The Great Hardware Recommendation Lie!

[brian_banks]

Firstly, the game is fun as can be. Hours of life has been lost to Civ4, but the technical difficulties of the game have been tremendous.

The minimum specs of 1.2gig proc, and 256mb ram is absolutely insane. If you think you can run this game on those specs, you WILL kill yourself and probably others nearby.

Secondly, the "recommended" spec is garbage also. 1.8gig proc is probably fine, but the 512mb ram is junk. I have launched this game on a total of three very different systems and on every occasion I've gotten as high as 710mb of ram used JUST FROM CIV4! It will also seriously jump if you open up the help box in the top right corner. With the average user having a firewall and AV program running....you're looking at 840 to 900mb of ram used AT LEAST.

I've found by looking at the forum and talking to users, that those saying everything is "rainbows and cookies" for them, tend to be running with 1gig or higher of physical memory.

I can usually sniff out a game that is poorly/sloppily coded....and it's my humble opinion that this one is a stinker. I can run some very system stressing (graphics, proc, mem) games that run fantastic...but why the F*** does this game run so absolutely horrible? Especially a turn-based game at that!!!

Bottomline: Firaxis, fun game, but you fudged your hardware recommendations to sell lots of copies. And you need to sit down and streamline code and fix bugs to get closer to these unrealistic specs.

 

[lamaslany]

I confess I am suprised that a turn-based game is so resource intensive - just was is all of that memory used for?!

 

[Shepherdboy]

Secondly, the "recommended" spec is garbage also. 1.8gig proc is probably fine, but the 512mb ram is junk. I have launched this game on a total of three very different systems and on every occasion I've gotten as high as 710mb of ram used JUST FROM CIV4! It will also seriously jump if you open up the help box in the top right corner. With the average user having a firewall and AV program running....you're looking at 840 to 900mb of ram used AT LEAST.

I've found by looking at the forum and talking to users, that those saying everything is "rainbows and cookies" for them, tend to be running with 1gig or higher of physical memory.

I would recommend that people wait to upgrade their RAM until a patch is available.

I am unable to play the game on my machine with 1.2GB RAM due to frequent slowdowns and freezes; however, I am able to play a complete game with only a few glitches on an old machine with only 320MB of RAM.

I'm hoping a patch will resolve the problems with my newer machine as I've actually got the old machine sitting in the middle of the floor next to my desk with a switch box connected to my monitor.

Shepherdboy

 

[brian_banks]

Yes, ram isn't the holy grail for many of us, but you can never have enough ram (sort of). The consumes a lot of it, period....end of story.

I'm not hanging my hat on RAM being a complete solution because their code is obviously fat and bloated. But I also wouldn't wait around for a patch that might not address performance issues. My assumption would be that a new patch is going to be addressing high priority concerns, such as ATI issues (which I'm a victim of), video corruption, and other major bugs to the game. These should be addressed, naturally, before going for performance.

So, my suggestion was, if performance is your complaint, bump the RAM first if you're at less than 1gig.

 

[heppcatt]

The game uses Python for things like the interface, and that's the reason why it is so slow. With Python almost everything about the game can be modded, but it is slow.

And the game is unplayable when you don't have at least 1 GB of RAM.

heppcatt

 

[Fieryphoenix]

I have had satisfactory games (albiet smaller maps) with 256 Megs on a relative's machine.

 

[Shepherdboy]

And the game is unplayable when you don't have at least 1 GB of RAM.
heppcatt

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I am able to play the game on an old machine with only 320MB of RAM on XP Home.

Shepherdboy

 

[oldStatesman]

Recommended Specs are probably okay...it is most likely a bug that is causing the behavior. See this thread for more. posts #122 and #123 are summations.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137706

The poster, Harkonnen, who found this out has made his own memory manager to address this, and has said he has the game running okay on a 512MB machine. Hopefully he will release it if the upcoming firaxis patch does not fix the problems..though I suspect it will.

 

[Comraddict]

I have 768MB and 1.6GHz A64 cpu, runs fine...and takes all but 100MB. but i don't play for hours.