Is your game sluggish ?

[screwtype]

Wow, look at that, 30% of respondents are having serious problems with the game!

 

[Bast]

Mine is pretty normal. I have AMD Athlon 3200+, 1GB RAM and 256 MB GeForce 6800. BUT I haven't played on huge map with 18 civs. Do you think I'll survive?

 

[Ramboost]

My game ran smotthly until I updated my graphics driver. I used graphics drivers from 2003 and I had no problems at all. Then I needed to update my drivers because of some non-Civ4 issues and the game crashed constantly to desktop. I have now settled a compromise: I use drivers that are about a year old. The game now runs acceptable with a some lag sometimes......and it introduced the infamous memory leak which I didn't have before.

My specs:
Intel 2,66 ghz
1 gb RAM
Nvidia TI 4200 128 mb RAM
Win XP pro SP2

 

[Brewster]

I see a few of the posters are running the game on underspeced computers (under 1.2G). I have been holding off buying the game due to the processor speed on my rig (900Mhz). Are you guys overclocking your processors to play the game?

 

[Pratputajao]

Game runs pretty good until I go to the diplomacy screen, have a wonder movie play, ...have any movie play for that matter.. during the game after that the Frames drop to 7-10 a second. After the second movie, diplomatic encounter, etc... the game drops to about 1-3 frames a sec. At this point, unplayable. Also on any map larger than standard the FPS are low indeed 2-5. I had noticed that once after dropping two of my graphics settings the game ran much faster than ever but after time I ended up where I was before. I had just rebooted my system so I thought it was becouse of that ( rebooting) rather than the change in settings. However I notice someone... narmox I think, had posted something simmilar. I am going to see if I can reproduce this.... This would be a GREAT help for the game at this time. Anyway, specs-

Cel 2.6
512 Ram
GeForce FX5200

 

[bradleyfeanor]

I voted "sometimes slow but ok."

I have 2 copies of the game running on 2 machines, and one performs a bit better than the other. The slightly faster system:

HP notebook running XP (media center)
P4 around 3ghz
Radeon x300 mobility
512 mb ram (will be upped to 1 gig soon)

And the slightly (very slightly) slower system:
Dell Dimension 8100 running XP
Pentium 4 (old model), 1.5 ghz
Geforce 6600 GT (128 mb)
712mb ram
(For the tech-heads: this is a first-model P4 system, which means that it is running the pricey and dead rambus memory. Also, the AGP port is 4x (AGP 2.0 spec), so the Geforce card is somewhat throttled in its abilities)

The intro movie runs fine on both systems, but the wonder movies are very, very choppy. I hope they fix that. I run the game at max graphics and 1024 x 768 resolution until around 100 BC and it plays very smoth. After that date, however, it slows down quickly so I set all the graphics options to low. That takes care of it, although I lose all the cool unit animations of course.

Personally, with all the horror stories about getting the game to work, I'm just happy I was able to get it running on both machines. But I am still hoping that the first patch is a doozy--Firaxis really needs to improve the performance of this game.

Edit: another interesting difference between the machines it that I get the diplomacy bug (where you can get the AI to give everything he has for peace) on one machine but not the other. The ATI machine is running a copy of the game I bought at Gamestop (not preorder edition), and it has the diplomacy bug. The other machine is running the preorder edition, but it doesn't have the bug. Very odd.

 

[netbjarne]

Voted "sometimes slow". On my computer it is playable, but theres sure some lag. I have also only played single-player on standard map, with all sugar disabled (no aa, etc).

What bothers me is the constant 100% cpu load, even when doing nothing.

 

[krapylet]

It slows up on occasion. I have an aging (3 yrs) 2400+ amd 2.0ghz with a gig of ram, 6 gig paging file and my hd is 7200 rpm. My computer is sub-par, definitely, and I'm playing on a huge map with 12 civs or so. It lags when I enter the menus, it takes a long time to load games, when I zoom out it freezes up completely for a while, then I can spin the globe. When I tried activating the grid, it took me about 20 minutes before I could deactivate it and play the game again. This is in 1950 AD. I'm gonna buy a new system this month, though, so I'm not gonna whine about this

 

[Zakharov]

I am also experiencing occasional slowdowns. It seems to happen more during the late game and especially after contacting another leader.

I think this is a result of the "below normal priority" bug, where the game is telling Windows to run it after all the background processes. This can be temporarily fixed by Alt-Tabbing out then back in again, as this seems to set the program back to normal priority. However, the game will slow down again fairly soon so you have to do this at the start of every turn.

 

[TyranusBonehead]

Two things I did were

1) turn the graphics quality down to low

2) increase the virtual memory, I doubled mine

Ever since I did these two things, the game has played very smoothly.

 

[myrath]

Most important is to:
* Install newest graphic card drivers
* Install newest chipset drivers for your motherboard (This is sooooo important! I can't stress this enough).
* Install anti-spyware stuff to keep the junk out of your system.

Should already make a hell of a difference.
Ofcourse you shouldn't try loading anygame with less than 512 meg of ram.

 

[Ubiquitous]

The game is fine on a standard map until you get to the stage where you are revealing the map and getting modern units ... and then it gets very slow indeed. Far too slow - I no longer play the game.

My computer is well above the rec. spec. The game is just flawed, regardless of what the Big Business Sympathising Fan-Whores say.

 

[vanle]

Yeah, sluggish, but not in the beginning. All is fine till i build my first city....or sometime around then.

1.7 Centrino.
1 Gig ram
GeForce Go 6800

So, technically I should be playing this at light speed. WRONG!!! I've also noticed that the game isn't as smooth as it could be, even in the beginning moving around the map there is definitely a noticible lag.
-LL

 

[Makaan]

Most important is to:
* Install newest graphic card drivers
* Install newest chipset drivers for your motherboard (This is sooooo important! I can't stress this enough).
* Install anti-spyware stuff to keep the junk out of your system.

Should already make a hell of a difference.
Ofcourse you shouldn't try loading anygame with less than 512 meg of ram.

incorrect. with my latest graphics drivers civ4 ran slow and my computer kept crashing (even when just using the internet). had to delete all the drivers files and reinstall older ones to fix it

 

[Ribannah]

So far the game runs fine on medium settings. No crashes.

AMD XP 1800+
256 MB RAM
Radeon 8500 Family (Hercules 64MB 3D Prophet)
Creative SB Live
IIyama A902MT VisionMaster Pro
Windows XP Home

Virtual memory: 2 GB

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

My system is a Celeron 2.4 GHz cpu, with 1 gig of RAM and a 128MB Radeon 9250 card (with around Catalyst 5.7 or 5.8 drivers I think). Although I voted for 'gets a bit slow sometimes' I have found that even Large Terra maps for me are not really much slower than in Civ3-and I am running mine in full screen mode with the highest quality graphics. I do hope that a future patch can improve the speed for 128 systems but-possibly moreso-I hope they fix it so that I can replace my 256 video card which-though much faster-was causing graphics artifacts and occasional crashes.
Still though, overall I have few if any complaints with the game speed so far-which is not bad for a game so early in its life!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[chimera99]

It starts to become sluggish once the wars begin and there are lots of units in play. In both my long games that was 1300 AD+. (Huge world) I have no problem with sound but the video starts to become very jerky (low fps) and eventually it becomes impossible to scroll and crashes start occuring.

1 gig dual channel DDR
2.8 GHz P4
Ti4600

 

[Efexeye]

I see a few of the posters are running the game on underspeced computers (under 1.2G). I have been holding off buying the game due to the processor speed on my rig (900Mhz). Are you guys overclocking your processors to play the game?

I would hold off on buying it until you upgrade. I have a very, VERY hard time believing that the guy with the 866mHz processor is running the game at all, much less with no problems.

 

[Sir_CharlesIII]

The performance on this game is pretty bad I have to say. I've seen some apologist saying that we should expect this because CIV4 has 3d graphics and what not. I'm sorry there's no excuse for this. The graphics in Civ4 are NOTHING SPECTACULAR - they look like something I'd see in games 2-3 years ago. That's okay because Civ games have never had cutting edge graphics but always have cutting edge gameplay. The problem is that this game should run fine - but you need a system that surpasses the RECOMMENDED requires to run it decently.

Here's a comparison: On my computer, a laptop by the way: 2.6ghz P4, 512MB RAM, Geforce 4 video card; the game Age of Empires III runs silky smooth. I can't put the graphics on full because of my mediocre video card - but they still look Above and Beyond anything in Civ4 - Civ4 doesn't even come Close to AOEIII's graphics on my computer. Yet AOEIII runs smooth even in large battles with lots of high poly units running around. Civ4 has low quality textures and low poly models by comparision - there's no reason it should be slow. This is just bad design.

 

[jeannie]

My game gets slow when I have a lot of automated workers. The same thing happened in Civ 3, but Civ 3 was much, much worse - there were times that completing a turn for me took several hours!