Performance tweaks

[Kariga]

Hi

Recenty I've been trying to shorten my end-of-turn load times, but without much success. My rig is GTX 1070 with i7-6700k and the game itself averages around 1000fps at max settings. However, the load times between turns seem to be just as long as with my older laptop from 2009 that I used. To be fair, this mod definitely loads faster than any other mod for Civ4 that I've played considering the sheer amount of different civs on the map and the huge size of it.

Is it possible to shorten the load times with ingame setting tweaks or by changing the values in CivilizationIV.ini ? I have heard that Memsaver=1 would shorten the load times but also I've read that it causes instability. I suppose hiding all enemy and ally movement will speed up the turns. Would reducing the screen resolution or windowed mode help too? How about DisablePAKMemorymapping=1 or removing the autosave feature?
I'm also using the BUG mod, is it compatible with RFC DoC?

Thanks!

 

[Leoreth]

DoC has its own implementation for the BUG mod, having BUG as standalone doesn't affect the mod.

The bottleneck for turn performance very likely is your available RAM, followed by processing power. In both cases, the age of the game engine prevents it from making full use of your system's capabilities.

The effective RAM available to the game is 2 GB as its EXE is only designed for 32 bit machines. On your 64 bit machine however you can extend the available memory to 4 GB using this tool.

Likewise, the game code is written to only make use of one processor core, now matter how many are available in your system.

 

[Kariga]

I tried your advice and it worked!

My load times became around 20 % faster.
However, the moment I began actually moving the camera around the map, I got a MAF. Hmm, I wonder if the game needs to be played at minimal graphical settings to avoid memory allocation failure. I will report more as I keep experimenting.

As a side note, I also tried out RAMDisk, but the load times were equal to vanilla. The 4 GB patch sped up the game without a doubt.

 

[Leoreth]

You might be able to reduce MAFs by using the version I recently uploaded (1.14.1).