SLOW SLOW SLOW (Menu load, game load, AI turn) and Crash - updates ?

[Bhoy]

Core 2 Quad with 4gb ram and a GeForce GT120 (1GB ram in card) and I struggle. Exact same issue trying to get past intro video, turns take ages (single biggest reason I have not managed to finish a game yet).

By default all my settings were set to High, as they should be with a decent system. I changed to medium and still had issues. I figured out that the reason why it was taking so long was because I was playing a Huge map with 25 city states and 12 Civs. I am guessing that the coding is treating this as 37 different civs which each take a turn = real slow down.

I changed the map to Large and cut the city states down to 5, had 7 other Civs and removed barbarians and the the turn changing is almost instant. Not very good to have to limit the game in such ways.

 

[Bhoy]

Hello, i have the same problems. I have a Intel Core2Quad Processor (4x2.66 GHz) 4 GB RAM and a GTX260 Graphic Card. (Win 7 64bit)

I noticed that my CPU is only used up to 25% (1 Core runs at 100%) during the game. in the Task Manager i can set how many CPUs a process can use, here is "all processors" activated. Does anyone else has the same behavior?

Having similar specs I can confirm that it uses sometimes around 65% of my CPU, and it's a quad core. Civ 4 would use 25% constantly when playing one of the more taxing mods - so I assumed they had brought in proper multicore support.

 

[anonyjjang]

Hi Everyone,

I just bought myself and just tried CIV 5.

I have some mixed feelings about the game and I'd like to share them with you. I do like most of the daring changes that were made (even if they turn out to be mistakes, at least they tried something new)...

I found it a bit light content-wise... However I can understand the economics behind it (2 or 3 extensions) + the improved moding capabilities which basicaly transfers development costs to modders who work for free

However, there's something that really is annoying me: How could they ship a program that has not been properly optimized in terms of PC requirements.

I've read some of those complaints in other threads my never found a compiled lists of my complaints

message to the editors: in the future, please do as Blizzard does : do not ship a product until its done, no matter what... nothing will kill your reputation + game life faster than a bugging program


Now about those optimization requirements:

Well, first a brief word on my PC: It's 3 years old running on Vista with 3Gb of RAM with E6320 + Nvidia 8800 GT. So I know it's not the best PC that one can find today, but come on, I was expecting CIV 5 to run smoothly nonetheless

1st problem:
When I launch the game, the intro movie launches and it takes about 40 secs of frantic punching of ESC, space bar, Enter, Mouse-click to finally stop the vid and access the menu - PS : I know a couple of clicks would do the job (+ a 40 sec wait) but I like expressing my anger and annoyance on my mouse and keyboard

EDIT : I just found the solution in another thread : Go to the folder C:\Documents and Settings\your name\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5 and in file usersettings.ini set SkipIntroVideo = 1

2nd problem:
I load a saved game and again, I have to wait for about 3 minutes

3rd problem (the biggest)
Every AI turn takes forever to complete, up to 4 minutes towards the end

4th problem:
Towards the middle of the game, when I move across the map with my mouse, the graphics for each tile may take up to 5 sec / tile to load. until a tile graph gets loaded, I see grey (sometimes hashed red)

5th problem:
The game crashes after about 4 hours of game-play. It randomly freezes when I'm moving around the planet with the mouse.
I checked my ram usage at that point and CIV5 was using 1.3 gigs of RAM (which is a lot !!!!!!!) but still, I had some RAM left (I had closed down most of my other apps)

6th problem:
Well, I hope this is not really a problem, and that it's just me that hasn't found it yet: Where is the button for "Checking online for updates" ?


Thank you for taking the time to read me ... I just had to vent it out !

Cheers

N

EDIT: forgot to add that I'm playing with a big map and 10 or 12 other CIVS (I'm at work atm so I can't be 100% sure). But even then, does it mean you have to have the best computer to play a big game ? I'm sure that they haven't spent enough time on RAM optimization AI turn...

Starcraft II is not so well optimized either. Alt+Tabbing still does not work properly. Severe lag when pylon is clicked, and pathetic FPS drop in intense fights even on $3000+ PC. Blizzard's PC optimization on release is OVER. They made so much $$$ from WoW that they don't even care anymore

 

[w00tm0ng3r]

I can honestly say that Civ 5 is the WORST optimized game I've EVER seen. I have a 2.85ghz duo core CPU, Nvidia GTX 260M, and 4 gigs of RAM in my laptop. This baby can run Empire Total War with 6000 dudes on screen in REAL TIME with much better graphics. It can even run CRYSIS on HIGH at 1920 x 1080, and it LAGS while trying to run a TURN BASED STRATEGY on a SMALL map with graphics that aren't even a FIFTH as good.

Also, I set Skipintrovideo to 1, and it skips the intro video, but I get stuck on a black screen and still end up hammering Escape for about 20 seconds. Anyone got any ideas?

 

[remconius]

It's the load time. the game takes around a 30-60 secs to load.

The intro movie is the screen place holder, so skipping it means you still have to wait to load... Only you dont have to press esc.

 

[Drago Askani]

Get a better computer. My Core i7 920 has no problems making late game modern end turns take no more then 30seconds if even that. Which feels long to me, but its not a huge issue.

 

[Cosmic_Fist]

I have a i7 920, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 9800GTX, and a fast SSD disk. I have no problems with any other games or applications.

I tried a huge map with default number of AI and city states, and now at turn 270, the turns take ages to complete. I'm writing all of this while waiting for my next turn.

I have a G15 keyboard which shows me CPU and memory usage, and I don't think the problem is a memory leak. 3,5GB are used atm, so I still have 2,5GB free. The CPU usage is never higher than 25% on each core, and Civ 5 seems to be making no use of hyperthreading.

I'm starting to wonder if the problem is that the AI moves you can't see are played out at the same speed as if you could see the animations...

 

[Moshu]

Playing on a Phenom II X4 955 / 2x4870 512 MB (XFire) / 4 GB DDR3 / SATA II HDD, here are the findings:

- small freezes during AI turns due to HDD access. Solution: buy a SSD or just deal with it.
- terribly optimized graphics... everything should move ultra smooth on this hardware (playing 1980x1200 all maxed) keeping in mind it's more or less a static game. But I have a hunch they abused tesselation (remember Metro 2033?) since during the late ages graphics seem to be slightly less responsive when zooming.
- no other particular issues... now if I could get a SSD I'll be a happy panda.

So: get a quad core, get 4 gigs or more of RAM, get a SSD and get some video muscle. My config is a relatively cheap one that can and will still be able for at least some time to play anything on the market at max settings and high res. DX11 is not here yet.

 

[Thalassicus]

The lack of progress bars for loading (both at startup and saves) is troublesome. It's an industry standard to have a busy icon for delays over ~1 second, and progress bar for any delay over ~10 seconds.

Get a better computer. My Core i7 920 has no problems making late game modern end turns take no more then 30seconds if even that. Which feels long to me, but its not a huge issue.

The issue is actually not with the turns themselves nor the quality of computers. In the late game on large or huge maps, how long does it take you to save? The inter-turn period itself is brief. While it's saving, however, everything freezes for easily half a minute even on my high-end system, an i7 920. If someone sets up frequent autosaves, it's easy to mistake those excessively long (and progress-bar-missing) saves for turn delays.

 

[w00tm0ng3r]

Get a better computer. My Core i7 920 has no problems making late game modern end turns take no more then 30seconds if even that. Which feels long to me, but its not a huge issue.

That's not the point. This is a TURN BASED STRATEGY with horsehockey graphics and it has steeper tech requirements than Crysis or REAL TIME strategies with significantly better graphics. This isn't Supreme Commander with 8,000 units on a 81 square kilometer map each rapid firing projectiles which each need a trajectory calculated for them in REAL TIME, this isn't Total war where as someone already mentioned you have 12,000 realistically modeled units on screen with FPS worthy graphics and physics models in REAL TIME, and this isn't Bad Company 2 or Crysis with their photorealistic graphics and physics shenanigans out the wazoo. This is a TURN BASED game where only ONE badly rendered thing is going on at any given time until you hit the end turn button. This is the worst optimization fail I've ever seen in any videogame ever. The only bright spot is it IS turn based and only one thing is going on at any given moment so it doesn't really matter if you have single digit FPS...

 

[MoonFlare]

That's not the point. This is a TURN BASED STRATEGY with horsehockey graphics and it has steeper tech requirements than Crysis or REAL TIME strategies with significantly better graphics. This isn't Supreme Commander with 8,000 units on a 81 square kilometer map each rapid firing projectiles which each need a trajectory calculated for them in REAL TIME, this isn't Total war where as someone already mentioned you have 12,000 realistically modeled units on screen with FPS worthy graphics and physics models in REAL TIME, and this isn't Bad Company 2 or Crysis with their photorealistic graphics and physics shenanigans out the wazoo. This is a TURN BASED game where only ONE badly rendered thing is going on at any given time until you hit the end turn button. This is the worst optimization fail I've ever seen in any videogame ever. The only bright spot is it IS turn based and only one thing is going on at any given moment so it doesn't really matter if you have single digit FPS...

They didn't optimize CiV...Total fail.
Civ6 will have a minimun req. of i7,10 gb RAM,some video card with 2048 and DX15 support.

 

[croxis]

This is nothing new.

The launch of Civilization2 was so bad that, at one point, there was a new patch every week. The game went from 1.00 to 2.42 before the first expansion was ever released.

Civ 4 had major issues as well. A large swath of hardware configurations did not work until the first or second patch. There were major loading issues due to all the files being bundled together in one mega file.

 

[Becephalus]

Well with my 1.6ghz 4GB Ram 4 year old piece of crap I have none of these problems. I keep the settings on low play in strategic mode and not with more than 12 civs/24CSs and a small map.

Game loads in a reasonable time (2mins) turns take about 3-4 secs typically.

Perhaps you just need to re-evaluate your expectations.

As far as the Blizzard comment, they are just about the ONLY development house that works that way. So holding everyone to their standards is just dumb.

 

[HeavyTwenty]

Well with my 1.6ghz 4GB Ram 4 year old piece of crap I have none of these problems. I keep the settings on low play in strategic mode and not with more than 12 civs/24CSs and a small map.

Game loads in a reasonable time (2mins) turns take about 3-4 secs typically.

Perhaps you just need to re-evaluate your expectations.

Perhaps you need to re-evaluate your blind fanboi defense of a poorly optimized game. My system exceeds the recommended system requirements and yet I still run into 2+ min turns on HUGE, random 15 sec freezes when I click certain units, and the greyed texture loading (all late game when more fog of war is revealed). Yes the game does run fine in smaller map settings, but did I really pay $50 to play only a portion of the game?

 

[Becephalus]

Civ 4 didn't run well on Huge on the computers for its time either. It is not a blind fanboi defense. There are tons of things wrong with the game. Just like there are tons of things wrong with every game that comes out that isn't made by Blizzard.

I am sure the performance will be improved. Paradox Entertainments Strategy games have even worse issues than these regarding system optimization.

ANd yes you did pay $50 to play a portion fo the game. Anyone who is expecting a finisher product when buying a PC game in the first two weeks hasn't been paying attention for the past 15 years.

Hell even XCOMs! release version was broken and that is seen as one of the best games of all time and is from 1994. You are the one acting like a boy. I want X and I want it now!

Anyone with half a brain and memory would know there would be huge issues with the release version of Civ5. It is still fun, they will fix some, mods will fix others, get over it.

 

[TheArsenal]

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
640MB dedicated video memory
Intel Core(TM)2 Extreme
2.66GHz
4GB

Huge Map, just entering the industrial age, 8 major Empires left, with I'm guessing 5 to 8city states remaining.

Each turn takes about 90 seconds to 2.5 minutes.

 

[HeavyTwenty]

Civ 4 didn't run well on Huge on the computers for its time either. It is not a blind fanboi defense. There are tons of things wrong with the game. Just like there are tons of things wrong with every game that comes out that isn't made by Blizzard.

I am sure the performance will be improved. Paradox Entertainments Strategy games have even worse issues than these regarding system optimization.

ANd yes you did pay $50 to play a portion fo the game. Anyone who is expecting a finisher product when buying a PC game in the first two weeks hasn't been paying attention for the past 15 years.

Hell even XCOMs! release version was broken and that is seen as one of the best games of all time and is from 1994. You are the one acting like a boy. I want X and I want it now!

Anyone with half a brain and memory would know there would be huge issues with the release version of Civ5. It is still fun, they will fix some, mods will fix others, get over it.

Going through my steam list of games that actually worked (performance wise) the first week.

Fallout 3, Left4Dead1, Left4Dead2, Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare.

These games were fully functionally at release. Anything major added to them were additional content. Firaxis Games is knocked off the list of dependable developers.

Edit: With a 93% review rating with metacritics, I actually did expect a working game. Guess I'll just have to test-pirate before purchasing.

 

[skrewler]

I have a i7 overclocked to 4ghz with 2x 5870s and 12gb of RAM. Even during the AI's turns, my CPU never goes above 30% usage and it never uses above ~1.5 gb of RAM. The game is also a RAID 0'd volume consisting of 3x SSDs which has benchmark performance of 800mb/s sequential reads. Yet the game is still painfully slow towards the end, or even mid game on the Large size maps and above.

So, it is not a hardware bottleneck.

EDIT: I read more of the replies. Some people are waiting 2 minutes+ for the AI's turn? Well, "painfully slow" to me is 20 - 30 sec on the AI's turns. I guess thats not bad compared to some of the other people on here, but with my system I'd expect it to be faster. I don't understand why the game doesn't use more of my memory or CPU.

 

[Danir]

What I've noticed is that turns take far longer in single-continent maps, and especially in multiplayer. Up to a full minute.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but how can turn times have anything to do with your graphics settings when it takes equally long in strategic view with basically no graphics at all?

 

[anonyjjang]

There's definitely something wrong with performance of Civ V. Hopefully future patches will fix it.