Shepherdboy
Chieftain
Greetings All,
My normal machine is a Dell laptop with a Radeon Mobility 9000 32MB. Although I have not had the loading problems or the Cheshire Cat problem, I do have the game slowdown problem after about 20 minutes of play.
I decided to pull out an old desktop machine and see if Civ4 would run on that. Surprisingly, it seems to run fine. This machine was originally a PIII 500Mhz. I upgraded it a few years ago with one of those CPU kits to a Celeron 1.3 Ghz. (I assume that means you don't really get the full power of the Celeron 1.3 since the system was made for an earlier chip.) I have 320 MB of RAM in the system and it is running XP Home. The video card is a lowly GeForce2 MX 400. I thought for sure the video card had little chance. Couple that with the lame processor and less than optimal memory and I would have bet heavily against it.
When I started up the game, I got a warning that my system was below specification and that adjustments to the graphics settings had been made, but I could continue if I wanted to. These are the setting changes that were automatically made: Low on all drop-down graphics settings. Single Unit Graphics, checked; Animations Frozen, checked; Effects Disabled, checked; Globe View Buildings Disabled, checked. I'm running at 1024x768.
I have absolutely no complaints about the way the game plays. It is very responsive. The zoom works fine, wonder movies play, and leaders animate fluidly.
I still have a suspicion that there is a memory leak in the game as the memory usage slowly but surely increases the longer you play. However, unlike on my laptop, I never reached a point of the system slowing to a crawl--even after an hour and 20 minutes of play. Perhaps if I had played longer...
I think I will experiment with the lower graphic settings on my laptop. Maybe they'll at least extend the time I can play before having to reload.
Anyway, perhaps this is useful to someone and hopefully a forthcoming patch will ease some of our issues.
Shepherdboy
My normal machine is a Dell laptop with a Radeon Mobility 9000 32MB. Although I have not had the loading problems or the Cheshire Cat problem, I do have the game slowdown problem after about 20 minutes of play.
I decided to pull out an old desktop machine and see if Civ4 would run on that. Surprisingly, it seems to run fine. This machine was originally a PIII 500Mhz. I upgraded it a few years ago with one of those CPU kits to a Celeron 1.3 Ghz. (I assume that means you don't really get the full power of the Celeron 1.3 since the system was made for an earlier chip.) I have 320 MB of RAM in the system and it is running XP Home. The video card is a lowly GeForce2 MX 400. I thought for sure the video card had little chance. Couple that with the lame processor and less than optimal memory and I would have bet heavily against it.
When I started up the game, I got a warning that my system was below specification and that adjustments to the graphics settings had been made, but I could continue if I wanted to. These are the setting changes that were automatically made: Low on all drop-down graphics settings. Single Unit Graphics, checked; Animations Frozen, checked; Effects Disabled, checked; Globe View Buildings Disabled, checked. I'm running at 1024x768.
I have absolutely no complaints about the way the game plays. It is very responsive. The zoom works fine, wonder movies play, and leaders animate fluidly.
I still have a suspicion that there is a memory leak in the game as the memory usage slowly but surely increases the longer you play. However, unlike on my laptop, I never reached a point of the system slowing to a crawl--even after an hour and 20 minutes of play. Perhaps if I had played longer...
I think I will experiment with the lower graphic settings on my laptop. Maybe they'll at least extend the time I can play before having to reload.
Anyway, perhaps this is useful to someone and hopefully a forthcoming patch will ease some of our issues.
Shepherdboy
