Screen Flickers/Lags Bad after Modern Era

[smokeybonez]

Works Great until about modern area. Then the screen goes in and out, and if I can tolerate it for awhile, it just loses signal and im forced to restart the pc. I attached my dxdiag file here so hopefully someone will have some insight into why this annoying problem exists and even better yet.... How to fix it. Thanks for help.

 

[smokeybonez]

Damn No one?

 

[smokeybonez]

Okay so i have pinpointed the problem a little further perhaps... after a game gets over a 500kb save file.. thats when the problem starts.. then it get progressively worse the further along in the game you get.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Are you running any programs in the background?

 

[ori]

try updating windows - that sometimes helps with graphics problems - you are missing service pack 3

 

[smokeybonez]

No other programs run at all when playing BTS (window mode)..

Ori-Install sp3 now ill let ya know when it finishes

 

[smokeybonez]

Nope same thing... flickers like crazy

 

[ori]

does reducing the graphics settings help?

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Check your BIOS and make sure that you have an adequate AGP aperture size (128 minimum. 256 is better) and that your AGP bus is set to at least 4X. 8X is better and your card supports it as long as the MB does. My old machine had the same graphics card and the BIOS would default to 1X transfer speed unless I overrode it. Nothing with graphics would work right because it wasn't fast enough.

There's no reason that card shouldn't run Civ beautifully with the CPU that you have.

Also, try running the game full screen. Windows devotes more resources to it that way because it isn't trying to refresh the desktop all of the time.

You can also try enabling the /PAE switch in Windows. See here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms791485.aspx

Ori has a good trick to make the game use all of that memory with PAE, but I think it applies only to Vista. XP and BTS are already PAE aware IIRC. Check with him.

 

[ori]

I don't believe that it is a memory allocation problem - the flickering is most likely due to the graphics memory and not the RAM/page memory usage. But setting the /3GB flag in Windows XP might still help:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=224178

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I don't believe that it is a memory allocation problem - the flickering is most likely due to the graphics memory and not the RAM/page memory usage. But setting the /3GB flag in Windows XP might still help:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=224178

I think you're right, it's most likely the graphics card or its interface, but it also could be a physical memory problem. He mentioned that he started to get the problem after his save file got to be over 500K. Maybe one of his RAM sticks could be bad? It might be worth running a memory test. I noticed with my new machine that Civ ran fine until I tried to zoom out in a huge world. It would go halfway and then the display would freeze for up to a minute, and then finish zooming. It turned out to be a bad RAM module. I replaced it and there were no problems after that. Thank goodness for warranty.