If you play for a while at a nice smooth 40FPS+, then for some reason you drop down to a chuggy 15FPS, I think I've found the reason.
I have a 8800GTX 756MB, it was the one of the first DX10 cards released. I've played around with DX9/DX11 and found that in the end the card will run OK in the DX11 option. So in a nutshell if my generation 1 DX10 card can run it your should too.
On an aside note, if you must run in DX9, turn on Aniostropic Filtering, 2 times Anti Aliasing in the control panel of your graphics card. For some reason the Devs disabled these options in game for DX9, the result is the textured look like junk, and the roads are almost invisible.
I've tracked down the slowness bug to what I believe to be a problem with the multi-threading. The nice thing about Civ5 is that while the CPU take its turn, you can open dialogs, check things, and **even initiate diplomacy**.
Now this is pretty cool, as it basically means there's no real reason to "wait" for the computers turn. Except there's a slight problem! I found that if I frequently accessed the diplomacy dialogs during the CPUs turn, when it came back to my turn, I could randomly lose about 30FPS!
It was a chuggy mess, and for me anything uder 15FPS is just too annoying to bother with. These are the exact same symptoms I get in games if I run too many processes that steal CPU. What I think is happening here is that somehow the thread that runs diplomacy concurrently with the CPU turn does not get cleaned up correctly.
In effect Bismark or whoever, may now be running in a background thread eating up more and more of your CPU. Since this is an internal thread you can't kill it from Task Manager, you simply have to restart the entire game from the windows desktop. The moral of the story is that it's best to leave the interface alone until the CPU has finished, for fear of triggering this bug.
I have a 8800GTX 756MB, it was the one of the first DX10 cards released. I've played around with DX9/DX11 and found that in the end the card will run OK in the DX11 option. So in a nutshell if my generation 1 DX10 card can run it your should too.
On an aside note, if you must run in DX9, turn on Aniostropic Filtering, 2 times Anti Aliasing in the control panel of your graphics card. For some reason the Devs disabled these options in game for DX9, the result is the textured look like junk, and the roads are almost invisible.
I've tracked down the slowness bug to what I believe to be a problem with the multi-threading. The nice thing about Civ5 is that while the CPU take its turn, you can open dialogs, check things, and **even initiate diplomacy**.
Now this is pretty cool, as it basically means there's no real reason to "wait" for the computers turn. Except there's a slight problem! I found that if I frequently accessed the diplomacy dialogs during the CPUs turn, when it came back to my turn, I could randomly lose about 30FPS!
It was a chuggy mess, and for me anything uder 15FPS is just too annoying to bother with. These are the exact same symptoms I get in games if I run too many processes that steal CPU. What I think is happening here is that somehow the thread that runs diplomacy concurrently with the CPU turn does not get cleaned up correctly.
In effect Bismark or whoever, may now be running in a background thread eating up more and more of your CPU. Since this is an internal thread you can't kill it from Task Manager, you simply have to restart the entire game from the windows desktop. The moral of the story is that it's best to leave the interface alone until the CPU has finished, for fear of triggering this bug.
