Squeezing every last bit of computing power

[wilkie]

- from a system that is below the min specs. It takes forever for the engine to initialize, but once it does I've had zero problems.

...if you don't count the single digit framerate.

Here's my ancient system:

800 Athlon T-bird
VIA KT133
1x512 Crucial (forget the exact specs, it's been awhile)
ATI 9600xt
98SE

I too am amazed it manages to choke down Civ 4. It doesn't matter what size map or how many AIs I pick - the 4000BC framerate hovers right around 10. I have:

Closed every non-essential process (explorer and systray left)
AGP BIOS app size to 128
turned every in-game graphical setting to low/off
downloaded a Low-Res texture pack
windows updated everything

My guess is that my gpu is cooling it's heals while my poor Athlon and KT133 scramble around trying to direct traffic.

I have yet to:

Defrag
Manually alter VM
Update ATI drivers (not thinking that's the bottleneck anyway)

Currently I'm playing as Ghandi (love them fast workers) on a small Archi map somewhere in the mid 1600s. As far as I can tell, I've only dropped a few fps...to about 7.

Beyond what I've already done and short of buying new proc/mobo/mem I think this is the best I'm going to see.

Suggestions?

 

[wilkie]

60+ views and nothing? Eh, oh well.

Dusted off the mobo manual and fiddled with switch settings, now OCed to 904 Mhz. Wee! I think I'm up to...maybe...double digit fps. Oddly enough, didn't notice any kind of late game slowdown or any other kind of problem listed in the forums. *counting myself lucky*

All for now.

 

[auldian]

There are some 98SE guides at www.techspot.com HERE. They gave me some ideas when I used that OS.
Your video drivers can't hurt. That last ME set I saw at www.ati.com supported 98SE back in February of '05.
Glad to hear you're able to play on it.