Terrible lag in Marathon/Huge late game - What can we do?

[jpinard]

I'm not here to complain, but to look for suggestions on what we can do to help this situation. Right now when I get to the Modern era of a Marathon/ Huge game, the game is so slow and lags so heavily I just want to quit. I can totally handle the turns taking a minute or two, but when the turn timer is done, it is still wicked awful slow... especially selecting buildings or units to build. There's a terrible lag/delay that makes clicking things in the city screen hard.

I know the problem is directly related to the number of units in the world. Things were fine until I built about 150 new units for a huge assault. This brought my total # of units to 403. The remaining 14 civilizations had a combined 1,960 units between them.

I have a dual core processor already overclocked to 3.3 GHz. 2 Gig of RAM, and ATI X1900XTX video card. I've already changed the memory saving line so I can't alt-tab, and am at a loss as to what I can do to help the terribly slow responsiveness in the game. Being "in" the city screen indicates it shouldn't be a video issue and is totally cpu/mem related.

I hope some of you have some ideas!

 

[arretium]

Buy a faster computer.

 

[jpinard]

Buy a faster computer.

My computer is already pretty fast. Are there any other ini or game settings that can be altered?

 

[Dan Quale]

A faster computer is the only option, mine still goes almost slow towards the end with a 5600+ and 8800gts 640, theres just so much going on that your computer is greatly taxed. I also build embarrasingly large amounts of units, so many that I conquer whole continents, and would probably make even Nasa's supercomputers tremble.

 

[jpinard]

A faster computer is the only option, mine still goes almost slow towards the end with a 5600+ and 8800gts 640, theres just so much going on that your computer is greatly taxed. I also build embarrasingly large amounts of units, so many that I conquer whole continents, and would probably make even Nasa's supercomputers tremble.

Darn I like conquering whole continents...

 

[KMadCandy]

spend less on espionage? i'm teasing, that's not really possible, but i wonder if this is way worse than it was pre-BtS? i don't lag a lot, just a little, but i just about never lagged pre-BtS and there it was only during wars with zillions of units. now, it starts after i have enough EPs to get visibility on almost every city. at that point there's very little fog of war. even with holy vision pre-BtS i never had that much of the map active all the time, so i'm pretty sure that's what causes it for me, at least a big part of it anyway.

 

[theKurgen]

Seems strange that you're having such problems. My computer is fairly slow so when I play a huge map I'll often move across to my wife's 2.4ghz duel core for the late game. It's only 1gb ram with a 6600GT graphics, but it really runs the game pretty much flawlessly.

One thing I can suggest if you've been playing a long time is to save and restart the application. Civ4 has always seemed to have a bit of a memory leak that causes it go slower the longer you play.

 

[jpinard]

Seems strange that you're having such problems. My computer is fairly slow so when I play a huge map I'll often move across to my wife's 2.4ghz duel core for the late game. It's only 1gb ram with a 6600GT graphics, but it really runs the game pretty much flawlessly.

One thing I can suggest if you've been playing a long time is to save and restart the application. Civ4 has always seemed to have a bit of a memory leak that causes it go slower the longer you play.

It was kinda OK until the unit count went up. Then it all went to hades.

 

[Underdawg]

What CPU is it? Is it a Core 2 Duo? A Pentium D?

If it's a Core 2 Duo @ 3.3Ghz, that's about as as fast it goes for today's computers. What is the 'terrible lag' like? Over-a-minute turn wait times? The slowest it goes for me is about 20-30seconds per turn in the late game (mostly during wars when the AI is moving all their units around).

(Mine is a Core 2 Duo OC'ed to 3.0Ghz - heh, I also have an X1900XT!)

 

[jpinard]

What CPU is it? Is it a Core 2 Duo? A Pentium D?

If it's a Core 2 Duo @ 3.3Ghz, that's about as as fast it goes for today's computers. What is the 'terrible lag' like? Over-a-minute turn wait times? The slowest it goes for me is about 20-30seconds per turn in the late game (mostly during wars when the AI is moving all their units around).

(Mine is a Core 2 Duo OC'ed to 3.0Ghz - heh, I also have an X1900XT!)

It's a Core-2 Duo OC'ed to 3.3 GHz. And as I mentioned in the original thread, I totally don't mind the turn wait. That's fine, even if it were a few minutes long I could read in between. What the big problem is, is the lag. I realize lag is a multiplayer term, but it actually is the best way to describe what's going on. While in the city screen, just going to click to queue a building takes several seconds to register. Because of this its easy to click the wrong building, or wrong unit. Click a unit several times to queue, and it takes a while to respond to the mouse click - and then blam they all click in at once. It's like there's a bunch of stuff being calculated in the background - of course nothing should be going on because the turn is over it's my turn now. (I'm not even in map view, I'm in city management view.)

 

[Walliard]

Are there any background processes running? That's all I can think of.

 

[PibbZ]

Are there any background processes running? That's all I can think of.

Only redering a DVD movie in realtime probably

No just kidding, i have issues with this too. Im gonna try to end my games pre-modern age from now i guess, until i get my new computer

 

[jpinard]

Are there any background processes running? That's all I can think of.

Believe me, I wish it were as easy as that. I have zero going on in the background. One curious thing is the dual core sharing is kinda sporadic. Not sure if it would work better on a single core. Too bad they could just offload one process to the secondary core (like message pop-ups). I have a feeling that process interrupts the flow info quite a bit.

 

[Tusk]

Believe me, I wish it were as easy as that. I have zero going on in the background. One curious thing is the dual core sharing is kinda sporadic. Not sure if it would work better on a single core. Too bad they could just offload one process to the secondary core (like message pop-ups). I have a feeling that process interrupts the flow info quite a bit.

I think the dual-core CPU might be part of the problem - I have read of a number of people complaining about bad performance and most have dual-core processors - I still run a single core 3ghz with only 1Gb RAM and I don't find the performance at later stages to be that bad. Maybe the game isn't configured to offload various processes to the other cores and uses only half your processing power?

 

[Psyringe]

Hmm, strange that you experience so much lag on your machine. My lag (on a slower machine, and with larger than huge maps) went away when setting the graphics quality to low (single unit graphics, low resolution textures, etc.), but you probably tried this already. I usually play with high quality settings until Optics or Astronomy, and then lower the settings when the lag becomes noticable.

 

[kazapp]

You could experiment with a mod where all unit costs are doubled. That would mean fewer units = faster gameplay.

 

[jimbob27]

I've found the number of civs that survive into the later peroids has a big effect.

For example...... I always play huge-marathon with around 12-18 opponents.

If I reach around 1800 or so....and there's 16 or so civs around........ it's laggy as hell. If I reach 1800, and there's about 5 civs left.... the lag is way way less.

The number of units doesn't seem to have as much influence..... 1000 units divided between 5 civs will move pretty quickly..... 1000 units divided between 16 civs, will take ages for the turn to end.

 

[Derbus]

What's your virtual memory set to in windows? Perhaps try cranking it up a bit, mines set at 2gig.


Also the obvious thing would be to lower your video settings, and turning off graphical displays (like yields, and resources)


I think theres an option for detailed terrain, make sure that is off as well

 

[jpinard]

I had my memory on auto and it was using ~2 Gig. Maybe I should defrag and set it to manual size of min/max 3072 (3 Gig)?

Jimbob - interesting post. I'll have to keep track of # Civs/speed/ and # of units.

 

[Soneji]

No, you want to use a fixed swap file. Make it 2GB and no more.

If you have it on auto, Windows farts about wasting cycles and access times by changing its size. A lot.