Slow mid- to end-game since BTS 3.13

[Pflaster]

Hello,

there are already some threads about performance issues and I've read many of them. But most concern vanilla Civ IV with patch 1.74. My problem is very similiar to those threads in that the game gets slower over time.

It is different, however, in three ways:
1) The game didn't become that much slower over time before patch 3.13.
2) The platform is a clean MS Windows XP Pro SP2 with all the latest drivers and only two 3rd party apps installed, Avast AVS and, of course, CIV4/BTS.
3) My computer has more than enough RAM. In fact, the computer is probably powerful enough in any regard: a HP Compaq nx6325 notebook with AMD Athlon TL60 (that's 2 x 2.0Ghz) with 4 GB of RAM, built-in ATI XPress 1250 (somewhere around X300/X700 level) with shared memory (256MB dedicated).

Now to the problem in detail:
Since the installation of the 3.13 patch I observed the following behaviour: the fans are running more and faster, which indicates more heat. The mid- to end-game (somewhere between 300 and 400 turns) slows down to a crawl, sometimes taking 30 or more seconds to process a turn. The responsiveness goes waaay down, mouse-clicks are applied to late or not at all, and sometimes nothing happens for a few seconds and then a lot of instructions are executed at once.

Before patch 3.13 I could play 500 turns and still have an acceptable game speed and a mostly responsive game. Not any longer

Now I have a good grasp of computers in general but not MS Windows XP, so I'm somewhat lost. I rule out a memory leak. Apparently Civ4 is at least partly written in Python, which has a working garbage collector since 2.5, so I rule out a memory leak, but I don't know how to check. There doesn't seem to be a command like "top" or "free" available. Thus I only assume something is burning a lot of runtime cycles, which would explain the heat and the decreased responsivness. Again, with regards to MS Windows I'm a kacknoob Any advice on how to track this behaviour would be greatly appreciated.

To be complete, here is what I already did:
a) disabled the AVS, disabled the internet connection
b) deleted and reinstalled the game from scratch
c) disabled MS Windows swapping

Nothing helped.

Any ideas?

 

[ori]

The thing with the fans does point to your graphics card getting some more work (BtS is basically only using memory anyway and the card is likely the one that is getting really worked up ).
Now your system seems to look good, and there is no real reason why it should get so slow, but assuming it really is a memory thing try reducing the ingame graphics setting and/or open your ...\My Games\Beyond the Sword\CivilizationIV.ini with any texteditor and set the following values to 1:

; Dont show the game background during movies - may speed up movie playing
HideMovieBackground = 0

; Allows some memory savings *** ALT-TAB WILL NO LONGER FUNCTION ***
MemSaver = 0

; Show movies using hi-color, not true-color (may be faster)
Bink16Bit = 0

; Copy ever other scanline during movie playback (faster)
BinkInterlace = 0

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves.  0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 4

All of these settings will save some memory, most of them have to do with the ingame movies. As for no memory leaks: this game has lousy memory usage, it just does not tidy up after itself and will go through the roof with the memory it uses especially on large maps and higher numbers of units (aka higher difficulty levels). That said some of this can be saved by saving every turn (hence the autosave setting).
Edit: oh and make sure the patch actually did install correctly, this is not always the case especially in non-default install paths and if you have certain custom assets...

 

[Pflaster]

Hi ori,

thank you for the input. I changed your suggested settings and will start a game now. Obviously it might take some time to get where it matters, so it may take some time to report back.

Thanks,
Pflaster

 

[jpinard]

I have the exact same issue. I don't think you'll see a change with the settings above as I've already implemented them to no effect. It's horrible and I need help too!

 

[Pflaster]

Unfortunatly the changed settings didn't improve the situation but made my movies butt-ugly

Any ideas?

 

[ori]

Unfortunatly the changed settings didn't improve the situation but made my movies butt-ugly

Any ideas?

I am sorry - I fully expected the ugliness but if that does not help at all I fear there is not much apart from changing hardware I could think off.

 

[Pflaster]

I am sorry - I fully expected the ugliness but if that does not help at all I fear there is not much apart from changing hardware I could think off.

Rather difficult in a laptop Thank you anyway. This is my second issue with the game, so I guess I will get in touch with customer support.

BTW, jpinard, what is your hardware setup? What does your hardware and mine have in common?

 

[jpinard]

Rather difficult in a laptop Thank you anyway. This is my second issue with the game, so I guess I will get in touch with customer support.

BTW, jpinard, what is your hardware setup? What does your hardware and mine have in common?

* Core2 Duo 6600 overclocked to 3.3 GHz
* 2 Gig 800 MHZ (FSB) RAM
* ATI X1900XTX video card
* Sound blaster X-Fi

I'm afraid we have little in common, except I run super big games and when in the late game it just lags due to either unit count or the sheer # of variables available to each civ.

 

[Pflaster]

Thank you, it seems we share a dual-core CPU and the ATI graphics solution. I'm not above suspecting that the ATI drivers are (once again) the culprits.

I'm going to try a few things now. I found a usable memory profiler for MS Windows XP and will take a look into things this week-end. I'm starting to suspect I would have had an easier time if I just tried to run it under Wine

Whatever, I'll be back in a few days.

 

[jpinard]

Thank you, it seems we share a dual-core CPU and the ATI graphics solution. I'm not above suspecting that the ATI drivers are (once again) the culprits.

I'm going to try a few things now. I found a usable memory profiler for MS Windows XP and will take a look into things this week-end. I'm starting to suspect I would have had an easier time if I just tried to run it under Wine

Whatever, I'll be back in a few days.

Oh cool! I"m curious if it oculd be dual core processor. If we loaded up one core 100% instead of switching if it'd help?

 

[Pflaster]

It seems Ori was right on the money with regards to the noisy fan. Logging the ACPI reported temperatures the graphics core reaches 77 °C within 10 to 15 minutes, thus kicking in S3 fan state (full speed). Curious, though, is that BTS patched to 3.03 doesn't put such a strain on the graphics card. After 15 minutes the temperature is reported at 55 °C and stays there. Graphics are really not my strong suit, so I speculate patch 3.13 calculates a lot of off-screen stuff?

I haven't completed any meaningful profiler analyses and now that the work week has begun again I hardly will have the time. So I postpone it to the next weekend. Be back then.

 

[CocoLoco]

I'm interested in the memory profiler results. What SW are you using? I might use it on my game. I also have the experienced the slow down during the mid to late game but it is not new to 3.13.