I dunno, I think someone needs to mod something to make it work any better. I have a feeling the game just doesn't know how to handle the resources it needs.
AMD phenom 9500 quad-core processor (2.2 ghz on each core)
4 gigs of ram
11 gigs in swap space partition
GeForce 8600GS with updated drivers
2 - 1 terabyte 7200 rpm hardrives setup as a raid device
yet when I'm running Civ4, my computer never uses more than half the ram, one and a half cores (if even, with the other two running at 0%). relatively none of the swap space, and the graphics card shouldn't be an issue.
There has been a lot of mutterings and argument over single vs dual and quad cores lately, and some people get quite upset when their new quad core isn't really faster than the old hardware they replaced or whatever. I just upgraded recently, and found the same thing. I offer this only as a real world example, and something to think about. I'm not criticizing anyone's hardware, k?
My room mate is an electrical engineer, and one day he decided to do a test of Civ's computer related issues. (Personally, I could have found something better to do, like oh, say, play Civ? But it's the small things that amuse him.) It's a semi scientific, real world test, (we timed things with a stopwatch) and he did his best to be accurate. (And of course, I helped. Thus insuring impartiality.
) I've never seen any actual Civ benchmarks, and we couldn't find any, so this was sort of neat.
It can be found here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7545940&postcount=12
We didn't test my new Phenom at that time. I would have liked to because I overclocked it, and it should have been faster (theoretically) than his. My new Phenom has since been broken by a bad motherboard, so I downgraded to a dual core "Kuma" based Athlon (2 Phenom cores instead of 4, so essentially a dual core Phenom.) Civ plays not much differently on that one either compared to the old Phenom. Compared to my original single core Athlon, there also isn't much different than his Phenom, or my old one.
Zylornck says whatever differences there were between my old Athlon and the new Phenom/Kuma Athlon are clock speed (Old Athlon XP 2.2 GHz. New Athlon and Phenom 3.2 GHz.), larger caches, much more memory, and faster hard drive transfer rates (SATA vs the old type). He ought to know, I guess, he works with this stuff every day.
YMMV, of course, but actually testing it on four different machines was quite interesting.
And thus ends my little informational post. Happy Civving.
-LM
