Time for a New Mac?

[Zaimejs]

I have a 2 gig dual G5 that's getting long in the tooth. I finished a game yesterday and by the end, every turn took forever and forever. I swear. It was so slow that I was suffering.

When you play what system do you play on, and does it run fast? I remember playing on a friend's PC and it was very fast. I'm almost tempted to just buy the Windows version and try it on my GFs computer.

Let me know.

 

[AlanH]

How much memory do you have? How bog was the game you were playing - map size, speed, number of civs, what date/turn did you finish the game?

 

[Zaimejs]

Great questions. Standard map size. All graphics and everything on lowest. Normal speed. 5 Civs (I cut down from 7). Ended right around 2000. Cultural victory... yay for me.

This happens every time. I get sick of playing right around the time I get tanks.

I just ordered the complete Civ IV set for PC... it was only $38 for all three titles... I thought, what the hell. I'll give it a try.

 

[AlanH]

Those are not very challenging game settings, but my first great question was about memory size? I would recommend at least 1 GByte of RAM per CPU core, so 2 GBytes minimum in your system.

Also, is your hard drive getting full? You need tens of GBytes of free disk space to allow the system to page in and out as it needs to.

These are key issues. If either of these conditions is not met then you will suffer severe 'thrashing' as the programs and data are swapped on and off disk.

I have Civ4 Complete for Windows, and I am able to run it in Parallels with few problems, though I've never played a real game with it. I'm sure it would be great in BootCamp, but I am congenitally incapable of rebooting my Mac into Windows. Mine's a first generation MacPro 2.66 quad core, with 4 GBytes RAM and an Nvidia 8800GT

 

[Zaimejs]

Plenty of ram and free space. Sorry I didn't respond to that before. I have.. I think 2 gig ram. Maybe more... and 50 gig free on the main drive. I'll have to check.

What bothers me is that the game runs smoother on my little MacBook than my big bad tower

 

[AlanH]

Graphics card? If it's an ATI, is it clean and well cooled?

 

[Zaimejs]

XT800 Pro.

yeah, I hope so.

I was just running Civ on my GFs PC. It loads so much faster and feels so much zippier. Same thing when I run it in bootcampl on this MacBook.

So sad.