This is my first post on this board, and what compelled me to register was some weirdness I just experienced. First of all, I've been a big Civ fan since Civilization II, which I played on my dinky 100 MHz PowerBook Duo with just 20 MB of RAM (ahhh, those were the days!).
With Civ III, I had to jump over the dark side - my Windows PC was essentially dedicated to playing Civilization and the Baldur's Gate RPG.
For Civ IV, however, I wanted to make a stand for the Mac. I know probably that every Mac game sale counts, so despite the fact that Civ 4 was calling, I somehow managed to hold out and sprung for Civ 4 Mac last week.
Unfortunately, as I'm sure everyone on this board is aware of, performance is a stinking issue. My current system is a 1.8 GHz iMac G5 with 512 MB of RAM (about to be upgraded to 1 GB). It's powered by a Radeon 9600 w/ 128 MB of VRAM. I'm running OS X 10.4.7.
Not the fastest system in the world, but it should be more than adequate, right?
Wrong! Even at the lowest setting with all graphic options turned down, screen draws lag big time. The slowdown gets progressively worse as time passes, even in areas that really shouldn't be affected, like saving games. By the time I get to around 1500 AD, it takes 4-5 seconds between moves before the game is ready to accept inputs. At a certain point, it's gets pretty much intolerable, as even loading games from quick saves take close to a minute.
Then suddenly last night, the game crashed out to the desktop while I was trying to move a unit. Mac OS X put up a dialog asking if I wanted to report the crash, and I elected not to.
When I restarted Civ 4 again, magically, the game was running 4-5X faster! It was actually scrolling without jitters, text wasn't flashing on screen in slow motion, moving units around wasn't a trial in patience!! The game was now taking just 10 seconds to save and load, instead of 30+ seconds. It was an absolute joy to play, smooth as butter! Except for the sound, which was screwed up as always.
Note, the weird part is, nothing changed except for the fact that the game crashed out and I started up the game without restarting the iMac!
Sadly, the happiness was short-lived because after another 3 hours of continuous playing, it suddenly slowed back down to its former snail's pace. But the unusual nature of this event seems to indicate that there seems to be some kind of major bottleneck that shouldn't be there. Is it a caching issue? Some weird interaction with OS X' virtual memory scheme?
In any case, it gives me pause for hope that the upcoming patch should make things dramatically better. I've now seen what Civ 4 can do without the performance parachute hooked to its back!
Moderator Action: Moving this post to the appropriate Civ4 thread
With Civ III, I had to jump over the dark side - my Windows PC was essentially dedicated to playing Civilization and the Baldur's Gate RPG.
For Civ IV, however, I wanted to make a stand for the Mac. I know probably that every Mac game sale counts, so despite the fact that Civ 4 was calling, I somehow managed to hold out and sprung for Civ 4 Mac last week.
Unfortunately, as I'm sure everyone on this board is aware of, performance is a stinking issue. My current system is a 1.8 GHz iMac G5 with 512 MB of RAM (about to be upgraded to 1 GB). It's powered by a Radeon 9600 w/ 128 MB of VRAM. I'm running OS X 10.4.7.
Not the fastest system in the world, but it should be more than adequate, right?
Wrong! Even at the lowest setting with all graphic options turned down, screen draws lag big time. The slowdown gets progressively worse as time passes, even in areas that really shouldn't be affected, like saving games. By the time I get to around 1500 AD, it takes 4-5 seconds between moves before the game is ready to accept inputs. At a certain point, it's gets pretty much intolerable, as even loading games from quick saves take close to a minute.
Then suddenly last night, the game crashed out to the desktop while I was trying to move a unit. Mac OS X put up a dialog asking if I wanted to report the crash, and I elected not to.
When I restarted Civ 4 again, magically, the game was running 4-5X faster! It was actually scrolling without jitters, text wasn't flashing on screen in slow motion, moving units around wasn't a trial in patience!! The game was now taking just 10 seconds to save and load, instead of 30+ seconds. It was an absolute joy to play, smooth as butter! Except for the sound, which was screwed up as always.
Note, the weird part is, nothing changed except for the fact that the game crashed out and I started up the game without restarting the iMac!
Sadly, the happiness was short-lived because after another 3 hours of continuous playing, it suddenly slowed back down to its former snail's pace. But the unusual nature of this event seems to indicate that there seems to be some kind of major bottleneck that shouldn't be there. Is it a caching issue? Some weird interaction with OS X' virtual memory scheme?
In any case, it gives me pause for hope that the upcoming patch should make things dramatically better. I've now seen what Civ 4 can do without the performance parachute hooked to its back!
Moderator Action: Moving this post to the appropriate Civ4 thread
