Intro Video Unwatchable / Gameplay Slow!

[manooly]

Is there anything I can do to help my laptop run my Civ4 game? The intro is choppy and unwatchable. I actually freezes up about 15 seconds into it. I am able to play the game though. I just feel like I'm not running at "max capacity" though. The game also runs a little slow with anything larger than normal maps. I know I could add RAM. I need other suggestions.

Specs:
HP Pavillion zv5000 laptop
AMD 3200 processor
512MB RAM
NVIDIA graphis card with updated drivers.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for your time!

 

[robaughjr]

The intro movies skip on anything but the best videocards. As far as your slowdown, try increasing your pagefile min and max to the largest allowed by windows. 512mb ram is the bare minimum to run the game so buying another 512 stick or better yet a 1024 will make a huge difference.

 

[Zanmato]

I would say the pagefile doesn't really need to be set to anything larger than 2Gb. Doubling the system RAM up to 1Gb is the best and cheapest thing you can do at the moment, you will see a massive improvement in performance. Through my own experience and from some of these threads anything lower than GF 6 series card and the game might struggle with the video.
However, you can try a few tweaks that might help:
Change the card settings to 'Performance' for Image Quality, turn AA to 'App-controlled' or 'Off'.
Civ4.ini changes, AllowScreenshots = 1, Bink16bit = 1, all other Bink settings set to 0.

If the game plays fine and it just issues with the movies, you could always turn them off until the low-res movies are released. When that will be is anybodys guess.

 

[manooly]

I appreciate the replies. Can you be more specific as to how I make these suggested changes?

Example: Right click on my computer -> Select Properties -> etc....

Any info would be apprecited. Thanks again for your time!

 

[Zanmato]

Example: Right click on my computer -> Select Properties -> etc....

Then the 'Advanced' tab and then 'Performance options', you will find the window regarding VM pagefile there. Click 'Change' and it will give you two boxes with numbers in - change these to somewhere around 1500 and 2000. Keep both figures the same so it keeps the pagefile static.

To change the card settings, 'Display' control panel > 'Settings' tab > 'Advanced' > 'GeForce (whatever your card is)' tab then the GeForce control panel should pop up. Go to 'Performance and Settings' in the menu on the left (if it isn't there click the green arrow on the left side of that window). Once there you will find the settings for the card.

Civ4.ini file found in 'My Games' in 'My Documents', it is just a plain text file so the changes are simple to do.