What would be the BEST video card to use?

CaptainPatch

CaptainPatch

Lifelong gamer
Joined
Sep 6, 2007
Messages
832
Location
San Rafael, CA, USA
Seriously tired of having the game CTD every time I try to Load a Saved game after Turn 30 or so. Everyone (of the ones that have spoken up) suggest that the culprit is my NVidia GeForce 9500 GT video card with 1024 Mb of RAM. _IF_ that is indeed the case, what is the consensus here as to what would be the **absolute** BEST video card for playing Civ 5? When it comes to PC hardware, I'm almost entirely illiterate; I barely know the various manufacturer names and have no clue as to why a 9800 is better than a 9500 (if it is, indeed, better), or what all of the alphabet soup that gets attached to model numbers means.

So, please help me out here. If I wanted optimal video performance, what card should I get?

Pertinent specs:
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @2.33 GHz (4 CPUs)
3070 MB RAM
Windows XP SP3 (I'm _comfortable_ with it, Vista proved to be glitchy as hell, and I'm waiting for Windows 7 to prove that it's just as reliable via "the test of time".)
 
Yeah the 9500GT is worse than the 8800s :p In fact it is the 8500 rebranded.

I'd say get something like an AMD ATI 5770 or NVIDIA 260 GTX.

Also, Windows 7 is pretty damn good from what I've seen. Still using XP too though, mostly due to laziness (I do have Win7 Pro, bought it for $40 on a Microsoft student discount ^_^).
 
Thanks for the feedback!

@tokala: Most of those discussions seem to focus on processing speed. I'm not too terribly concerned about how fast a turn does or does not advance. What is driving me crazy are the CTDs that occur when trying to Load a Saved game, post-Turn 30 or so. Also, once the game has advanced to @ Turn 250-350, somewhere in there, I frequently get full-on freezes. I _imagine_ that this has to do with the PC having to juggle the interactions of ALL of the many units 28 City-States and 8+ nations have created by that late in the game. It would seem odd that Quad CPUs and 3 Gb of RAM could NOT handle that load -- otherwise I would expect to hear that nearly all players would be having similar problems. That leaves the video card as being the most likely bottleneck.

I wouldn't mind that turns take an extra 30 seconds to process. But having to start the game from desktop every few minutes gets old real quick.
 
The savegame-bug is known and apparently worked on with high priority.

Oh, I overlooked the big _IF_ in you first post, oops :blush:

As there are lots of bugs still to be squashed, there is no way to tell if a better video card would make the difference for you :p

If you have read through the second referenced link you will have noticed that in Civ5 your Quad is not much faster than a equally clocked dual core, and from the first link could be inferred that the civ5 graphics is pretty CPU intensive, too.
And lots of people, even with way faster machines, are complaining that civ gets slow as molasses in the later game. It might get just to much for yours ;)

Did you already try to fiddle with the .ini settings? For me that made the difference between a reproducible crash while scrolling on a huge map and _no_ crash :)
 
I read through the INI changes that were laid out, but it _seemed_ (I'm guessing, obviously) that that particular IN was meant for a system using DirectX 11. As I'm using Windows XP (SP3), I'm still using DirectX 9.0c. Is that perception erroneous? [I'd hate to go in and make INI changes and inadvertently bollix the whole thing.]
 
Assuming massive power and almost perfect heat dispersion it would be the GTX480 otherwise the GTX 460
 
Well, I adjusted the GraphicsSettingsDX9 INI file as suggested. That didn't affect the CTD problem at all. I'll play a few turns and resist the urge to Load any previous Saves and see if I can discern any performance improvements. [I have a feeling that it will be like a tone deaf person trying to discern the difference between a symphony played by a 102-instrument philharmonic orchestra and the performance of a 96-instrument philharmonic orchestra. After all, what is the perceptible difference between "in the blink of an eye" and "in the three-quarters of a blink of the eye"?]

I went ahead and ordered the GTX480. It was suggested that I should also upgrade my power supply from 650w to 1000w, so that's on order also. Those should be installed come Thursday.
 
CaptainPatch said:
Well, I adjusted the GraphicsSettingsDX9 INI file as suggested. That didn't affect the CTD problem at all. I'll play a few turns and resist the urge to Load any previous Saves and see if I can discern any performance improvements. [I have a feeling that it will be like a tone deaf person trying to discern the difference between a symphony played by a 102-instrument philharmonic orchestra and the performance of a 96-instrument philharmonic orchestra. After all, what is the perceptible difference between "in the blink of an eye" and "in the three-quarters of a blink of the eye"?]

I went ahead and ordered the GTX480. It was suggested that I should also upgrade my power supply from 650w to 1000w, so that's on order also. Those should be installed come Thursday.
Click to expand...

Cancel that order, the GTX 460 is way better because of SLI
 
While 2 GTX460 in SLI have a higher theoretical performance than a single 480, SLI will give you all kinds of problems and really isn't the right thingh for the non-geek. And Civ5 doesn't work with SLI anyway ATM ;)

The 480 as well as a 1000W PSU are utter overkill, as a wrote earlier, if you care for money at all, a (single) 460 would have been almost as good for half the money, and a 500 W brand name PSU would have been more than enough for either choice :D
 
If we're talking Civ5 specifically, in my experience the 250GTS was the best card, never crashed never froze never had the wide-reported 3minute turns.

Switching to my 450GTS i get slowdowns after 100 turns rendering the game unplayable (even when restarting the game).

I mean, it depends. It seems alot of the newer high end hardware has issues with this game (high end cpu's especially, with the turn times).
So if you want to know the best graphics card for THIS game, now before any patches fixes the issues, i'd say an old one.
 
No matter what video card you have, it SHOULD only make a minor difference with the turn times. If there is a massive difference, it's most likely a software/driver issue or even something completely unrelated. You could try the "clean sweep" approach:
1.uninstall Civ
2.uninstall nvidia driver in safe mode
3.install latest beta driver
4.install civ

And there are people with problems and nVidia DX10 cards in general and the GTS250 in particular, too.
 
It seems rather counter-intuitive that state-of-the-art hardware actually performs worse than older stuff.

I'm rationalizing that overkill now means that I'm postponing my next video upgrade for a couple of years. Same goes for the 1000w power supply. (Multi-CPUs generate a LOT of heat and use a truly serious exhaust fan. I already burned out a 450w power supply and replaced it with a 650w that is doing okay for now.) As Grandma used to say, "Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it."
 
CaptainPatch said:
It seems rather counter-intuitive that state-of-the-art hardware actually performs worse than older stuff.

I'm rationalizing that overkill now means that I'm postponing my next video upgrade for a couple of years. Same goes for the 1000w power supply. (Multi-CPUs generate a LOT of heat and use a truly serious exhaust fan. I already burned out a 450w power supply and replaced it with a 650w that is doing okay for now.) As Grandma used to say, "Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it."
Click to expand...

Uh the GTX 480 is such a pig that the dual GTX 460s are actually cooler
 
Okay, so now I have replaced the NVidia GeForce 9500 GT with 1 Gb of graphic RAM with a GTX460 with I Gb of graphic RAM. With just that hardware change, it has had _zero_ effect on the CTDs when trying to Load a Saved game when the game has already been running. Turn-wise, it seems like I'd have to use a stopwatch to measure the difference in seconds between Before and After.

^^That^^, however, actually stands to reason. The duration between turns is a function of the CPU and the RAM running the calculations of what each player does. The video card's speed really doesn't kick in until after the CPU has determined **what** needs to be displayed.

Graphic changes (refresh rate), otoh, are quite fast. When I'm Internet surfing, fresh pages load real fast. So in gameplay, I believe that the **pace** has picked up noticeably. (Screen changes take place in one eye-blink instead of three.)

If there are any heat issues (or not) remains to be seen. (I've only been surfing for about ten minutes or so.)

[Wondering how much effect this new card will have on Fallout: New Vegas when it comes out later this month.]
 
CaptainPatch said:
Okay, so now I have replaced the NVidia GeForce 9500 GT with 1 Gb of graphic RAM with a GTX460 with I Gb of graphic RAM. With just that hardware change, it has had _zero_ effect on the CTDs when trying to Load a Saved game when the game has already been running. Turn-wise, it seems like I'd have to use a stopwatch to measure the difference in seconds between Before and After.

^^That^^, however, actually stands to reason. The duration between turns is a function of the CPU and the RAM running the calculations of what each player does. The video card's speed really doesn't kick in until after the CPU has determined **what** needs to be displayed.

Graphic changes (refresh rate), otoh, are quite fast. When I'm Internet surfing, fresh pages load real fast. So in gameplay, I believe that the **pace** has picked up noticeably. (Screen changes take place in one eye-blink instead of three.)

If there are any heat issues (or not) remains to be seen. (I've only been surfing for about ten minutes or so.)


[Wondering how much effect this new card will have on Fallout: New Vegas when it comes out later this month.]
Click to expand...

Do you think a gtx 480 is worth it now?

PS update your CPU Christmas 2011 for maximum value (Ivy Bridge)
 
civ_king said:
Do you think a gtx 480 is worth it now?

PS update your CPU Christmas 2011 for maximum value (Ivy Bridge)
Click to expand...
For Internet surfing (of which I do A LOT) it's worth the $318 I paid for it. Plus, oh, that reminds me that I could probably get away with raising the graphic details from Low to High! (Must dash off and do that ASAP!

And what does "update your CPU Christmas 2011 for maximum value (Ivy Bridge)" mean? (Remember, practically tech illiterate here.)
 
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