Problems running Civ4 T.T

[xurol]

I finally broke down and bought Civ4 yesterday. Unfortunately, it seems my system is not quite equipped to handle the game. I have:

AMD Athlon 1.3 GHz CPU
1GB Corsair DDR RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (for some reason this apparently is not good enough according to srtest.com, even though it should be more than good enough afaik.)

I have the proper drivers, etc etc yadda yadda. I'm pretty sure my video card is good enough, though apparently it doesn't support 3D acceleration or Video HW Transform & Lighting.

So, my question is: is there any way I can run Civ4 on this system? I have all the game graphics settings turned as low as possible, but I'm still getting a lot of jumpiness and a crappy FPS when I play the game. I am thinking about buying a really nice processor, but I won't have that kind of cash until summer and I'd like to play the game now.

 

[Zanmato]

I would tend to agree with srtest about the FX5200. I had one when I first got the game and it is simply not up to the task for some reason. I upgraded and the problems with lagging and FPS were sorted. However, you could try a few things and see if they help at all.

Go to the nvidia control panel, usually found under the Display control panel in Advanced settings. Switch the 'Image Quality' to Performance. You could also change the Antialising to Off too. Make sure that the game settings has the AA sampling to 0.
Is the card AGP? If so you could try and increase the AGP aperture in the BIOS settings. If you are comfortable with fiddling with the BIOS, you should find this setting under 'Advanced Chipset Features'. Set to 128mb or 256mb.

Hope it helps.

 

[xurol]

Thanks, I did that and I can at least run it now, althought the quality is still somewhat poor it is playable.

I'm going to buy a new processor soon, a pretty good one. AMD 64 2.0 GHz, do you think that will help any or is the video card going to be a hinderance no matter what I do?

 

[Dusty4prez]

It wouldn't amtter if you had a bazillion GHz the video card will be a hinderance.

 

[Zanmato]

Agreed, I would upgrade the card first rather than the CPU. I recommend a series 6 card with 256mb video RAM and with onboard cooling.