Lagging Game, Cannot Play

[PanzerEric]

I have been playing Civ 5 since it came out witn no problems.

However, yesterday wil playing Civ 5 (version 1.0.1.511) the game began lagging badly. I have a good PC and this has never happend before.

I restarted my PC and re-launched Civ. The game played fine for about 5 turns then slowly became more and more laggy until the game was unplayable. At this point I cannot play and have looked at everything on my PC to see if there is a problem to no avail.

1) I seem to have plenty of memory available for the game. My system has 8Gb of memory, and Task Manager shows that I have over 4Gb free memory available to load up the game.

2) I thought it might be Steam related. But the problem is present whether Steam is on-line or off-line.

3) I removed and reinstalled the game.

System Specs:

AMD Pehnom 970 Quad Core processor
2.4Ghz

8Gb Ram

750 Gb hard drive

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GS

Vista Home premium

Service Pack 2

As stated prevously I have never had any problems playing Civ 5 on my PC. Now all of a sudden it lags so badly I cannot play.

Any ideas on what might be the problem?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[FeiLing]

Check your temperatures. Something like Speedfan for CPU and GPU-Z for the GPU^^

At idle CPU should be no higher than 45° C, GPU can vary a lot due to type, but maybe between 40-60°C is normal.

At load (have the programs running while playing, when it slows down alt+tab into windows and see what they show) CPU must be not be higher than 70°C, GPU must not exceed ~100°C.

Make sure the fans are running and while at it, carefully remove dust from them and the inside of the PC.
Do not leave the case open.

 

[PanzerEric]

Great suggestion FeiLing!!

I downloaded SpeedFan and it showed my GPU to be at 104C which is running on the highside of temperature by quite a bit.

I opened my PC and as expected it was completely covered in dust. After an extensive cleaning my PC now works very well. Several hours of playing Civ and no problems with lagging at all and the temp for my GPU is now around 68C. My CPU temp fell by 8 degrees C as well.

Thanks again FeiLing!!