Need help improving game performance on a 2006 MacBook Pro

[AlanH]

Still, Civ4 isn't a graphics-intensive game

Oh, yes it is! It uses a 3d game engine, designed for real time action games, that caused major problems with most existing PCs and Macs when it was first released. Most regular PCs were shipping with Intel Integrated Graphics processors, and were woefully unable to cope.

If you go back into the older Civ4 threads on this site you will find that a lot of people were upgrading graphics cards, CPUs and memory just to get it to run.

so it's not really a stretch to ask that it perform decently on a computer released in the same year.

Firaxis software engineers designed for the future. They either didn't realise, or didn't care, that the software would need the high-end gaming hardware of the time. As the silicon evolved, the mainstream PC hardware caught up a year or so later.

Apple have never prioritized game performance, and Macs have never been shipped with the fastest graphics hardware. And most Macs cannot be upgraded. Civ4 also needed a DirectX-to-OpenGL conversion layer that added a further performance hit because it took less advantage of graphics hardware acceleration. So Macs lagged by at least another year.

 

[Gary King]

The game freezes my computer every other time I run it, requiring that I force my computer to restart by holding the power button. Also, sometimes it can take 30 seconds for a single turn to complete, on a Standard map at the lowest resolution. I seem to be the only one having these problems in this thread.

 

[Taneda Santôka]

Don't forget you're trying to run the game on an old MAC LAPTOP. Not a PC gaming station.
Why don't you just erase then reinstall everything cleanly. Sometimes it's all it takes.

 

[AlanH]

The game freezes my computer every other time I run it, requiring that I force my computer to restart by holding the power button. Also, sometimes it can take 30 seconds for a single turn to complete, on a Standard map at the lowest resolution. I seem to be the only one having these problems in this thread.

I'd say there's something wrong with your installation or your Mac. You might want to take the Mac into a Genius bar for a checkup, and/or reinstall Civ4 as suggested above.

Make sure you delete the ~/Documents/Civ4/ folders, ~/Library/Application Support/Civ4/ folders, and ~/Library/Preferences/com.aspyr.civ4xxxx.plist files as well as the main game software folder before you reinstall.