New Macbooks! GMA X3100

Sounds promising. I look forward to seeing your first impressions when you get one :)

Of course, the most likely scenario is that the GMA X3100 will break under Civ4 again. I think it's happened with every new graphics hardware option Apple have introduced, so why should this be an exception? (Ahah! Brad's at Apple now! :) )
 
I'm not looking for impressive, I'm looking for merely adequate. The GMA950 didn't even meet that standard. ;)
 
Yes, Alan, I did run out and get one right away! I only had a chance to load up a few late saved games to try it out, and it does seem a bit faster than the 12" Powerbook I had been using. I guess it's not "broken".... I don't think I'm going to increase the graphics settings anytime soon, but at least I'll be able to finish a game without the endgame slowing to an absolute crawl.

And I think it will run a lot better once I get more ram than the stock 1GB....
 
Still haven't gotten far enough in a game to really know whether the endgame is going to lag horribly, but I do have a quick tip for you all: if you're going to pick up the base model with 1GB Memory, expect to have to buy more to prevent excessive swapping. At least 2 GB ought to work.

Leopard uses a few hundred more MB than Tiger, and the new Graphics chip uses system memory also, so 1 GB is not enough for Civ. I bought a 2 GB module, which totalled 2.5 GB with the remaining stock 512 MB module, and all my swapping problems went away! (That's DDR2 667 SO-DIMMs, if you're keeping score at home.)
 
FYI: Someone in the Civ3 forum has discovered that he has to run Civ3 Complete on an x3100 MB in window mode, as it crashes in the default fullscreen. I guess Civ4 is more tolerant.
 
It took me a while to get back into Civ: I had to move down from Prince to Noble since my skills are so rusty. Plus, I'm slower than the rest of you ;) .

But, I have a Standard Map game on Continents where I've taken over my continent and discovered the other one, and it's still playable. (all graphics settings at their lowest value, of course). The graphics are behaving at least as well as my 12" PB (it has a Go5200 with 64 MB RAM), and the game itself is much faster, especially between turns. In addition, on my PB (with 1.25 GB Ram max), I had to quit out of all apps and kill Dashboard to get Civ to run at its best. On the new MacBook with 4GB RAM, I don't have to anymore!

One thing, though, though I doubt this is MacBook specific: As you play more in a particular session, it seems like the memory footprint of the game gets larger and after a certain point, things start to slow down. The first symptom is that the music starts to skip. If you quit the game and restart, it gets snappy again. (I should note that it's not a swapping issue, ever since I upgraded to 4GB I haven't had to swap once!)

But here's what I don't understand: I have activity monitor running in the background now, and every time I quit Civ, not all of the memory gets freed up. After quitting and restarting the game a few times, I can have over 2 GB of memory listed as "active", even though if you add up all the RSIZE's of the active applications, they don't nearly add up to 2 GB. After restarting the OS, the active memory goes back to a reasonable value.

Has anyone seen this before? Is is something to be concerned about? It seems like when there is a lot of "unaccounted for" Active memory, the tripping point at which Civ gets laggy and I need to restart the game gets shorter. Am I just imaging that?

(I should add I'm running Warlords 2.08, which I believe is the latest version.)

Thanks a lot!
 
imadork said:
One thing, though, though I doubt this is MacBook specific: As you play more in a particular session, it seems like the memory footprint of the game gets larger and after a certain point, things start to slow down. The first symptom is that the music starts to skip. If you quit the game and restart, it gets snappy again. (I should note that it's not a swapping issue, ever since I upgraded to 4GB I haven't had to swap once!)

But here's what I don't understand: I have activity monitor running in the background now, and every time I quit Civ, not all of the memory gets freed up. After quitting and restarting the game a few times, I can have over 2 GB of memory listed as "active", even though if you add up all the RSIZE's of the active applications, they don't nearly add up to 2 GB. After restarting the OS, the active memory goes back to a reasonable value.

Has anyone seen this before? Is is something to be concerned about? It seems like when there is a lot of "unaccounted for" Active memory, the tripping point at which Civ gets laggy and I need to restart the game gets shorter. Am I just imaging that?

(I should add I'm running Warlords 2.08, which I believe is the latest version.)

Thanks a lot!
Click to expand...


I reported the same sort of behaviour a few months ago, but no one else had any further comments. I am using a PPC G4 with Vanilla CIV and get the same effect, although I have not looked at the actual memory usage. Once CIV slows down, all my applications run slowly. If I reboot, all the apps, including CIV, are nice and snappy again. I think there is a minor bug in the code somewhere that causes an accumulation of memory that is not actually being used, although it is flagged as in use.
 
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! (Or, a very happy Thursday for those of you outside the US....)

I finished my game last night, with only a slight slowdown in the endgame. Even the post-game history screen went much faster than it used to with my 12" PB G4. I have to say that the new MacBook with the GMAx3100 is satisfactory for my needs. I purposely avoided getting a MacBook with the GMA950, figuring that it would not be adequate for Civ, so maybe someone else can comment on the new macbook vs. the old macbook.

In the process of playing this game, though, I did have one lock-up and one full-blown kernel panic. Those could be general Leopard issues, or more specific video driver issues. I guess we'll see if future updates address it.

Next up for me, a huge map! This might take a few weeks for me o finish, though.

FYI: using "ioreg -l | grep IOFBMemorySize" in the terminal, I can see that OS X is allocating 256 MB of system memory to Video Memory....
 
A few more quick notes for you all:

It does slow down a bit in the endgame on huge maps. It's still playable, though. I've also bumped up the graphics a little bit.

Also, about my memory issues, I've found that the "unaccounted" memory problem is much worse when I put the computer to sleep while the game is running. I've been avoiding that for the last few weeks, and having better results. Is this a known bug?
 
A memory leak would not surprise me at all. I suspect the original PC code had leaks and they still exist in the Mac port. And there could be new leaks introduced by the port, of course.

I don't know how leaks could get worse while the computer is asleep - it shouldn't be doing anything during that time.
 
It's more likely entering or leaving sleep that would be causing problems, I think.
 
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