Official System Requirements

[Mercade]

The gt240 is about as fast as a 9600GT. A 9800GT would be about 30% faster.

All of those are DX10 cards, I would not recommend any of them for Civ5, where those cards have tendency to cause trouble
The only logical choice in that pricerange is the HD5670 at the moment, but the aquivalent nVidia cards will be available in two weeks.

If you buy a GT240, get one with 512MB GDDR5 VRAM. 1024MB will at best be as fast, and as a worst case significantly slower (depending on the used RAM type).

I second the recommendation on the HD5670. Mine works splendidly on the CIV5 demo.

Thanks guys. As my gaming desktop runs XP, I'm not too concerned by DX 10 or 11, but I understand your point about 10 to be avoided.

The 512 MB (GDDR5) one costs me about 90 euro and the 1024 MB (GDDR5) is about 110 euro, so I guess I'll take the 512 MB one if you say it's not expected to make a positive impact on Civ5.

Do we have a preference between e.g. ASUS, MSI and Sapphire?

Btw, I see some of these HD 5670 cards give a power recommendation of 400 watt. My computer has a built-in power supply of 375 watt. Is that expected to give problems when running at a moderate resolution of 1280 x 1024 or 1650 x 1080?

 

[tokala]

Do we have a preference between e.g. ASUS, MSI and Sapphire?

Btw, I see some of these HD 5670 cards give a power recommendation of 400 watt. My computer has a built-in power supply of 375 watt. Is that expected to give problems when running at a moderate resolution of 1280 x 1024 or 1650 x 1080?

Brand probably won't matter, even if you take one of the "cheap" ones. If you refer to the 5670, there is HIS HD5670 IceQ with an extremely effective and silent cooling system, and it isn't even much more expensive.

Those PSU recommendations are nonsene. A 5670 will draw about 50W in Civ5, an entry level gaming computer a total of about 200W.

 

[trevort]

Thanks guys. As my gaming desktop runs XP, I'm not too concerned by DX 10 or 11, but I understand your point about 10 to be avoided.

The 512 MB (GDDR5) one costs me about 90 euro and the 1024 MB (GDDR5) is about 110 euro, so I guess I'll take the 512 MB one if you say it's not expected to make a positive impact on Civ5.

Do we have a preference between e.g. ASUS, MSI and Sapphire?

Btw, I see some of these HD 5670 cards give a power recommendation of 400 watt. My computer has a built-in power supply of 375 watt. Is that expected to give problems when running at a moderate resolution of 1280 x 1024 or 1650 x 1080?

I bought a Sapphire 5670 from Amazon. You can read reviews of 5670 cards from AXLE, Gigabyte and Sapphire on Legit Reviews.com. Happy reading and good luck.

 

[The_J]

Hello all,

I decided to download the Civilization V demo before ordering the real thing. The intro movie plays without a problem, but as soon as the movie is done my display shows "Out of frequency". I changed my refreshrate a couple of times, but that didn't work.
I had a look at the (minimum) requirements and that ought to be fine (the minimum, that is). In other words: I have no idea what the problem is?

What refreshrate did you try? 60?
If you are playing with a resolution of 1900 * X, then try lowering the resolution.

 

[hulky_13]

unfortunately im hopeless with technical knowledge on computers I meet the minimum standard for civ v but the speed is incredibly slow. At the start of a standard map game turns take around 3-5 seconds....is this normal?

Perhaps elements of my machine require an upgrade and i know for a fact my graphics card is terrible. Perhaps somebody could make some reccomendations so i can lay the game on larger maps comfortably.

Aspire AX3812
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit (6.1, build 7600)
Pentium dual core cpu E5400@2.70 ghz (2cpu's)
3gb RAM

I think my graphics card is intel g45/43 chipset family:
intel 4 series express chipset family
approx total memory: 1294mb

Apologies but thats the limit of my computer knowledge....im willing to upgrade whatever it takes......is my processor ok?

Thanks a lot.

 

[McLMan]

3-5 second turn times at the start of the game is pretty normal. Many have reported times of up to 90 seconds late in the game (I haven't had a game go into the modern era yet, but about 250 turns in my times are less than 10 seconds).

Your processor looks to be about middle of the road, would probably be ok even late in the game (though not as fast as a quad). Graphics would be the bottleneck. I'm not familiar with g45/43 but as a general rule unless they're the very latest integrated graphics aren't very strong.

Upgrading might be a problem. I just looked up the Aspire AX3812 and that thing's tiny. How much room do you have in your case? Is there an available PCI slot? I'm certain it would have to be a low profile card that's powerful enough to run Civ V which will really limit your choices. A new PSU would probably be in order as well.

 

[tokala]

Upgrading might be a problem. I just looked up the Aspire AX3812 and that thing's tiny. How much room do you have in your case? Is there an available PCI slot? I'm certain it would have to be a low profile card that's powerful enough to run Civ V which will really limit your choices. A new PSU would probably be in order as well.

Once again HD5570 to the rescue
Even if you could fit something more powerful into that sub-compact, it would stretch the thermal envelope of that design. And the 250W PSU will be more than enough.

 

[hulky_13]

Thanks a lot MclMan and Tokala for replying.....

Forgive my lack of knowledge but what is a psu?

So you guys think if i purchase the hd 5570 and perhaps some RAM that i could run this game comfortably on larger maps late into the game?

As a guide could you explain what the processor, RAM and video card are responsible for in a game of civ.

Thanks again.

 

[tokala]

Thanks a lot MclMan and Tokala for replying.....

Forgive my lack of knowledge but what is a psu?

So you guys think if i purchase the hd 5570 and perhaps some RAM that i could run this game comfortably on larger maps late into the game?

As a guide could you explain what the processor, RAM and video card are responsible for in a game of civ.

Thanks again.

PSU: power supply unit

RAM: Storage for game data+engine, on smaller maps Civ need around 1GB. The larger maps will get unplayable before you run out of RAM. 3GB will be sufficient if you don't plan to run a dozen other programs at the same time as Civ. The amount of RAM gets only important if you don't have enough, more than "enough" won't effect game speed.

Video Card: Renders all the eye candy, the faster the video card, the more eye candy, resolution and framerate will be possible, has no influence whatsoever on AI turn times. The speed differences between different video cards are huge, the 5570 will be guestimatedly 10 times faster than your intel chipset graphics, and it is "only" an entry level gaming card

Processor: The CPU is "playing" the AI Civs and is processing engine data before sending them to the video card. For the graphics engine dual cores are standard nowadays, some new games make good use of 4 cores, very few of more. The verdict is still open how good civ scales for more than 2 cores. A middle of the road dual core like yours is still all that is really necessary for the vast majority of games (Civ included). If the CPU is too slow, the video card will be starved of data and the game will get choppy although the video card would have been fast enough in principle.
For the AI turns it looks like not even two cores are utilized efficiently, so more cores will have very little effect. Accordingly, people are gettting agonizingly slow AI turns on the larger maps even with the most expensive (multicore) CPUs money can buy.

Unless you can tolerate turn times of dozends of seconds, the larger maps will get unplayable on ANY CPU in the late game.

The performance differences between processors are only marginal compared to video cards. One core of a $50 Dual-Core CPU will be about half as fast as one core of a $1000 hexa-core CPU.

 

[hulky_13]

Yeah thanks a lot for that mate, il take your advice and try the 5570, they look to be about £90 which is a tad more expensive than i thought they would be. Thanks for all of your advice it really helped me out.

The only games i play are the civ games so i don't mind going that extra mile to get better performance. Although i must say up to now i'm not overly impressed with V and it just doesn't have that 'civilization' feel which i miss. Considering goingack to my beloved BTS!!

Thanks again for help matey.

 

[tokala]

Yeah thanks a lot for that mate, il take your advice and try the 5570, they look to be about £90 which is a tad more expensive than i thought they would be. Thanks for all of your advice it really helped me out.

Just make sure you get the version with DDR3 or better yet GDDR5 memory. There are DDR2 memory variants, which are not much cheaper, but way slower.

And it won't be £90, see for example this one for £60

 

[berkut]

so my celerom 1.8 Gz suport it?

 

[The_J]

That are not really enough infos .

But i'd guess now "no", it's a weak, old processor, not even a double core (are there celeron double cores? I don't think so).

 

[tokala]

so my celerom 1.8 Gz suport it?

If it's a Celeron M, then you have a fighting chance
Those are practically one half of a Core2duo, and will be almost as fast as the "minimum" CPUs for calculating the AI turns. It might get a bit choppy when scrolling over the map, though. People got it to run on even weaker CPUs.

Problem is, those Celerons came usually with a crappy intel chipset graphics

 

[danielat2]

I installed the game on my old laptop (Asus with core 2 due 2GHz CPU), to my happy surprise, it works, but very slowly. That's ok, I has been planning to buy a new one. However, I am confused, since none of quad-core CPU laptops has 2GHz CPU. All of them are around 1.6GHz, with Turbo boost (and that is usually above 2.5GHz). I am not an expert in this. Will it be ok, of only Turbo boost frequency is above recommended one? Do you know any laptop brand that would have the recommended (or higher) parametres - send me the link, please.

 

[tokala]

I installed the game on my old laptop (Asus with core 2 due 2GHz CPU), to my happy surprise, it works, but very slowly. That's ok, I has been planning to buy a new one. However, I am confused, since none of quad-core CPU laptops has 2GHz CPU. All of them are around 1.6GHz, with Turbo boost (and that is usually above 2.5GHz). I am not an expert in this. Will it be ok, of only Turbo boost frequency is above recommended one? Do you know any laptop brand that would have the recommended (or higher) parametres - send me the link, please.

Nope, turbo boost might or might not kick in, depending on various parameters. Testing has shown that the "quadcore" recommendention is nonsense

Suitable specs for Civ5 would have for example this or this laptop.

 

[MarkTG]

Just a quickie, and apologies if it's been asked before, but how safe is it to rely on being able to run the demo? Like others have mentioned, i tried can you run it, and passed minimum spec bar graphics card. However, i've played the demo through a couple of times now with no problem. I realise that will be a cut down version in terms of numbers of civs/units etc, so speed might be more of an issue on the full game, but am i pretty safe in assuming that as my graphics card managed to run it fine the full game will at least run?

Here's the can you run it bit i failed

Video Card
Minimum: 256 MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT or better, 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics
You Have: GeForce 7600 GT
Upgrade Suggested: Unfortunately, your Video Card does not meet this requirement. Click here to see some recommendations.
Features: Minimum attributes of your Video Card
Required You Have
Video RAM 256 MB 256.0 MB
Hardware T&L Yes Yes
Pixel Shader version 3.0 3.0
Vertex Shader version 3.0 3.0

 

[tokala]

It will run, pending issues that might have ben intruduced with the patches. And obviously it will get slower with game progress and bigger maps. But that that slowdown has been shown to be pretty independend from your specific hardware.

 

[MarkTG]

that was my gut feeling, but nice to have it confirmed. Cheers

 

[Mercade]

Brand probably won't matter, even if you take one of the "cheap" ones. If you refer to the 5670, there is HIS HD5670 IceQ with an extremely effective and silent cooling system, and it isn't even much more expensive.

Those PSU recommendations are nonsene. A 5670 will draw about 50W in Civ5, an entry level gaming computer a total of about 200W.

I bought a Sapphire 5670 from Amazon. You can read reviews of 5670 cards from AXLE, Gigabyte and Sapphire on Legit Reviews.com. Happy reading and good luck.

Just to close out and thank Tokala and Trevort for their feedback, I bought the Sapphire ATI 5670 and it runs beautifully. My CPU is only minimal (Dual-Core Pentium D820), and I don't mind a little turn lag, but the graphics are great with everything set to high.

Given that I run XP, I don't care about DirectX 11, so I wish there was a way to disable the start-up question between reguar and DX9 every time you start Civ5.