my sip of civ4 with a under-requirement machine

Good news, I tried civ4 with my 4 years old machine.

here is my machine's spec
CPU: 1.2G ATHlon
RAM: 368M
Video card: Sis730, with 16M shared memory.
Free HD: 3G
O.S.: windows XP, sp2

1st, I tried tutorial and I see Sid's instroduction, but all slow. So I goto advanced, put low graphics..Try to start a new game...all seems fine, but dropped me off before enterring the new world..
Try pre-build world, earth.. I could log in, slow.. but playable.. Until I met with Ghangis Khan. The leader head in the diplomacy windows was messed up.. have to restart..meanwhile, maybe after this, I get the render error message.

Then I looked at the files sizes of the pre-build worlds. battle is smallest. But I can't enter it either. I end-up start a new game with planet... I played till 1000BC.. I was in a lonely island, and did not see anyone, but beast and barbarians.. Get my 1st great scientist... yea!!

 

So, ah, do you have plans on upgrading that video card?

 

I may... But it's really slow on XP. I may have to either upgrade RAM, or install a win2K..

 

I think the video card is killing you badly too. I got Civ4 up and running last night on a 600 Mhz Celeron(!), 320 megs of RAM, but 128 megs of video RAM. I was able to run a small map at 1024X768 and lowest detail without too much trouble, although you have to be patient at times.

 

XP might be a problem as well. I'm running on Win2K.

 

I agree. 16M shared RAM, I guess I have lowest video card here. And Sis730 do gave me extra problem with some other games.. But the problem is the Sis730 is an on-board video card. Even I buy a new Video card, I may have to find a way to un-load the old Sis730, etc..

 

It has to be your video card, judging by the messed-up leaderhead. Your video card is way below the minimum specs. 16 MB? Does it even have T&L capabalities?

 

You should probably be able to go to Add/Remove programs, and uninstalling the video drivers there, if you get a new video card. After uninstalling those drivers, it'll ask you to restart. Cancel that so you can select shut down and turn off computer. Follow the instructions given to you by the video card supplier.

Onboard video is the suck.

 

There may actually be an option in the BIOS to disable the on-board graphics. There will at least be one for on-board sound so depending on the BIOS, have a look for that option (for on-board video) if you do get a new video card.

 

Threads like these give me hope. I hope you can play the game.