Laptop Issues

[the_legend]

I don't know if anyone else owns a new widescreen laptop, but I have experienced quite a few annoyances that have lessened my overall enjoyment of civ iv.

First, I feel the gameplay is slow, at least as compared to civ iii. I have heard that this from others, so perhaps the game just was meant to run slightly slower, creating an issue for someone who loves instant gratificiation, but it seems sometimes there is a noticable lag between moves.

Second, I have had a handful of crashes in longer games. I feel this is odd for a brand new system with the recommend or better requirements.

Does anyone have any ideas for fixing these issues?

Does anyone know if Civ IV plans to make a resolution that accomodates widescreens?

My system requirements are 2.0 Ghz Pentium, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB Video RAM, 80 GB Harddrive.

 

[hlok]

I have a laptop with a 1.6GHz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 5650 Go 128MB and agree that Civ 4 runs uncomfortably slow. However, after reading a lot of threads on this forum I have some methods I think might help:
(1) Set desktop color depth to 16-bit. This will reduce Civ's memory-usage and apparantly looks exactly the same. Not sure if Civ needs to be in windows mode for this to work.
(2) Use RivaTuner to reduce Shader-level used by Civ. Some ppl have reported that Pixel Shader 1.1 and Vertex Shader 1.1 give the most bangs for the bucks.
(3) Use Harkonnen's unofficial patch(it's on this forum but I don't have a link, sorry). This reduces and optimizes video memory usage, both lowering memory footprint and increasing graphics speed.
Please note that (2) and (3) are a bit tech'y so you might want to avoid those if you're worried about screwing up your system/game.

Since you don't specify what graphics card your laptop has I can't possibly comment on your crash problems but good suggestion is to make sure you have the latest drivers for it. Please note that latest drivers for laptop cards are not always available from the laptop or graphic cards manufacturer.

Civ4 does natively support (at least some) widescreen resolutions. It runs in 1920x1200 on both my desktop and laptop. Although not very fast on the laptop.

Good luck!

 

[Zydor]

the_legend

The symptoms you describe are indicative of the major Civ IV issue - memory management. It could be other things of course, but go for that for now - the suggested fix (the Harkonnen Patch) is quick and easy to install, it is not a technical one to deal with, if it does not work for you come back and we can go further - if you do come back it would be helpful to post your Dxdiag dump

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146309

Look at Post 1 of the thread, it gives clear instructions, you may need to change 2 settings on the patch - very easy to do - as the settings do have a profound effect on the way the patch works. The default settings are ok as such to start off, but many do need to tweek them to get the best out of it. The guys on the thread are very helpful, and will assist if you have hassles

Regards
Zy

 

[the_legend]

Does the Har patch do anything else to my machine or only effects civ iv? Might be a dumb question, but just a bit concerned.

 

[the_legend]

I have an ATI Video Card with 128 MB of memory.

I must say that a game with this major of a flaw really demeans the greatness of the game. Civ III ran much better!

 

[hlok]

(the_Legend)As far as I can tell from the threads I've read it only influences Civ4.

Apparantly it works by linking into Civ4 on startup (exact method/DLL is slightly different depending on the version of the patch) and then replacing som elementary memory-management in the graphics engine, somewhere in-between the Civ4 application and the Direct3D API (part of Windows). Please correct me if I'm wrong anyone.

I agree that this does detract somewhat from Civ4 but at the same it worked perfectly on my hight-spec'ed desktop and was stable but slow on my mid-spec'ed laptop. For me that seems like any new 3d-based game = you need fairly good system to run it. However, the problems other have reported: CTD's, incompatibilites with perfectly reasonable video cards (like yours) and problems with big maps is much more serious and is definetly the responsibility of the developers.

 

[robaughjr]

Does the Har patch do anything else to my machine or only effects civ iv? Might be a dumb question, but just a bit concerned.

Doesn't mess with your machine at all, all you do is download a couple files and extract to your civ4 folder. I haven't read a negative post about it yet. It either works or it doesn't, it won't make it any worse (made a huge difference on mine). Browse through the thread and see how many positive posts there are. Detailed installation instructions are in the first post.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146309

 

[the_legend]

I appreciate all your help and will make my attempts this weekend.

 

[the_legend]

i believe i still need to update my video driver, but the new civ iv patch is working fine and the game play has greatly increased. Any idea why this patch kicks so much ass?

 

[hlok]

After doing some extensive testing with all the three methods I mentioned above I found that in my case, Harkonnen's patch was the only one that made the game playable in 1920x1200 on my laptop. Let's hope Firaxis include something similar in the next official patch.

 

[the_legend]

I think I play at a "larger" resolution, meaning whatever the Less desktop setting would be.