Lags and crashes

[daniel192]

I bought the game today and made a city.
I wanted a wonder for it and started a wonder.But sometimes i complete it the game chrashes.If it works the movie plays but the sound is horribly laggy.It happens ot the intro movie,straight video,but laggy sound.

Help me!

 

[CivDav]

system specs? check out the newest drivers for your video driver and run a dxdiag.

 

[ronnybiggs]

Let me know what you find - I'm researching the issue myself.

 

[matt4446]

Please provide:
CPU:
RAM:
Graphics Card(s):
OS:
Free hard-drive space:
thanks.

for the sound and video at the start see my post:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=176537
(if you are using amd (dual core or not) try what i said)

Additionally try increasing VM (virtual memory) on the drive with the game installed.

Matt

 

[civfanneophyte]

I have a Compaq Presario running Windows XP-Home edition with an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ chip, 2.17 Ghz with 1.5 Mb ram. 1.0MB available RAM. 2 Gb virtual memory with 1.96 Gb available. I have a GEforce 6600 video card. I have 100 Gb hard drive space with 80Gb available. Seems like the system has enough resources.

I have had Civ IV since December. I previously had a Radeon video card but after two burned out (I suspect improper installation at Best Buy but decided to go to the GeForce card after the second warranty replacement).

My system crashes (locks up so that I have to unplug the power, it won't turn off) when I try to schedule multiple (three) builds for a city (say a settler and a worker and a warrior). The system does not lock up if I only schedule one build ata time and wait until the build is done befoer scheduling another for the city.

This did not used to happen (before the GeForce 6600) so I suspect some sort of software issue. I have downloaded the most recent patch and I have deleted and reinstalled CIV IV.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

 

[crunch]

What an interesting problem! Never heard of it before, though. I cannot fathom how this could relate to graphics card. Try playing the game in a window and reproducing the error, perhaps you will be able to glimpse some error message or so.

 

[ronnybiggs]

I have a P4 2 GHz, 128 MB NVidia card, 512 MB RAM. Does it matter that I have only 133 MHz FSB speed?

I'm convinced this is a cruddy Windows OS issue. There must be a way to bypass this.

 

[Velvet-Glove]

I have a P4 2 GHz, 128 MB NVidia card, 512 MB RAM. Does it matter that I have only 133 MHz FSB speed?

I had a very similar system to this until a few months ago, when I completely rebuilt/upgraded my PC - I didn't have a problem with crashing but lagginess was a huge problem, especially with the first release of the game, which definitely had memory issues. The biggest problem seemed to be at the map trading stage of the game when the whole world was finally revealed... the game would take from 10-20 minutes or so to map out the world and come back to life and from this point onwards the end-of-turn intervals (i.e. the AI moves) were quite slow to calculate. I did find that doubling my RAM to 1GB made a big difference to all this, though, and later patches made it better still.

So, I think the answer to the 133 FSB question is that it doesn't/shouldn't matter, the game will run on this sort of system, just more slowly than on a faster machine, and you probably shouldn't attempt any of the larger maps if you want an enjoyable, and playable, game. If you are seeing the game crash then something somewhere isn't quite right, either with the hardware or with the OS.

 

[ronnybiggs]

I should add some details. My problem is the cut-scenes lag intolerably. The rest of the game plays quite smoothly. I think this may also have something to do with the fact that at first the CPU thinks I'm bleow specs, but still runs fine when I increase the resolution.

 

[Velvet-Glove]

ronnybiggs, if the game is otherwise stable then your lag problem is probably just a lack of RAM. With just 512MB on board you will have very little left over after Windows has grabbed it's share. You could look into your virtual memory settings, a tweak might help, but you would be better off adding another stick of RAM as this is much faster than accessing the hard disk. As I indicated above, doubling my RAM on the old PC did make a noticeable difference, to all aspects of the game - loading, running, map scrolling, movies etc.