't load. I don't get a CTD or anything, the game stays on the load screen indefinitely. Again, this problem never surfaces while I'm in-game. So theoretically I could play an entire game without any crashes or issues (I am extrapolating here, but I have good reason to believe it's true). The only problem arises when I try to load savefiles.

This issue along with my problems with DoC has me thinking about what you wrote about disk corruption or something along those lines since my problems are specific to loading. I have just one nonpartitioned disk, and I've thought about partitioning for some time now. Might do it finally. I tried defragging but it didn't help (and I believe windows occasionally does it anyway).

The last solution is trying a factory reset of my laptop. Every time I plan on doing it, I just get lazy and go back to playing unmodded civ4

Edit: I actually performed a disk speed check shortly after writing this post. I typed

Code:

winsat disk -drive c

(replace c with disk name) on windows command prompt with admin privileges. Here are the results I got:

Spoiler :

Code:

> Running: Feature Enumeration ''
> Run Time 00:00:00.00
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -ran -read'
> Run Time 00:00:14.64
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -seq -read'
> Run Time 00:00:10.09
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -seq -write'
> Run Time 00:00:11.45
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -flush -seq'
> Run Time 00:00:09.30
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -flush -ran'
> Run Time 00:00:13.34
> Dshow Video Encode Time                      0.00000 s
> Dshow Video Decode Time                      0.00000 s
> Media Foundation Decode Time                 0.00000 s
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1.32 MB/s          3.6
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   88.12 MB/s          6.3
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  73.46 MB/s          6.1
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     8.412 ms          4.9
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     22.191 ms          4.4
> Latency: Maximum                             101.271 ms          7.7
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         10.093 ms          4.5
> Total Run Time 00:00:59.31

If someone else tries this, post your results too. I don't really have much of a benchmark to compare myself to, apart from the numbers to the right of the results (which are presumably a score or percentile).

Ah, I see I was unclear. In my previous post, I was referring to loading the game from desktop. The bit where "init xml" etc appears.

 

Maybe it has to do with the file size. I have run into weird issues once the size exceeds something big, like there is a buffer issue in the exe file. Weirdly using the debugger to set a breakpoint just before it fails and then start again after a few seconds seems to fix the problem. It's really weird.

Your numbers look as I would expect from a standard mechanical drive. It's not impressive by modern standards, but clearly within specs of running civ4/5. In fact everybody had numbers like that when the games came out. You can see the speed difference between random read and sequential read. That's the head moving around on the platter. You can change the reading pattern from random to sequential by defragging your disk and in most cases it will not really get fragmented if you make sure you have at least 20% free at all times.

What you should do is go to my computer and right click your C drive and select properties. Here you click the tools tab and first you error check and then you optimize once you know there are no errors. I think that is what you can do to make the disk access faster, other than replacing hardware.

I'm not sure you will really benefit from stats from other people, particularly not if they use a HD, which has significantly different specifications, but if you really want some numbers, then here goes.

Spoiler :

Drive: Samsung 970 EVO plus (NVME)

Code:

> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1095.95 MB/s          8.9
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   3048.40 MB/s          9.2
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  3412.05 MB/s          9.3
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     0.052 ms          8.9
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     0.147 ms          8.9
> Latency: Maximum                             0.225 ms          8.9
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         0.048 ms          8.9
> Total Run Time 00:00:02.38

 

Great point. I'll see if I can find a "cutoff size" above which save files give problems. Do you use visual studio for debugging?

I have a 1 tb disk with 100 gb free, and I just freed up 100 gb more. Currently defragging again. Thanks for the tips. I'm definitely getting a SATA SSD once the quarantine eases a bit.

 

Yeah. It just works.

Make sure you get one with a DRAM buffer/cache. It cost a little extra, but it can make it significantly faster in a number of common usage cases. SATA is capped at 600 MB/s, which makes it slower than NVME, but it's still significantly faster than mechanical HDs. Also keep in mind that if you really want to, you can get NVME to 4xPCIe cards, which can be used to add NVME drives to motherboards too old to have any directly on the motherboard itself. If your goal is to play civ 4/5, then you will likely not be able to tell the difference between SATA and NVME though. In fact it might be questionable how much you benefit from upgrading from a mechanical HD.

 

Had to come and pick this up again because i just crashed right at the end before my Space Victory as Great Germany, Lmao

It gave me an error saying "You need to lower the graphics" and afterwards the usual "runtime error"