video cards that dosent make probs

[aargov]

hi
i have p 4 2.6 c and 9600 pro and my comp keeps locking up/freezing
is there a video card that works fine with this game?
i mean that not a single user with this video card ever stumbled upon this problems
i know that nvidia 6800 card is causing problems too
so if i wanna upgrade which card should i get in order to play civ 4 trouble free?
thanks for your help!

 

[AsnoT]

i'm an ATI user normally, but it seems to me that is not a good idea when playing civ4.

so i got a new rig (see sig) with a nvidia 6600GT (pci-e), on which the game hasn't CTDed even once (or done any other nasty things).

highly recommended...

 

[Willem]

I'm running a Radeon 9550 and aside from having to run on low graphics, I'm not having any problems at all. Although the grid gets rather slow to appear in the later game.

 

[einherjar_LC]

It sounds more like a heat or ram issue than a video card issue.

But just for a reference, in my machines that I play Civ on, I have a an

Nvidia Ti4600 128mb,

Nvidia 780GTX 256mb,

Raedon ATI mobility 345M 64 mb(with a third party mod that allows me to use the current catalyst drivers on the mobility chip since ATI doesn't support them for whatever reason),

Geforce 4 MX 420 64mb.

The 64 mb cards will play the game on medium settings but the movies are a bit stuttery.

All my computers have 1gig of ram or more though which I think helps game play quite a bit for the older cards.

 

[Kan' Sharuminar]

I have a Nvidia 6800 card and have had no problems with Civ4.

Was I just lucky?

 

[smjjames]

well the 1.5 patch was suppoused to fix ATI issues (its 1.6 now, but it includes everything), so try downloading the patch.

I have an ATI driver and the patch fixed the issue with it.

 

[einherjar_LC]

The only issue I've had with my ATI card was the black terrain but that was before I updated to the most recent drivers.

I'm sure that's just dumb luck for me though considering the plethora of issues people have been having with ATI cards.

 

[Vladesch]

I used to have a 9600xt and it ran fine with that (Ive since upgraded), so I doubt its problems with your graphics card.

 

[Harleqin]

I'm using an old ATI 9550 card with 256MB of RAM on it. No problems at all. Running everything on high. Only glitch is sometimes in battle on of the fighting units are invisible. No impact on the game though.

 

[smjjames]

yea, I got that bug in one game where the fighting units go invisible temporarily.

 

[Salty Ant]

I have an Integrated Graphics Card that has absolutely zero problems with Civ 4. ATI Radeon Xpress 200 (I think) works perfect with the game and its only 64 MB. I cant figure out why this cheap and seemingly crappy video card works fine when other people have spent hundreds of dollars on expensive 256 MB cards that wont run the game at all..?

 

[Pilotis]

ATI 9800 Pro. Leaderhead crashes occasionally. Bad enough for me to set autosave to 1. Interested by AsnoT:
"i'm an ATI user normally, but it seems to me that is not a good idea when playing civ4." Hum hum. Should I swap ? Anyone else agree with AsnoT ???

 

[Willem]

ATI 9800 Pro. Leaderhead crashes occasionally. Bad enough for me to set autosave to 1. Interested by AsnoT:
"i'm an ATI user normally, but it seems to me that is not a good idea when playing civ4." Hum hum. Should I swap ? Anyone else agree with AsnoT ???

Nvidia does seem to have less problems, but it seems like it's a pretty isolated thing. I suspect that it has more to do with ATI's drivers, and possible conflicts with other processes, than the actual cards.

 

[Pilotis]

Still switching to Nvidia would help. It's so fraggin' when the screen flickers black - will it CTD or 'hang in there' ???

 

[neriana]

I have an ATI 9600 Pro as well, and don't have the same problems. I play on high graphics and high resolution, too. I played the game for about 5 hours straight yesterday and did get a crash from being low on memory, but that's it. Since the patch, I've even been able to go back to animated leaderheads .

I've found that Omega drivers are significantly better than ATI ones. http://www.omegadrivers.net/ They fixed a plethora of problems with different games for me.

 

[smjjames]

yea, I think I have that Omega thing. it didn't fix the initialization issue until the patch fixed it though.

I haven't had any real issues, other than the arctic caps going black when I kept doing a new game and then looking at the worldbuilder (instead of regenerating the map), but I just attributed that to the game bieng tired of me doing that like 15 times in a row and complaining about it since a game restart fixed it. That and the wierd unit invisibility thing which happened after this latest patch, only seen that one in one game though. The fact that I have pentium 4 is probably helping.

 

[Pilotis]

Thanks neriana. I'm trying the Omega driver now.......

 

[gmanne]

Just upgraded to a Radeon x800pro, no problems even with only 512 ram. (Very important to get the right drivers though, very)