Restarts and crashes

[-_-Kronos-_-]

When I play Civ it constantly crashes or restarts my computer. Very annoying, it happens at random times without me doing anything

View attachment My Computer Specs.txt

 

[Zanmato]

Please post your DxDiag file so we know what kind of setup you have. Also, I assume you have patched the game with v1.52 as it had alot of fixes.

For the DxDiag, Start > Run > Type 'dxdiag' > Save all info.

Hopefully, we can help you out then.

 

[Zanmato]

Ok, try increasing the pagefile to at least 2Gb. See if that helps.
I suspect it might be your graphic card, it is a good few years old and it might not fully support DirectX 9 hence all the crashes. It may be time for a upgrade and I would recommend a GeForce 6 card for this game if you want to stick with nvidia.

 

[MorrisMcD]

I am having the same issues...

If you can offer any suggestions it would be much appreciated... The card is a gigabyte with the Radeon9250 chipset I think... 128 MB.. But I guess this file will tell you that?

 

[Akhenaton]

Ok, try increasing the pagefile to at least 2Gb. See if that helps.

Has anyone really seen VM allocations that huge for CivIV? The largest I've seen has been about 600MB, so with 200MB for Windows, you shouldn't need more than 500MB unless there is less than 512MB of RAM available. Sure, Windows will complain about wanting to resize the pagefile even when it has been told not to (at least W2k does this), but it doesn't matter.

I suspect it might be your graphic card, it is a good few years old and it might not fully support DirectX 9 hence all the crashes. It may be time for a upgrade and I would recommend a GeForce 6 card for this game if you want to stick with nvidia.

I don't get it when people offer HW upgrades as a solution to crashes. If the card is working properly (doesn't crash other games), then CivIV is at fault. There is a bug in SW if it crashes on good HW. Even if the HW is under spec, it's still a bug. The manufacturer may choose not to fix bugs which only show on under spec HW, but it doesn't change the fact that the SW was poorly coded if it crashes instead of politely refusing to run with under spec HW.

FX 5200 meets CivIV min specs, so the whole point in blaming it is moot (specs don't call for DX 9 support in HW, in fact it calls for DirectX v7.0 which included support for HW T&L, so go tell Nvidia, if you think ForceWare doesn't support DX9c in SW).

OTOH, obviously if a user is not willing to wait for Firaxis to patch the bugs crashing his machine, then upgrading is the only option available after all workarounds have been exhausted. But it still isn't fair to blame the HW, when the problem is in CivIV.

 

[-_-Kronos-_-]

Thanks for the page file fix, it halted the restarts (Mostly) but it still crashes at time

 

[Zanmato]

Has anyone really seen VM allocations that huge for CivIV?

No but I think that is the point of setting it to a high amount. True, it maybe doesn't need to be that large now since the latest patch. But I think the idea behind it is so it rules out a memory crash.

I had a FX5200 and it just didn't cope with Civ4, got progressively slower then it would eventually freeze/crash. Upgraded to a newer card with double the video RAM and it has sorted out the issues I have with the game and runs smoothly through to the end of game.

Sure, I agree that the game should run on such a spec (as what Kronos has) if it says it can on the box but for various reasons it doesn't.
The reason is likely to be bad coding in the software. But I also believe that the developers made a huge over estimation of what the min spec should be. I think it is widely agreed that 512mb of RAM isn't enough if don't want to use a large amount of VM. Using large amounts of VM is one cause of the slowdown that many users experience as the game data pages to the HDD. Perhaps if the dev team tested more, talked with the video card vendors in more depth, they might have rethought the min spec and not released a beta version of the game.

When I buy something I expect it to work as it should 'out-of-box' but this game is far the most intensive piece of software I've seen (for a game) and users with older HW might struggle with it like I did. PC gaming is so hit-and-miss these days too and it going to take the developers a fair amount of time to iron out every bug for every PC setup if they indeed do at all. The more impatient of us will try and upgrade once every other suggestion has been exhausted and try to actually play the game without crashes instead of doing somebody's else work for them and what has should have been done in the first place before release.

That's my slight rant over with for today

 

[Akhenaton]

No but I think that is the point of setting it to a high amount. True, it maybe doesn't need to be that large now since the latest patch. But I think the idea behind it is so it rules out a memory crash.

If there really are crashes due to running out of VM, they should be easily recognisable. An allocation error due to refused allocation from the OS is pretty obvious to handle with an exception filter. I don't know how Python does this, but I think it should be very easy to recognise if a crash is due to running out of memory or if it's for any other reason.

However, having plenty of pagefile could have very slight performance benefits due to how the paging algorithm interacts with the file system. If the pagefile is a constant block of HD estate and not dynamic (fixed size so that Windows is not free to resize it at a whim and slow everything down while doing it), then a larger contiguous block means less fragmentation of memory pages as written on disk. While memory access is thought to be "random" by name, actually it's just "not always sequential". Often when large pieces of data (long arrays, textures etc.) are requested, pages may be read or written so that they are actually stored in successive manner. Doesn't happen very often, but it happens sometimes, and if there is no extra fragmentation in the pagefile due to it having ample free space, it might save a couple tens of ms here and there.

I'm mentioning this just to be thorough, so that when I say 500MB is enough, I don't exactly mean that 1GB or more isn't necessarily as fast or even in some cases a tiny tiny bit faster. Just make sure the pagefile is static and not under Windows control. That matters the most for performance.

I had a FX5200 and it just didn't cope with Civ4, got progressively slower then it would eventually freeze/crash. Upgraded to a newer card with double the video RAM and it has sorted out the issues I have with the game and runs smoothly through to the end of game.

So, your problem wasn't lacking system memory or too small pagefile. What does it got to do with this?

 

[Zanmato]

I was merely repeating the same advice that I've seen posted on other threads about the PF. Maybe you don't need as much since the latest patch so perhaps this solution is now outdated. One way you could find out how much you need is to run a Counter Log. I only need 200mb VM it seems for Civ4 to run happily with 1Gb of RAM and the paging executive turned off in the registry. 1GB of system RAM should be enough for Civ4 with the 1.52 patch to run as it should.

My point about upgrading the hardware is the Fx5200 card isn't very good at handling 3D. So I put one in that would handle the massive geometry of the game and it now works. Of course I offer this solution from my own experience since it now works great.

 

[MorrisMcD]

My page file was already set to 1500 min and max... Even replaced the card and its still doing it :shrug:

 

[Zydor]

MorrisMcD

Your pagefile use is high at 492Mb, was the game running when you took the dxdiag ?

Regards
Zy

 

[crazyefa_on_civ]

Hi folks, I haven't had a good game of civ in a while , or rather not with iv. Here is what I have tried,
Logging in as a different user
Shutting down programs(although not all of them i have a rpc system program that makes a mess of things if i shut it off.)
Upping the page file
And a few but not all of the things suggested in the fix it list(s).
The symtom is this. Hard Crash with in 5-10 min. No Washy No Ticky hard reboot required.
Suggestions would be more than appreciated. I haven't seen anything make a dent in this.

 

[MorrisMcD]

MorrisMcD

Your pagefile use is high at 492Mb, was the game running when you took the dxdiag ?

Regards
Zy

hrm... No it wasnt... I did up the size of the pagefile to 2GB and it stayed up MUCH longer after that, but ended up crashing AGAIN...

In addition to changing to 2GB, I set the 'AGP Aperture' to 128MB since that is what my card is.. It was set to 64MB... I dont know what that is, but maybe that is what caused it to work better. By the way.. where does it autosave games? I couldnt find any saves!!

 

[Zanmato]

Any save should in the 'My Games' in your document folder. Upping the aperture size will make the game run alittle quicker but only up to a point. It depends on your system RAM aswell as the video card spec.

As Zydor suggests, the pagefile use is alittle high. Try turning off some of useless processes in Windows and free up some more memory. Or anything like a p2p proggie or anything else running minimized in the background.

 

[MorrisMcD]

Any save should in the 'My Games' in your document folder. Upping the aperture size will make the game run alittle quicker but only up to a point. It depends on your system RAM aswell as the video card spec.

As Zydor suggests, the pagefile use is alittle high. Try turning off some of useless processes in Windows and free up some more memory. Or anything like a p2p proggie or anything else running minimized in the background.

Ahh.. I couldnt find it because my My Documents is redirected and not to a mapped drive, so I cant load from within the game.. oops... Coincidentally, you can double click a save game, and it loads up civ4 with THAT game automatically.. Pretty cool...

I ran the game not full screen and instead of rebooting on me or bluescreening, it just crashed civ4... Much easier to deal with but still annoying as hell when it happens..

Here is the event logged when it happened if it helps

Faulting application civilization4.exe, version 1.5.2.1736, faulting module civilization4.exe, version 1.5.2.1736, fault address 0x00634bdd.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I had paging file usage down to 200MB and still crashin

I can deal with how I have it, but this is truely disappointing and if I can figure it out, it would be a way sweeter game.. As usual... Been playing Civ since the first one and they get to be harder each version to get working completely

 

[Zydor]

You have a lot running in the background, that can cause a lot/some/no issues for many reasons. A quick way to find if any are lurking with background apps is to run MSconfig via "run" on the start button.

Stay offline when you do this as it will probably stop your firewall & anti-v loading after a boot.

When its up, look at Services tab, check the "Hide MS Services " box, press "disable all", go to the Startup tab, press "disable all" button.

Go back to Services Tab and make sure the "hide all MS Services" tab is checked (ie not empty)

Then press ok. ReBoot.

When it settles, run the game - if the symptoms have disappeared - either the background apps in total are stealing too much main system RAM, or one (or more than one) is clashing in memory. In the latter case, its then a detective job to find out which one by turning them back on one by one.

If you get "in a pickle" just go back into MSconfig and enable the top button on the front screen -= that will return you back to normal.

Regards
Zy

 

[MorrisMcD]

You have a lot running in the background, that can cause a lot/some/no issues for many reasons. A quick way to find if any are lurking with background apps is to run MSconfig via "run" on the start button.

Stay offline when you do this as it will probably stop your firewall & anti-v loading after a boot.

When its up, look at Services tab, check the "Hide MS Services " box, press "disable all", go to the Startup tab, press "disable all" button.

Go back to Services Tab and make sure the "hide all MS Services" tab is checked (ie not empty)

Then press ok. ReBoot.

When it settles, run the game - if the symptoms have disappeared - either the background apps in total are stealing too much main system RAM, or one (or more than one) is clashing in memory. In the latter case, its then a detective job to find out which one by turning them back on one by one.

If you get "in a pickle" just go back into MSconfig and enable the top button on the front screen -= that will return you back to normal.

Regards
Zy

No such luck.. I still am getting crashes and reboots with the entire startup disabled... I plan on getting another half a gig of ram on Monday to bring me to a gig.. But I have a feeling, that isnt the problem...

I am severly bummed out.. Now that I am in the ADs, the turns are getting longer and the crashes become more irritating.. Will someone please just sell me a computer that is running this game flawlessly?? lol