Slow Performance on Fast Computer Running Vista

[Jyriki]

First I'd like to apologize if this has been discussed here before. I tried searching and didn't find anything that looked like it quite fit the bill.

I have a home built system that for everything else is pretty much a hotrod. I even recently updated it with a Core Duo 2 2.66GHz CPU to make sure there were no CPU bottleneck issues. It has 4GB of 6400 DDR2 RAM, a RAID 0 SATA array with all kinds of free space, and dual nVidia 6800GTS cards. I'm running 32bit Vista Ultimate with the latest nVidia drivers.

So what I can't figure out is why I can't play Large or Huge maps at all? Even at turn 1 the performance is horrible and the frame rate is unplayable. There is such a dramatic difference from normal sized maps where the game play is as fast as you could reasonably expect for the entire game (the end of turn scenario can be 2 or 3 seconds toward the end-game) and there is never any frame-rate problem. I've tried tweaking all the in-game settings I can find to no avail. If anything, BtS made this problem much worse (in Warlords I could at least get a 50 turns in before it became unplayable).

I see lots of people here play the large and huge maps and I'd really like to as well. Very frustrating.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any recommendations?

 

[Ghost Ranger]

It is most likely the Gfx cards, try disabling SLI, and aren't those cards a little old?

 

[Barry Bonds]

In all honesty I'm surprised that you can even run Civ IV Properly on Vista without patching it. Unless you have actually patched it? If it's not that, perhaps it's just because your cards are out of date.

 

[dfi]

did you have xp previously, or are you currently dual booting XP? If so, is the game slow there too?

 

[Jyriki]

It is most likely the Gfx cards, try disabling SLI, and aren't those cards a little old?

Yeah, the cards are a couple of years old but they still get great frame rates with all my other current games. I will try disabling SLI, but again, changing the graphics settings has no effect that I've seen, and it is only the Large and Huge maps, standard or smaller maps run great. That leads me to believe it's not a graphics issue.

In all honesty I'm surprised that you can even run Civ IV Properly on Vista without patching it. Unless you have actually patched it? If it's not that, perhaps it's just because your cards are out of date.

Never had any problems running Warlords or BtS (never tried Vanilla), well other than this large/huge map issue. As far as I can tell I'm fully patched in both Vista and Civ.

did you have xp previously, or are you currently dual booting XP? If so, is the game slow there too?

No *sigh*. I foolishly jumped into Vista with both feet. I knew better, but *shrug*.

 

[Ghost Ranger]

Make sure you run Windows update, because they recently released a performance update (control panel). Also, the most recent patches are 1.74 for vanilla, 2.13 for warlords, and 3.03 for BTS.

More importantly, what programs are running in the background?

 

[dfi]

If you have xp discs somewhere you can dual boot it and try huge map performance. would at least limit it to OS/game config or Hardware bottleneck.

 

[dfi]

Make sure you run Windows update, because they recently released a performance update

if you are referring to KB938194 & KB938979 I don't believe they have been pushed to windows update yet. you have to download & run the manually.

 

[Jyriki]

If you have xp discs somewhere you can dual boot it and try huge map performance. would at least limit it to OS/game config or Hardware bottleneck.

I'll have to try that when I get home. I don't have any experience in setting up a dual-boot since my long-gone linux days, but I'll look into it.

if you are referring to KB938194 & KB938979 I don't believe they have been pushed to windows update yet. you have to download & run the manually.

Ahhh, I didn't realize these were manual updates! Thanks a ton for the heads up! Some of the fixes they describe sound promising. I'll try them out and report back just in case anyone else is having this problem.

 

[Jyriki]

More importantly, what programs are running in the background?

I'll also check this out more thoroughly to make sure there's nothing using lots of CPU cycles or memory. I pretty much have a clean Vista install with Office 2007, SAV Corporate Ed, and some HP printer junk. I can't think of anything that would be using that much RAM.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions! Keep 'em coming. I have to believe I'm not the only one having this problem.

 

[Ghost Ranger]

if you are referring to KB938194 & KB938979 I don't believe they have been pushed to windows update yet. you have to download & run the manually.

Ah, yes, you are indeed correct (I don't have vista )

@Jyriki- Ah, Symantec Antivirus- there's your problem right there, Norton/ Symantec products are very bloated and can have a major performance hit on your computer (I even read somewhere that Norton can make disk access up to 16 times slower), slowing down boot and hogging ram and other resources that it doesn't need. I would suggest that you switch to something like AVG free, as it is very lightweight and only uses ~3mb of ram while idle. I also use it and have had less problems with it since switching from McAffe. And if you can't use AVG free for some reason I heard a really good (although not free) Antivirus is NOD32 using something like ~2mb of ram while idle.

 

[Jyriki]

@Jyriki- Ah, Symantec Antivirus- there's your problem right there...

Yeah, I was thinking about that when I typed it in. Kind of an "ah-ha" moment. I'll try it the first chance I get with SAV turned off and see if it makes a difference.

 

[Ghost Ranger]

Why are you using that Antivirus? Does the 'Corporate Edition' have anything to do with it?

 

[Jyriki]

Why are you using that Antivirus? Does the 'Corporate Edition' have anything to do with it?

Because I have a long history of using Norton/Symantec and it works really well for the network I administer at work and we maintain extra licenses for employees to use at home so you can't really beat the price. I can't stand most of the "Norton" line products now, they're totally bloated, but the SAV Corp Ed seems to be trouble free and reliable.

 

[Jyriki]

Well last night I got a little Civ-Time so I figured I'd try out a few of these suggestions.

First downloading and installing the two patches recommended by dfi666. This turned into a rather large update since I hadn't been on my system at all this week and I updated all of Microsoft's monthly updates as well.

Rebooted, launched BtS and generated a large size map using the Medium and Small script. It ran great! So I tried a huge size with the same script. It was immediately clear that the frame rate was jacked since the leader animation in the opening dialog was extremely choppy. Sure enough, unplayable.

So I went by to trying a large map again. Damn thing was choppy! Every bit as bad as the huge map.

So I took a look at what was running... SAV was using about 30 MB of RAM (a pittance in my 4GB configuration). SAV's page fault delta occasionally peaked for one sample cycle, but overall wasn't too bad. It looked like the culprit might have been Microsoft Search which was merrily indexing my hard drive *pulling hair out*. Also for some god awful reason Windows Defender decided it was time to run a scan.

So always a one for subtle adjustments, I disabled every service I could think of that wasn't necessary. Goodbye Search, Defender, SAV. Looking at the Task Manager now, nothing was using CPU cycles, there were almost no page faults, and the only thing using a significant chunk of memory was BtS. I still had over 60% of my physical RAM free.

So I closed out of BtS and restarted it, tried a large map, ran great. Tried a huge map, hecka choppy. Went back to a large map, ran great. By this point I was done experimenting and wanted to actually play for a bit. So I went to town on a large map for several hours with no noticeable slow down.

So I guess I'm better off than before, but still not able to play huge maps which is frustrating.

 

[Ghost Ranger]

Try this, you may be able to suck a little more performance of of the computer

 

[Jyriki]

Try this, you may be able to suck a little more performance of of the computer

That's the thing, most people don't seem to need to tweak the heck outta their systems to play these bigger maps do they? It's not like I have a marginal system. Oh well, I guess I was hopping I was just doing something wrong that would be easy to fix or there was a commonly known problem with Vista and larger maps.

Anyone out there that has Vista and plays large or huge maps?

 

[Ghost Ranger]

How many processes do you have while idle? For me, I have 22 (not including the task manager) on XP. If you have any programs that constantly run in the background, you should disable them. Adobe reader, Quicktime, and itunes are some examples. And you should go thru the guide, It really helps a lot.

And I just thought of something, 32-bit operating systems only support 4GB of RAM total (includes video RAM). Is it possible that not enough video RAM is being allocated?

 

[Jyriki]

How many processes do you have while idle? For me, I have 22 (not including the task manager) on XP. If you have any programs that constantly run in the background, you should disable them. Adobe reader, Quicktime, and itunes are some examples. And you should go thru the guide, It really helps a lot.

And I just thought of something, 32-bit operating systems only support 4GB of RAM total (includes video RAM). Is it possible that not enough video RAM is being allocated?

I'll have to check the processes again when I get home, but it didn't seem like a horrible amount. That and they didn't seem to be using CPU or disk resources really, nor a huge amount of RAM.

I didn't mean to imply that guide you recommended wasn't great. I've never seen such a comprehensive guide. I just mean to say that something fundamentally seems to be wrong, not just a few tweaks or adjustments.

Perhaps you're on to something with the video RAM address range. I'm not sure how to check that though. I was under the impression that the OS just reserved that address space as needed and that portion of your system RAM was just unused. Since I have 2x256MB of video RAM, I would expect those addresses would just be mapped at the end of the 4GB block and I couldn't get all of the use out of the system RAM. At least this is how it worked under 32 bit XP right? I suppose if the game is stepping on these addresses that could jack the video performance causing the choppyness I'm seeing... *shrug*

 

[dfi]

i play large and huge maps with the same system dual booting both vista and xp. no probs in either os for me.

Try posting a dxdiag and cpuz report. sometimes those can pinpoint any problems. I have a couple other ideas but it could be a waste of time if i don't take a peek at dxdiag & cpuz report first.

Is your hard drive light flipping out when you run huge maps?