Need help improving game performance on a 2006 MacBook Pro

[Gary King]

I've got a 2006 MacBook Pro. The specs are 2 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, and ATI Radeon x1600 128 MB for graphics. Civ4 BTS runs excruciatingly slow; the game constantly freezes as it tries to catch up. The game also takes up 2 GB of hard disk space for the VM, and yet that doesn't even seem to help at all (this is also why it takes about five minutes to exit the game as it clears the VM, which is also annoying). Anyone have suggestions on what to do to improve performance? I think I've already got most of my graphics settings down to the lowest.

I find this all fairly strange, as I am able to play Call of Duty 4 (on medium settings) without much graphics lag, running at about 30 FPS or so.

EDIT: I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard), and the largest map size I play is Standard.

 

[DoctorDon]

It might be the video RAM. I have nearly the same hardware as you--MBP, purchased May 2006, except I have a 2.16 Ghz Core Duo, and I have the x1600 with 256M.

I play Mac BTS with no mods, all "Low" graphics and no anti-aliasing, native resolution, at standard size (7 nations). Under those conditions, I don't see "excruciatingly" slow performance, although it does slow down in the later ages. I don't see freezes either. The game quits normally.

Unfortunately I don't have any suggestions for you.

 

[AlanH]

Does Aspyr Support have anything to say on the subject?

 

[Flintlock1415]

Step down the size of your maps. I have an iMac with the same video card as your MBP, but only 512 MB RAM and 1.83 Core Duo, and it runs fine, but I never play bigger than standard size maps.

 

[Gary King]

Do you guys have any other apps running when playing Civ4? In my original post, the experiences that I explained are immediately after I start up my computer, with no applications running in my dock. Sometimes I will have iTunes running to listen to music while playing though, but that's all.

 

[frunobulax]

Just out of curiosity what OS are you running?

Like Flintlock1415, I am running an iMac with similar hardware (see signature - ATI Radeon x1600 but with 256Mb VRAM for graphics) and Civ4/BtS runs fine, albeit a little slow on bigger maps and later in the game when there are more units running around. The game graphics are on the medium-to-high settings.

I often run other apps in the background, like iTunes or Firefox, though I prefer not to just to optimize Civ4's performance.

 

[DoctorDon]

I usually have Mail and Safari running. I didn't see any performance difference in 10.4, 10.5, or 10.6 on my laptop (specs above in post #2). I have probably run nearly all the point releases, too. Admittedly I have never played a game on a bigger than standard map.

 

[Gary King]

I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard), and I only play on Small or Standard maps. It sounds like most of you are not having any performance problems. That is very strange; the problems with my game are really noticeable. For instance, sounds are chopped up so that I can hear one second of audio and then the next second is silence, then again audio once more, indicating that the computer is trying to catch up with the game.

 

[Flintlock1415]

I have also noticed poor sound quality, but I rarely even have sounds on. I think one time I had music on it actually crashed from it (at least thats what I think the logs said.) Maybe just clicking the master volume off might help.

I actually just (like 5 mins ago) installed 2 Gigs of RAM on my computer, and just firing up some apps it seems much quicker. I want to see how much it helps out Civ.

 

[Gary King]

So, I thought about what was different between my computer setup and installation of Civ4 compared to the rest of you guys. Then, I figured it might have been the hundreds of save files that I have. I have about 200 single player save files. They shouldn't affect the game's performance as they are just like any other document; they should only load when they are needed. However, I deleted/moved all 200 of them, and poof, the game runs a lot smoother. The game is as good as it was when I played it on this very computer three years ago.

The only time that the game still lags is when I'm viewing a city with over 50 units in it, but that's a minor problem.

 

[Gary King]

Okay, that didn't seem to help. The game is still pretty slow, and it still crashes pretty frequently. When it's really slow and I click on something, like the Military Advisor, then the game will freeze and sometimes crash to the desktop.

 

[Flintlock1415]

Maybe try cleaning up some disk space. From what I understand, the game can be rather CPU intensive, so maybe that will help?

 

[Gary King]

Maybe try cleaning up some disk space. From what I understand, the game can be rather CPU intensive, so maybe that will help?

I've already got 8 GB of free space on my hard drive.

 

[AlanH]

8 GBytes is not much free space. The usual recommendation is to keep 10% of your system drive available, as the system needs to be able to build swap space. If your drive is only 80 GBytes then I guess you are OK against that limit, but I suspect the recommendation assumes bigger hard drives.

 

[Gary King]

8 GBytes is not much free space. The usual recommendation is to keep 10% of your system drive available, as the system needs to be able to build swap space. If your drive is only 80 GBytes then I guess you are OK against that limit, but I suspect the recommendation assumes bigger hard drives.

I've only got 80 GB in total. And shouldn't swap size only be as big as your RAM, at least in most cases?

 

[AlanH]

Depends. My Mac has 4 GBytes physical memory, but is currently running with 7.89 GBytes swap used according to Activity Monitor. It puts stuff you're not using onto disk, and it can have a lot of apparently resident apps and system code that exceed the physical RAM. When it's paging this on and off the hard drive, program execution can slow to a crawl. You see this effect sometimes when you switch between running apps, and the beachball cuts in while it swaps things around.

 

[DoctorDon]

Swap size does not need to be the same as RAM size. In the old days, you'd often set them about equal (on systems where you had control). Nowadays with machines with big memory, sometimes you set it less. We have some big workstations with 24 G RAM, and because we know we won't be overloading the memory with apps, our swap is only 4 or 8 G. That being said, those are Linux machines, and I have no idea how Macs decide about swap.

I will also note that there is one other memory <---> disk concern: when you "sleep" a Mac laptop, the contents of RAM-->disk, and that *does* need about the same space on disk as your memory.

 

[Gary King]

So far I've noticed that the game runs ridiculously faster after I dropped the resolution from 1600x900 to 1280x720. That's probably the most easiest way to improve the game's performance; I should have tried it a while ago, but I didn't because when the resolution is that small, the game looks like it comes from Fisher Price as there are way too many gigantic buttons.

 

[Taneda Santôka]

So far I've noticed that the game runs ridiculously faster after I dropped the resolution from 1600x900 to 1280x720. That's probably the most easiest way to improve the game's performance; I should have tried it a while ago, but I didn't because when the resolution is that small, the game looks like it comes from Fisher Price as there are way too many gigantic buttons.

Brilliant, running a 2006 MBP on 1600x900 resolution. Of course the game"s gonna be slow. You should also play without AA and with "single unit graphics". I got used to it.

 

[Gary King]

Still, Civ4 isn't a graphics-intensive game. I already have all my graphics settings to low, and I have any unnecessary effects disabled. After playing the lowest resolution for a while, the game has indeed improved, but it's still not perfect and has noticeable hiccups. Remember, the game was released in 2006 (for the Mac; 2005 for the PC), so it's not really a stretch to ask that it perform decently on a computer released in the same year.