"Partial Effects" causes crashes!

[Seraiel]

I just wanted to give this info to you all, because this cost me an 80h Space Race game, one in which I would have finished at about 1500 AD, so really good and would have definately been a #1.

The game crashed about 10 times, always just after ending the turn. At the 10th time, I forgot about that this game could ever be accepted in the HoF, and began testing. Tried through all options of BUG and standard CIV, and found out, that the setting "Partial Effects" in the Graphics Tab was the cause of all those crashes.

CIV version and mods:

Civilization IV complete, BUFFY 3.19.003, Blue Marble

System Settings:

Alienware M17rx4 - Intel Core i7-3630QM - FullHD - ATI HD 7970M - 16 GB RAM @ 1866 MHZ - 256 GB SDD (Samsung 840 Pro) - 500 GB HDD (Seagate)

Windows 7, AMD 14.4 driver, running CIV from Radeon RAMDisk

 

[WastinTime]

I suppose almost all crashes come down to some sort of graphics problem. Here's my story.

My system has always been quite reliable, but after Xmas, a few weeks ago, it was crashing all the time. Somehow I managed to submit a game thru all that since most of the crashes occurred soon after alt-tabbing back into the game after a break.

Anyway, problem seems to be gone now and the problem was most likely that for Xmas break, in order to make my battery last on the airplane, I set power saving options and told it to use my Intel integrated graphics card instead of my discrete NVidia card.

 

[Seraiel]

Alt + tabbing is a very common source for crashes. I don't know why, but CIV seems to have some kind of "memory-leak" , because the longer one plays, the slower the game gets. Playing long enough and then Alt + tabbing, is almost a certain way to make CIV crash.

That's why I only play a maximum of 10 turns when I play large or far advanced games, and restart CIV frequently. I also try to stay away from Alt + tabbing then, which of course sometimes is impossible, because of needing a calculator.

If only BUFFY .004 had one...

 

[WastinTime]

I disagree. I think if you have the right video card (and it's updated), you can alt-tab all day long (like I do) and run high detail, and effects, and play for hours and hours on huge maps.

 

[Seraiel]

You can see the specs of my system, which is still quite new, in the first post. My video driver is always up to date. Still, I had reproducable crashes using the "effects" settings. It's impossible, that my system is not able to handle the effects from a game that's 10y old, it must be bad programming.

Not to sure about Alt-tabbing, the last Alt+Tab crashes occured with my previous system, and that was a 2.5 Ghz Dual Core with an SLI GeForce 8600 running vista, so by far not as powerful as my current Win7 Alienware. Still ridiculous, because the system was at least 8y more advanced than the game.

 

[WastinTime]

I understand what you're saying. I actually chose my words very carefully. I said you have to have "the right video card", not necessarily the 'best' card or a 'new' card. It could just be that my NVidia card handles CivIV and that ATI one has an issue. I'm not saying that's true, but something along those lines. It may not be ATI's fault. Windows is always a suspect.

Anyway, I just wanted others to know about the power saving settings and/or integrated graphics which caused my problem.