Late game performance issues, anybody else other than me?

[Legal_My_Deagle]

It is hard for me to tell if this is only BTS or not, reason being I am playing on my new laptop with Vista as opposed to my old crappy desktop with XP and Warlords only.

Old PC like I said runs a gig of RAM and a Radeon 9800pro, 2.6ghz Intel if I remember right. XP Pro Ed. Game ran fine with Warlords.

New laptop still only has a gig of RAM until I update it in the next week or so with another gig, however I have a nVidia Geforce 8600m 256mb. Intel Core 2Duo T7300. Slow 5400rpm HDD however, but I don't see how that should be causing only late game lag. Vista Home Premium.

So why should I be getting some hardcore late game lag now? Is it a memory code problem? Only other thing I can think of is that although Vista's coding for handling memory is more efficient and makes better use out of a higher amount of memory, the OS itself uses up more memory, so perhaps this is because of memory issues and only having 1gig.

Thoughts?

 

[Tellos]

It's Vista. it is a resource HOG of the highest caliber. Got some nice things on it but my XP pro with 512 ram and a 128mb vid car runs BtS actualy BETTER than the core game and exspansion. Fact is vista's min is 512 reccomended is 1 gig. It really needs at least 2 gigs just to be a good gaming PC also your dealing possibly with how vista's settings are if your trying to run it with all it's own graphics at their prettiest your adding extra lag. Why it is only late game I donno but I can say ths Vista is a resource drain. When the OS requires 15 GIGs of space for it you know it's bloat ware.

 

[TopDog]

Same for me legal. Definitely noticed it slowing up allround, between turns, loading games and ive even has a couple of MAFs and other crashes..... but its still the best civ expansion ever!

 

[Underdawg]

How much RAM do you have? Vista itself even stripped of most of its resource hogging components still hovers around 500-600MB of used memory, so if you only have 1GB of RAM, late game will be noticeably laggy (heck it was not very responsive back when I had only 1GB of RAM with XP).

 

[toft]

1. Everyone complained from win 3.11 to win95
2. Everyone complained from win95 to win98
3. Everyone complained from win98 to winxp

And now again everyone is complaining about how much more resources vista requires over winxp... its kinda ridiculous. Vista works just fine under the right surcomstances. And BtS works just fine with Vista - and better than vanilla civ4.

 

[mice]

Is it Vista or is it the airships?

I get a distinct point when things slow and it's when airships turn up. I think it's true with all ranged things.

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

Civ4 is a memory hog. I'm no programmer, but I swear to god it doesn't need nearly as much memory as it ends up using.

 

[TheTerminator97]

1. Everyone complained from win 3.11 to win95
2. Everyone complained from win95 to win98
3. Everyone complained from win98 to winxp

And now again everyone is complaining about how much more resources vista requires over winxp... its kinda ridiculous. Vista works just fine under the right surcomstances. And BtS works just fine with Vista - and better than vanilla civ4.

No they didn't. Vista is a . .. .. .. .ing resource hog and its terrible.

You are far better off using XP, unless you have a beast of a system, then this discussion is meaningless anyways.

Also vista has a lot of other . .. .. .. . that makes people hate it, it isn't just that it uses so much system resources doing nothing.

People are working on making DX10 for XP. So there is no reason to upgrade, vista doesn't bring anything new to the equation.

 

[Dagta]

There are some speed and efficiency improvements coming to Vista that may show up in this week's or next week's updates. That should help. As is it now, Vista IS a huge resource hog.

 

[leckig]

Terminator: I bet you used to say exactly the same 8 years ago when everybody were switching to XP and you kept fixing your 98 or maybe even ME

Eveybody in the industry agrees that Vista is a huge improvement. You have to have a right computer to use it, and it is a pity that some low end laptops are being sold with Vista.

 

[Jperkinson]

1. Everyone complained from win 3.11 to win95
2. Everyone complained from win95 to win98
3. Everyone complained from win98 to winxp

And now again everyone is complaining about how much more resources vista requires over winxp... its kinda ridiculous. Vista works just fine under the right surcomstances. And BtS works just fine with Vista - and better than vanilla civ4.

That's why I use Win2K Pro. (The only Windows worth it's salt)

of course it's soon to be discontinued....

 

[Kalimakhus]

Hey Legal

Each aspect of the game may depend more on a different piece of hardware. For instance saving and loading depend on RAM so this is why MAFs happen at times of saving the game or loading it. Between turn lags are due to processing power. This is roughly measured by the CPU speed. As you get to the late game there is more and more cities, and units for the game to process. Now while your laptop is quite a good one still its processor is 2GH (I checked Intel's site and it sys so). The fact is your so called crapy old desktop would perform better when it comes to between turns lags. But it most likely would give you hard CTDs because of MAFs with the 512 MB RAM.

And by the way Dual core processor won't allow for better games performance as long as games are single threaded in general. So an old 3GHz CPU of a single core would be quite good for Civ4.

 

[vodlaian]

It's no secret that CIV4 needs major optimizations, just look through the SDK some time...

 

[sabo]

1. Everyone complained from win 3.11 to win95
2. Everyone complained from win95 to win98
3. Everyone complained from win98 to winxp

And now again everyone is complaining about how much more resources vista requires over winxp... its kinda ridiculous. Vista works just fine under the right surcomstances. And BtS works just fine with Vista - and better than vanilla civ4.

eh.. I'm still running on DOS 2.1 and my old 286 runs fine.. kidding. I was actually happy when XP came out. The very first windows OS that didn't run on Command.com (dos) outside of the old NT and Windows 2000 OS's.

 

[T_F]

The only real problem is that Vista requires an impressive computer - which is why most Linux distros are better, they can run on almost anything. I don't have anywhere near the money required for a Vista-usable computer. Hence, I run XP.
(Total off-topic - my family once had an ancient computer that ran XP, and it took it half an hour just to turn on.)

ANYWAY, I think the problem may be a memory leak. I have noticeably slower performance the longer I run the game, and I have to reboot to achieve better performance. I have 768mb of RAM (my motherboard can only hold a gig), 300gb of hard disk space, a nVidia GeForce FX 5500 card, and a 1.2gHz processor (I got this computer two years ago and it's already out of date!!), and I have had to wait almost a full minute between turns occasionally.

(I am so sick of having to continually buy hundreds of dollars worth of hardware just to be able to run the games I like. It just seems wrong to me.)

 

[vodlaian]

(I am so sick of having to continually buy hundreds of dollars worth of hardware just to be able to run the games I like. It just seems wrong to me.)

The reason for this is, as hardware advances, programmers become more lazy (The publishers are 80% to blame for this though). As a matter of fact, part of the blame should go to the gamers, many have a tendency to give stupid advice without a clue of what they are talking about...like "GET A BETTER COMPUTER N00000b111E!!!?!" instead of realizing that many of these problems wouldn't exist if the programmers actually dedicated some time to optimizing instead of rushing to get the game out to make a publisher happy. Sort of reminds me of the new trend to release games which don't even work as advertised and expect the consumer to wait a couple of months to download a patch.

 

[T.A JONES]

Hey Legal

Each aspect of the game may depend more on a different piece of hardware. For instance saving and loading depend on RAM so this is why MAFs happen at times of saving the game or loading it. Between turn lags are due to processing power. This is roughly measured by the CPU speed. As you get to the late game there is more and more cities, and units for the game to process. Now while your laptop is quite a good one still its processor is 2GH (I checked Intel's site and it sys so). The fact is your so called crapy old desktop would perform better when it comes to between turns lags. But it most likely would give you hard CTDs because of MAFs with the 512 MB RAM.

And by the way Dual core processor won't allow for better games performance as long as games are single threaded in general. So an old 3GHz CPU of a single core would be quite good for Civ4.

Lets give this guy a hand He nailed it. Blaming Vista is a sidetrack, its a minor setback to CIv4's real troubles. You go out and buy all the memory you can handle and load up a huge map late n the game n see what happens. I bet Your still runnin interturn deleys on a respectable huge map sizes when theres tons of civs/units on the board. Thats the biggest annoyance there is (besides those mynute

It used to the same with Civ3, up to like a year ago. True optimal performance where you go around with no crazy deleys wasn't established till I cranked up 3.2 on 2CPU so I could overclock the bit#ch for extra kick.
Only then did CIv3 truly performe lag free. There will always be time taken if you have many civs and many units they have to move but with caps lock on they will only stopn for battles and the rest should go in literally 'a blur'

 

[TheTerminator97]

No, vista ruins performance. Also, a major problem is graphics, turn off all animation and other . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . like that. Even if you have a beast of a computer, it speeds up the turns to have less . .. .. .. ..

Also don't use vista because its terrible. Vista is like ME, a piece of trash.

 

[Galatian]

No, vista ruins performance. Also, a major problem is graphics, turn off all animation and other . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . like that. Even if you have a beast of a computer, it speeds up the turns to have less . .. .. .. ..

Also don't use vista because its terrible. Vista is like ME, a piece of trash.

Linux Fanboy?!? I mean serious, get some informations before you write stuff like that and maybe try it out first, I'm using Vista Ultimate 64-Bit on my Laptop as well (Core 2 Duo @ 2,0 GHz, 2 GB Ram, NVidia 7900 GS and an Hitatchi 100 GB with 7200 Rpm) and it runs just fine. When I play games I turn of my Virus Scanner (Trend Micro Internet Security 2007) and shut down the Sidebar. Ram used: 650 MB. XP only used little less. Vista lookes a lot better, it is easier to use and there are a lot more funtions that are not avaiable for XP (and I'm not just speaking of DX 10). Many Games actually run a lot better (Half Life 2 to just name one). It is in fact just a question on how much the programmers are optimizing their games to run under Vista. And I just really have to blame Firaxis here, because CIV worked a lot better with Warlords.
In their manual they speak about increased performance for NVidia GeForce 8 Series and Soundblaster X-Fi. I think this is ridiculous. First of all: How many persons actually have stuff like that? Obviously only hard core gamers for some Ego-Shooters, but rarely someone who is playing a turn-based strategy game....Second (and this is much more important): Where are all the graphical changes? I mean there are a few changes, but this hardly justifies 1. all the performance issues and 2. all the bug that they have (just look in all those threads here). It is a turn-based strategy game for crying out loud...C&C works just fine on my computer and has a definitely higher advances engine.
So why doesn't BTS have such a performance? Best guess: they rushed everything. As other threads show there were other feature planned but dropped for some reasons (probably time issues; take the palace as an example). I feel no big difference in the performance between my old computer and my new laptop. I believe they need to optimize the program for the better use of ram as well as multiple CPU cores.
I rarely see so many bug reports for a computer game and reporting a bug was also my reason to register to this forum here. And i have never done this with a computer game, but I am utterly disappointet on how many great reviews BTS received and how bad it actually is once you bought it.

 

[Spiral]

Ooops double post :O