Larger maps, late game

[Chiefwiggum]

Hello,

I've taken a long break from Civ4 and only recently started playing it again. Since I've bought a new machine a few months ago I had some high hopes that the extremely slow performance I saw late game on large or huge maps would be all but a fading memory. Sadly it is not. I've scanned the various threads to see if this still is an issue or if a fix has been released (some type of memory leak has been mentioned before).

I'm running BTS the latest patch on a HP Pavilion Elite m9180 with Vista
Phenom AMD 9500 Quad Core 2,2Ghz, 3072MB RAM and a GeForce 8800GT.

Regardless of game settings (low details etc) I sooner or later find myself in the same situation as before with my old machine;
For example: Starting a game as China on the world map, when I reach say 14-15th century the game performance is really bad. It's not graphical bugs but just slow loading time between turns and general slowness when moving units or entering cities.

I hate small maps; want to be able to utilize the full features in game

Any suggestions or tips for other threads I should look at?

Many thanks guys
/Chief

 

[J-man]

Do you exactly have 3072MB RAM of have 4 gig and it's reported as 3072MB RAM? If it's the latter you running way behind in updates for windows. One other thing that could work is update your drivers (particularly your graphic drivers).

Your computer should run huge maps just fine...

 

[Chiefwiggum]

Cheers for your reply J-Man. I too also think I should be able to run huge maps without any issues.

It's actually 3.00GB in RAM, no more no less. My gfx drivers are now from 22nd January 2009 and seems to be the latest for my card. I just ran a Windows update but I seem to have all the latest ones already.

Strange this issue is

 

[J-man]

The are only one other thing I can think of now...
-CPU and/or graphics card aren't cooled good enough, do you know the temperatures?

Other then that I don't know, although I find it odd that the latest gfx driver is from january.
(my latest gfx driver are from May and I have an ATI card, ATI has worse reputation then Nvidea when it comes to updating drivers.)