Possible solution for lag

[The_Halfmoon]

This is not a general help, but it certainly helped me, and I have no doubt it'll help at least a couple of people (most likely the nVidia 5200 and 6200 people)

if you've installed the latest drivers for your video card, and the card is something capable of running Civ (never thought I'd have to say that... used to be the easiest game to run), then you should also consider installing the latest chipset for your motherboard

now I certainly know some of you have done this, and I'm sure it won't help everyone, but it helped me (game runs very smoothly, while before it was virtually unplayable), and it'll help some people here. The motherboard chipset issue is more frequent than most people realize, and even if certain games run perfectly on your system, you're simply not getting the performance out of your AGP slot that you could be on relatively newer cards... and a substantial problem is also directDraw and direct3D problems with certain programs

anyway, the problem seems to be related to the SM Bus, and for a detailed explanation

http://www.iamnotageek.com/a/114-p1.php

 

[Pushead]

It didn't seem to have an effect for me. I have up to date drivers for my MB (I'm going to flash the bios too). The SMBus was disabled by windows for some strange reason, so I enabled it, but it seemed that Civ4 actually spent more time searching the HD.

 

[The_Halfmoon]

It didn't seem to have an effect for me. I have up to date drivers for my MB (I'm going to flash the bios too). The SMBus was disabled by windows for some strange reason, so I enabled it, but it seemed that Civ4 actually spent more time searching the HD.

yeah, it might not work for everyone... also, up antialiasing to 2, though I'm sure others have convinced you to do so

the main issue seems to be that with SM Bus issues, you'd probably notice heavy lag, or crashing during videos

it's really ridiculous how many bugs got into the retail version though... so there are probably 1000 other fixes for 1000 other problems

what kind of motherboard/chipset do you have?

 

[alamo]

It looks like you're talking about the software drivers for the main board. That can definitely be a problem, but flashing a bios can be a very dangerous thing.

There can also be problems with the special drivers for the AGP slot, so you effectively have a PCI card instead of an accelerated gfx card.