Upgrade from 4870s in CF or no?

[BiffMan]

I'm not getting bad performance from Civ5, it's just stuttering a little more than I'd like when panning around a well populated map later in the game.

I'm currently running:
2x ATI 4870 1GB in crossfire @ 1920x1200 on Cat 10.9
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ (2.4 GHz)
4 GB DDR2
Vista 32bit

So obviously the processor is mighty long in the tooth, but as it's on a socket 939 MB, that's a bit more involved of an upgrade (Ram/processor/MB) so for the moment I'm mostly curious about the graphic side of things. It's a pain to tweak a setting, exit, restart, retest so I haven't methodically tried every graphic setting.

At the moment I'm running with 4X MSAA, low detail shadows, and high detail on everything else. Smooth as silk on water/clouds, not so much on regular terrain. Not horrible or anything, and when not panning it's perfectly smooth animation, its the panning around (which of course happens alot) that's choppy enough to be annoying.

So I'm not too sure how the 4870 stacks up against the DX11 cards. I thought it was resonably similar to a 5770, so seems like I should be okay, so would there be an upgrade now that would be worth it, am I mostly processor limited, or should I just deal and hold out for a 6xxx series card and be good for another few years?

Also, can anyone point me toward a good guide on which settings affect performance the most? Also, I'm running DX11, but as far as I'm aware, my card isn't DX11 native, so am I really running DX11 then?

Thanks!

 

[J-man]

You PC is above recommended specs, it *should* go smooth. Have you got the latest drivers?

 

[tokala]

So I'm not too sure how the 4870 stacks up against the DX11 cards. I thought it was resonably similar to a 5770, so seems like I should be okay, so would there be an upgrade now that would be worth it, am I mostly processor limited, or should I just deal and hold out for a 6xxx series card and be good for another few years?

Thanks!

DX11 on DX10 cards seems to be buggy in Civ5. You get a fraction of the frame rate of a comparable DX 11 model (in your case indeed a 5770).
People are getting sluggish scrolling even with fast quadcores, so for a remedy you should start with the video card(s).

And for an eventual mobo/CPU upgrade, if you are not gunning for absolute high-end, you can do it quite cheap with a DDR2 AM3 board

 

[The_J]

Try disabling Crossfire. Many programs have problems with 2 graphics cards, maybe Civ5 too.

 

[BiffMan]

Thanks for the responses, guys.

I'm running latest drivers (10.9) and have tried with and without Crossfire and didn't notice much difference, might actually be better with Crossfire which is unusual for a new game, but I'll not complain.

It really seems like it's something with the screen updating when panning that's so much slower than anything else. It's not the texture-loading thing that you get when you first load up a game, and it's not pounding on the hard drive at that point or anything.

So if it can handle the display of the textures, etc fine with full speed animations, and after panning it settles back to full frame rate, I'm hoping it's just some optimization issue with DX10 cards in DX11 or something else that might be addressable. Would really prefer to hold off for a 6xxx series card if I can manage it