Options to improve perfomance?

So I have a GTS 450, which according to the game, is the bare minimum to "run it".

However, I get less than 15 ~20FPS even with minimum settings, and seems that fiddling with the settings don't give much, as even increasing the quality doesn't seem to lower the FPS that much.
My other system specs are a I7 3770 and 16 GB of RAM.

And I'm surprised since the game does not look particularly demanding. Is there any setting or something hidden I can do to improve perfomance? Or I have to just wait for a perfomance patch? (Or just play in strategy mode)

 

Any ideas?

 

You could play the game in windowed mode at a lower resolution. You'll have a smaller image area, but you'll maintain visual fidelity while increasing performance.

 

While you are right in the sense that Civ 6 is not very demanding in terms of render calculations it is still a modern game and those have larger vRAM requirements than your GPU caters for. This results in a lot of textures having to be loaded to the GPU from memory, discarded for other textures and then reloaded again the next time they need to be drawn. This is extremely inefficient and bottlenecks the databus between GPU and RAM constantly. This is why there is little difference between Low and High settings, the databus is bottlenecked in either scenario, high detail is just taking slightly longer to load it's texture files. This is essentially a textbook example of how a single bottlenecked component can drag down all the others around it.

The most obvious solution here is to upgrade your GPU. If your budget prevents that at this time then I'm afraid you may well be in a spot of bother and heinous_hats advice is probably looking like your best option.

edit: that said, it may be worth looking out for a texture compression mod. These improve GPU vRAM utilisation at the cost of increasing GPU calculations. A texture compression of the correct amount with an efficient algorithm (designed for GPU processing, not a zip file for example) might balance the load on your GPU sufficiently. Your GPU is old enough that this sweetspot may not exist though, these things are somewhat hit and miss.

 

The GPU is certainly the squeaky wheel and an upgrade is your best option.

In the meantime, along with squeezing the map into a smaller window, you might try playing on smaller maps with fewer opponents (less stuff to render). Start with Duel size (2 players) and see how that runs.

For reference, I currently use an even older processor (core i5 750) with just 4GB system memory. The gpu is an nvidia 760gt with 4GB... not the latest, but it does allow me to run with maximum quality and reasonable framerates (30 - 90 depending on zoom level and map content). I choose to run windowed for other reasons, but it does make higher quality more affordable.

 

Is there a texture compressino mod already? Can you point it out to me? Thanks!