Okay, I want to cover a few things here, so apologies for the general subject title. First, let me point out that I've never had any rendering issues. What I have had are random CTDs (common), random BSOD/reboots, and random freezes (rarely), and Wonder movies - which were originally smooth - becoming choppy.
1. The patch
At first, installing the patch seemed to make things worse; the wonder movies became even choppier, and zooming out (I think to the point where clouds start featuring in the render) caused ~5 second freezes (although this seemed to be a one-off, only the first time I zoomed out). Using FRAPS, my framerate varies from up to 15-16fps zoomed into a city (on high detail) down to 4fps at the world view. When the choppy Wonder movies are playing, I'm at around 10-11fps.
I thought things seemed smoother before the patch, so I tried to uninstall - but I couldn't find the right option, and instead uninstalled everything. I took this chance to re-install Civ4 on a separate partition (not sure this makes any difference, but I've seen it mentioned here). I loaded a previous saved game (~1700 on huge continents map), and:
- Framerates on the map haven't changed; still between 10-16fps (higher over water), but
- No freezing when zooming out (although framerate still low)
- Wonder movies are once again smooth! The framerate while the movies are playing is now up to 59-60fps. How can a simple re-installation change this framerate by so much? Something surely isn't right here...
I've now tested this with the patch, and with blue marble mod, with the same results. This might be a solution for those who used to have smooth movies, but have since lost them.
2. CTDs/reboots
Some of this might sound obvious, even stupid, but I tried a range of things to try to solve CTD problems: different in-game and ini file settings, use a soundcard (instead of on-board sound), disable audio, driver changes, memory managers, defragmenting my page file, changing the thread priority (not sure this does anything, personally), running using VDMS (I really thought the problem was sound-related!
), etc. I seemed to have some success with some of these, but nothing seemed to work consistently - a session using the same settings would last anywhere between 20 seconds and 5 hours.
Something that I overlooked was my overclocking settings. I've never previously had instability issues with overclocked CPU and RAM, so it didn't occur to me to test this. Toning down my overclocking has made a massive difference to stability - so far! This game obviously puts more stress on the RAM and CPU, and together with the GPU workload probably creates a lot of heat under the hood. Maybe conservative memory timings, improved case cooling, might also help with stability? I guess this is obvious for gamers, but maybe not for civaholics, given the relatively low system demands of previous versions.
Another thing was adjusting the AGP aperture in bios. I'm not sure that this has altered the stability in any way, but increasing it (to 256MB, in my case) has a massive impact upon decreasing the freezing caused by turning the grid on/off (from up to 10 seconds to less than 2). It also seems to result in smoother scrolling, though I might be imagining this...
3. FPS issues
No solutions, just questions! In light of the huge change in the wonder movies framerate before/after reinstallation, is there a logical explanation for this? Does the game progressively corrupt some file outside of the cache (which I regularly clear)?
More generally, I was a little shocked by the low framerates during normal gameplay. My specs:
-Athlon 64 2800+ (Socket 754)
-1 Gb Corsair RAM, 1035Mb pagefile
-Sapphire Radeon 9200 (128MB), using Catalyst 4.12
-WinXP Pro SP2
-All background tasks turned off prior to playing
Is this the best I can expect from this aging video card? The opening menu screen and wonder movies run at 60fps, but in-game never gets above ~30fps (over a completely empty ocean), and is usually much lower. Is there any way of improving this, short of buying a new card?
Anyway, apologies for the length of this, but I hope this information's of use to someone...
1. The patch
At first, installing the patch seemed to make things worse; the wonder movies became even choppier, and zooming out (I think to the point where clouds start featuring in the render) caused ~5 second freezes (although this seemed to be a one-off, only the first time I zoomed out). Using FRAPS, my framerate varies from up to 15-16fps zoomed into a city (on high detail) down to 4fps at the world view. When the choppy Wonder movies are playing, I'm at around 10-11fps.
I thought things seemed smoother before the patch, so I tried to uninstall - but I couldn't find the right option, and instead uninstalled everything. I took this chance to re-install Civ4 on a separate partition (not sure this makes any difference, but I've seen it mentioned here). I loaded a previous saved game (~1700 on huge continents map), and:
- Framerates on the map haven't changed; still between 10-16fps (higher over water), but
- No freezing when zooming out (although framerate still low)
- Wonder movies are once again smooth! The framerate while the movies are playing is now up to 59-60fps. How can a simple re-installation change this framerate by so much? Something surely isn't right here...
I've now tested this with the patch, and with blue marble mod, with the same results. This might be a solution for those who used to have smooth movies, but have since lost them.
2. CTDs/reboots
Some of this might sound obvious, even stupid, but I tried a range of things to try to solve CTD problems: different in-game and ini file settings, use a soundcard (instead of on-board sound), disable audio, driver changes, memory managers, defragmenting my page file, changing the thread priority (not sure this does anything, personally), running using VDMS (I really thought the problem was sound-related!
), etc. I seemed to have some success with some of these, but nothing seemed to work consistently - a session using the same settings would last anywhere between 20 seconds and 5 hours.Something that I overlooked was my overclocking settings. I've never previously had instability issues with overclocked CPU and RAM, so it didn't occur to me to test this. Toning down my overclocking has made a massive difference to stability - so far! This game obviously puts more stress on the RAM and CPU, and together with the GPU workload probably creates a lot of heat under the hood. Maybe conservative memory timings, improved case cooling, might also help with stability? I guess this is obvious for gamers, but maybe not for civaholics, given the relatively low system demands of previous versions.
Another thing was adjusting the AGP aperture in bios. I'm not sure that this has altered the stability in any way, but increasing it (to 256MB, in my case) has a massive impact upon decreasing the freezing caused by turning the grid on/off (from up to 10 seconds to less than 2). It also seems to result in smoother scrolling, though I might be imagining this...
3. FPS issues
No solutions, just questions! In light of the huge change in the wonder movies framerate before/after reinstallation, is there a logical explanation for this? Does the game progressively corrupt some file outside of the cache (which I regularly clear)?
More generally, I was a little shocked by the low framerates during normal gameplay. My specs:
-Athlon 64 2800+ (Socket 754)
-1 Gb Corsair RAM, 1035Mb pagefile
-Sapphire Radeon 9200 (128MB), using Catalyst 4.12
-WinXP Pro SP2
-All background tasks turned off prior to playing
Is this the best I can expect from this aging video card? The opening menu screen and wonder movies run at 60fps, but in-game never gets above ~30fps (over a completely empty ocean), and is usually much lower. Is there any way of improving this, short of buying a new card?
Anyway, apologies for the length of this, but I hope this information's of use to someone...
