Memory-fix by Harkonnen is out!

[waylander]

Hello, I tried out your patch but it doesn't seem to do anything for me. I wasn't having any problems with crashes but late game the scrolling would slow down to the point of being almost unplayable. From the what I am reading your patch should have helped with that but I can see no difference before or after.

My system:
Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz
1 Gig of ram
Radeon 9800 All-in-wonder 128 Mg

I installed the patched and left the setting at default. If you have any suggestions I would appreciate hearing them.

 

[MxxPwr]

Smidlee
BTW, about running civ4/doom3 simultaneously. Can you please check it for globe view in civ4? Will it get waay slower? I mean globe view with a couple of cities.

Ad Hominem
Thanks for the info. Two releases (post #1 and post #640) have different problems... I am going to put a 3rd one which will benefit from both. I hope it'll work.

Pheoni
I have noticed white eye lashes even without the fix... Might be caching problem though. Same stands for green/golden ships. Sometimes this problem occures, sometimes not...

But I always get white eyes with some leaders. Mongolia leader has always one eye white, another eye normal. Probably these are side-effecst of memory-savings.

Hark and All

I noticed the white eyelids and blurry icons went away when I unchecked 'low res textures' in the graphics options.

I'm using a GeForce4 MX 440 (64mb) card.

Hark I'm going to right up a more detailed observation on your patch later; but I'm getting a 35mb savings and 15fps in normal game mode; standard map; 32mb; fullscreen; insane mode = 0

Thanks,
Frank

 

[Smidlee]

I'll throw some odd-ness on the fire. My CivIV works alot better in globe view than it does in the normal screen. To the tune of 25+fps in globe compared with single digits zoomed in.

Chalk it up to the oddball Ti4200 that so far seems to defy logic maybe?

If this happens early in a game then someone elses in another thread noted that trees (movement) can slow your framerate with low-end cards.
My motherboard has built-in ATI Xpress 200 which only get 10 fps zoomed in on a new map. If this happens late in the game then that is odd.
With empty maps, in globel view I get X2 the framerate than zoomed in probably because of tree movement.

 

[CombatWombat]

If this happens early in a game then someone elses in another thread noted that trees (movement) can slow your framerate with low-end cards.
My motherboard has built-in ATI Xpress 200 which only get 10 fps zoomed in on a new map. If this happens late in the game then that is odd.
With empty maps, in globel view I get X2 the framerate than zoomed in probably because of tree movement.

I have noted that alot of jungle/forest tiles seems to be what causes my fps to go down the tubes, so this is very likely. Good thing they provided a way to stop the pointless tree swaying. Oh. Right. They didnt.

Also, yes, it is early game. It doesnt stay playable to get to the mid game...much less the late game!

 

[Otterbear]

Excellent work Hark, I have a 124(5,6,8?) ATI Radeon pro and I have set the memory usage in your .ini file to 120 and my game is working great and most of the HUGE map is filled and I'm in the final stages of the game. I can zoom out to globe view and everything...ok,, sometimes it slows down a bit...but if I come out of the game and go back in things speed up again...Great work.! Thank You

PS: I also have a gig of RAM pretty sure that helps a bit

 

[{ChinO_MorenO}]

Im having superior cpu usage (100% seen from the task manager) in terra scenario normal sized, in the middle stage of the game (when you begin colonizing the new continent).
Before I had harkonnen patch it would just crash to the desktop or the system would reboot. Now it just becomes unplayable, and as the task manager seems to point out, its not a ram problem (however, I have an AMD 64 3.2Ghz, so i cant see how the processor could hang the game).
I set 80 mb ram in video memory usage (I have a radeon 9600 128mb ram), should I set it higher? I dont know how to see my agp apperture size to make the calculations harkonnen told us to do. Finally, this all sucks... we should not go through this to play a great game... However, thanks for your hard work Harkonnen

 

[lord_graywolfe]

well Hark im now running into the same problems again. i dont know why it is suddenly giving me the black map and bad leaderheads. it was running perfect. oh well im trying some changes in the ini to see if will change anything now. i did get one new wrinkle with my map. see for yourself, the japanese have found a new way to invade.

 

[Thrallia]

Harkonnen
I emailed you my saved game that was having that issue with gunships disappearing sometimes.
Here's hoping you can figure it out.

 

[Circastes]

With this patch Civ4 is running absolutely perfectly.

Excellent stuff.

 

[pachu]

Hi Hark,

I do believe your Post#640 patch is better than the Post#1 patch.

I've played a full game, standard map, 7 civs, all video settings low, window mode. Its the 1990's and still no problems. If it was your post#1 patch, I would've probably encountered some problem (black terrain, etc) around this time for a standard map.

My settings:

Post#1 patch
patch_on=1
vid_mem_usage=80
insane_mode=1

Post#640 patch
patch_on=1
vid_mem_usage=128
insane_mode=1

Inno3d GeForce 6600GT 128MB Video Card
Athlon XP 2200+
512MB RAM

Cheers

 

[Circastes]

well Hark im now running into the same problems again. i dont know why it is suddenly giving me the black map and bad leaderheads. it was running perfect. oh well im trying some changes in the ini to see if will change anything now. i did get one new wrinkle with my map. see for yourself, the japanese have found a new way to invade.

hahaha, that is awesome.

 

[Briareos]

I have noted that alot of jungle/forest tiles seems to be what causes my fps to go down the tubes, so this is very likely. Good thing they provided a way to stop the pointless tree swaying. Oh. Right. They didnt.

It's not the swaying that causes the FPS to drop, it's the number of triangles that have to be rendered per tree, and that doesn't change even if the animation were removed as they're still all redrawn each frame.

 

[Harkonnen]

firebead
64Mb users should try 'vid_mem_usage' = 100/128 since these cards work better via AGP than through their video memory.

FullyCompletely
To tell the truth, I'm still on 5.11. While writing the fix I was using 4.12. Then I switched to 5.11 and saw no difference.

Bast
You are probably checking the wrong column in task manager. Mem_usage is amount of physical memory which civ4 recently accessed. This is not total amount of allocations made which I reduce. Total number of allocations is shown by 'VM_Size' (virtual memory size) column which is not shown by default. You should go to 'view->options' in task manager to turn it on. Slow globe view might be the problem because a lot of geometry is unloaded from video memory by that time. Setting 'insane_mode = 0' might help, but it will decrease memory savings.

cintorix
Yes it might mean that. Post #640 fix accomodates memory allocated for geometry for memory allocated for textures, so it saves ~8-10 Mb less with 'insane_mode = 1'. Provided you are looking 'VM_Size'. Check by reply to Bast in this post.

RX2000
Thanks man! That means a lot, otherwise this thread could be shorter

CombatWombat
This is the "WTH" I was looking for... Stay tuned, I that with your system we are going to solve globe view problem for all

waylander
Try deleting/renaming 'Harkonnen.ini'. If the game still starts, that means you have placed it wrongly.

{ChinO_MorenO}
100% CPU usage is ok for any game since it always renders a frame, not just sitting for keyboard/mouse event like normal applications do.

lord_graywolfe
Try reducing 'vid_mem_usage' by 20 or 30, this might help with that (at cost of some speed).

Thrallia
Ok, I've placed checking your savegame into my TODO for testing final 'installer' version.

pachu
'Installer' version will contain both of them. The idea with 2nd intermediate release has failed too (locally).

Briareos
Well, true. Trees are the 2nd most consuming thing after terrain. Instlaler version will contain primitive counter per frame, so you'll see it with your own eyes

 

[Harkonnen]

ALL
We've hit 100K views yesterday

Well, up to this point the current approach of patching is 99% exhausted. New ways of thinking are required to make noticable improvements without problems.

I mean I am starting 'installer' version now. It will retain all settings and features of both #1 and #640 releases + some new ones. A wizzard will help tuning them without getting too much into tech details.

Also, that release will contain 'check for update' feature, so those of you who have few problems or few time don't have to watch this support thread.

Installer will also contain a loader to try it with other games. Especially 'insane_mode' might help with some as it is rather universal way to reduce memory usage at cost of some speed.

I will do my best to bring this on or before 25th December.

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

[pachu]

ALL
We've hit 100K views yesterday

Well, up to this point the current approach of patching is 99% exhausted. New ways of thinking are required to make noticable improvements without problems.

I mean I am starting 'installer' version now. It will retain all settings and features of both #1 and #640 releases + some new ones. A wizzard will help tuning them without getting too much into tech details.

Also, that release will contain 'check for update' feature, so those of you who have few problems or few time don't have to watch this support thread.

Installer will also contain a loader to try it with other games. Especially 'insane_mode' might help with some as it is rather universal way to reduce memory usage at cost of some speed.

I will do my best to bring this on or before 25th December.

Merry Christmas everyone!

You've got to admire the man ppl! I wouldn't expect such dedication from the devs.

Can't wait for the installer Hark. But don't push yourself too much. It's Christmas anyway. I'm sure everyone will understand if you can't get the installer before xmas.

 

[Harkonnen]

pachu
Thanks The problem with xmas is that many boxes will be opened that day and eventually many will get to the fix which currently isn't linked anywhere, so we'll just loose them with post #1 version and all its problems.

My aim with this fix is primarily for 'check for updates' feature and for CFC banner there (if Thunderfall won't reject this idea), so that those who mirror this fix without any original links still see the origin of this solution.

Otherwise many memory-fix beta-testers and simply great helpers here will become forgotten and with each new version fewer and fewer players will use the fix. "Spamming" boards won't have big effect when it is performed for the 3rd/4th time (2nd time with 'installer' it won't be as effective either), so I'd like to make this fix staying alive on its own.

 

[DanoDavid]

PC-Configuration:

- AMD64 3000+
- xFx GeForce 6600 LE / 256MB Extended PCI
- 1 GB DDR Memory​

Before Patch:

big and huge map games crashed with further exploration; once only civ4 crashed, once with bluescreen; scrolling broke for secs up to 1 minute, sometimes all stuff on the map disappears, sometimes very strange grafic failures followed by crash.​

After Patch:

no crashes yet, scrolling stop max for 1 or 2 secs​

I left Harkonnen.ini untouched, so patch_on=1, vid_mem_usage=80, insane_mod=1. I switched grafic quality to middle, witch seems no optical effect to me, but made scrolling smoother.

Harkonnen, you should teach the Firaxis people

Thank you very, very, very, .... , mucho

 

[DanoDavid]

PC-Config: AMD64 3000+, XFX GeForce 6600 LE Extended PCI / 256MB, 1 GB DDR 400 Memory

Before i did the patch, i had problems with big and huge maps when reaching wide exploration. So for example very bad scrolling with disappearing stuff on the map, stopping for secs up to 1 minute. Later in the game (1880 AD) strange grafic failures (looked like someone scratch my display) and crash every!!!!! turn.
The crashes ends sometimes on desktop, sometimes in bluescreen.

And now I'm very glad to say: its nearly smooth playable, no crashes yet.

I set the grafic quality to middle, witch seems no optical effect to me but encreased performance while scrolling. The Harkonnen.ini I left untouched.

Harkonnen, you should tell Firaxis people something of propper fixing. Thank you very much

 

[DanoDavid]

I thought my first post didnt get their

 

[Harkonnen]

DanoDavid
Thanks Set 'vid_mem_usage' to 150 or 180 (256 megs of video allows that). If alt-tabbing is a problem for you, set 'insane_mode = 0'.