Why so bad game performance?

[Willem]

May I remind you, end game (I'm going to assume modern or up) is a place that usually most players don't get to usually.

You have no way of knowing how far "most" players go. That's strictly conjecture on your part based on your own playing habits, and not a statement in fact by any means.

You just said larger than huge map with medium graphic settings end game, that explains why it would go that high. That isn't even normal settings.

Well the graphics setting wouldn't have that much to do with RAM usage, that's more of a VRAM thing. And my other settings were just slightly higher than normal for a Huge map, so there's not going to be a lot of difference there. The game will most certainly go beyond 500 meg with only normal settings, memory leak or not.

 

[stopstopp]

I have two example of a late game war and mid game. the late game war is using over 564,000K, that's not a lot over 500,000K and the other one is using 498,000K. Every time I run Civ, is does not use the large amount you are speaking of. And lemon, I know how RAM works, just because my settings don't use over 500,000K doesn't make me an idiot. Seeing how Civ works and how sluggish it gets, I assumed most people would lower graphics and other settings to get better gameplay, but maybe I'm wrong. Although I don't think a majority of people use mods, maybe on this forum a lot of people do though.

It is a VRAM issue, but it may help the posters condition, as it makes a difference of on my laptop for some reason or another.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I have two example of a late game war and mid game. the late game war is using over 564,000K, that's not a lot over 500,000K and the other one is using 498,000K. Every time I run Civ, is does not use the large amount you are speaking of. And lemon, I know how RAM works, just because my settings don't use over 500,000K doesn't make me an idiot. Seeing how Civ works and how sluggish it gets, I assumed most people would lower graphics and other settings to get better gameplay, but maybe I'm wrong. Although I don't think a majority of people use mods, maybe on this forum a lot of people do though.

It is a VRAM issue, but it may help the posters condition, as it makes a difference of on my laptop for some reason or another.

I never said that you were an idiot. I said that you were wrong. If I meant to call you an idiot, there would be no ambiguity, as I would flat out say it. Just because I disagree with you, or I'm correcting you about something, does not mean that I think that you're stupid. It just means that I disagree.

As for your memory usage, what OS are you using? And how much memory does your machine have in total? Civ will use <500 MB and pagefile the rest if the machine is low on memory. 2 GB or less, with Vista, is a good example. In a machine with more than 2 GB, Civ will exceed 500 MB very easily, even with vanilla BTS, as Willem has pointed out in this thread. That was the point that we were trying to make.

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

its not vram issue.

i did more testing even on large map, and its alway the cpu the limiting factor - cpu at 100% all the time.... while the physicall memory never even touched 2GB (altogether with other programs.

this leads me to realisation that spending money on ram wont make the game go faster.
new cpu for old MB is useless, ditto for GC.

sot he only thing that remains for most users I think, is overclocking the cpu

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

is there any benchmark test for civ4?

I am thinking of some extreme save, where turn proccesing can be compared in seconds?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

its not vram issue.

i did more testing even on large map, and its alway the cpu the limiting factor - cpu at 100% all the time.... while the physicall memory never even touched 2GB (altogether with other programs.

this leads me to realisation that spending money on ram wont make the game go faster.
new cpu for old MB is useless, ditto for GC.

sot he only thing that remains for most users I think, is overclocking the cpu

A game made 3+ years ago, if made well, should probably not be taxing systems made in the past year to the point that there are 10+ second turn times in the late game.

But I consistently see CPU as a limiting factor also - 4 GB RAM and 1 GB graphics card that's reasonably new are not bottlenecks...but a 3 ghz processor with a good front side bus should NOT bottleneck the game badly either! This is a TBS! Why is it lagging systems more than first person shooters which essentially do nothing BUT whore graphics?! Don't get me wrong, shooters have strategic depth, but that genre should easily tax systems more with superior graphical detail and much more constant motion...that's not how it is though.

Civ IV is the only TBS I've ever played where I had lag trying to micro my units during a turn, or had to wait long periods of time on a new machine for the AI to do something. It's also the only major/popular TBS I've played in the last 10 years or so where the CONTROLS DO NOT WORK properly.

Ask the AVGN (angry video game nerd) what the #1 most important thing about a game is . Yeah, being able to play it. Fortunately, you can play civ IV, but it gets really pissy when you shift click on a unit and it selects the WHOLE STACK, and proceeds to refuse to un-select a single unit without clicking off, when it randomly assumes you're pressing alt when you are not doing so, or refuses to let you select your land units in your naval stack. Trying this in single player, it's just a @#%# annoyance. Trying it in large-scale warfare on a blazing turn timer, or worse yet vs humans in simultaneous turns? Yeah, now we're getting things up the doop shoot from the game, such that the person who wins is the one who didn't get jacked by the interface (which, by the way, lies to the player...nice use of fake difficulty there ).

People can come down on me for @#$%ing in this subforum all they want, but what I'm citing above is a SERIOUS, UNDENIABLE flaw in the game that is a PRIORITY FIX OVER JUST ABOUT ANYTHING THAT'S BEEN SUPPOSEDLY PATCHED for balance, and YEARS after the game has been released, YEARS after it's been known, GUESS what HASN'T been fixed for IV?

The controls not working as they say *always* a valid complaint for a game. Some people don't like doing triple to what, 100x the actions that would be necessary if things actually worked.

Was tweaking unit strength really more important? Was making siege unable to strike amphibiously REALLY more important than fixing controls? Really?

I have yet to go a single game where these things haven't harassed me at least once when selecting a stack, it's not like it's a rare occurrence. I guess enough people don't do things to save micro, I guess...?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Moan moan moan TMIT

I introduced you to a whole new world of lag on Saturday anyway

TMIT and I played his longest ever game (about 8 hours).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Moan moan moan TMIT

I introduced you to a whole new world of lag on Saturday anyway

TMIT and I played his longest ever game (about 8 hours).

I've seen worse lag, but at least I could play another game on the side simultaneously while waging war .

 

[s.bernbaum]

TMIT, thanks for the rant about the controls! I have all those problems and play on an old computer. I thought it was my machine. Nice to know that I don't have to upgrade to solve the problems --- they would still be there!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

TMIT, thanks for the rant about the controls! I have all those problems and play on an old computer. I thought it was my machine. Nice to know that I don't have to upgrade to solve the problems --- they would still be there!

I used to have an old one so I thought that too. However, I've since reproduced them on a laptop (which was better than my clunker PC from ~7-8 years ago) and now on a machine with better tech specs than virtually anything a consumer would have when IV came out.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Have you tried setting affinity? I used to use it a lot. Just go to task manager (ctl+alt+del) and click on the process tab and right click the game (Civ4BeyondSword.exe) and set affinity to use only one core(uncheck them all but one) and it should help a little.

Not sure how to do it to the game shortcut. I think there was a /affinity 1 switch or something. but this should help things a bit as Civ4 is a single core game. other than this, maybe try a little overclocking, if possible. (try only 5MHz at a time and test)

Hope this helps at least a little.
-=Mark=-

 

[morchuflex]

Hello.

I am resurrecting this thread because I'm about to upgrade my PC and I'm wondering what to buy.

I mainly play LoR and FfH2. I always play on HUGE maps, epic speed.

Currently I own a C2D E6600 @ 3GHz, 2 Go of RAM (I'm stuck with XP until I upgrade) and a 8800 GTX.
Performance in the late game is excruciatingly slow. In FfH2, I can't play beyond turn 400 or so (I get a MAF error every other turn) - Fortunately, I generally win before turn 300 anyway, but still...

I'm considering 2 different upgrades: a minor one and a larger one.
Minor upgrade: AMD Phenom X4 955 BE, 8 Go DDR3, GF 560 Ti.
Larger upgrade: Intel SNB i7 2600K instead of AMD processor.

What kind of performance boost can I expect in each case?

 

[ston]

1) Long turn times, beginning on standard maps, few seconds on bigger maps
2) many combat glitches .... the units runs from other side of map to join combat
3) few seconds to open city screen - painful since so much micromanagement necessary
4) overall slow and sluggish, once more units and cities ae on a map (bigger size just makes it even worse)

Hmm, another dual-core AMD/Athlon combo which suffers the problem (my set-up also). I'm starting to get the feeling that the game may be optimised for intel/nvidia systems.

I've been trying a bunch of things to resolve this problem.

This thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=145238&highlight=late+game+slow

...seems to have some good ideas, I've not tried them myself yet though but I plan to do so. Doing a forum search for "late game slow down" brings up lots of threads discussing this problem.

As the problem typically builds up over time from when you start playing, saving the game, quiting, re-starting the system and running the game up again is a usable work-around. Although it's a pain to do so, overall you do save a lot of time time and frustration as the game is much snappier when you start it up again.

The basic problem is poor implementation; as brilliant as the game-play is, the technical implementation of it falls very short

HTH

 

[Archon_Wing]

There's definitely some kind of memory leak. Sometimes late game earth18 or something gets extremely annoying late game, but the lag goes away if i restart the program-- for a while at least.

In any case, I prefer normal sized maps because of this.

Anyhow, I think it's pretty bizzare. I have 2gb like OP did (though if he should be reading this he should upgrade to SP3), and Starcraft 2 works perfectly fine. There's no way a TBS from 2005 should consume more than a game from last year should it?

edit: Took a look-- a late game earth18 with bug mod takes about 850mb of ram. Total ram usage never goes past 1.6-1.7 gb and I have a bunch of crap running in the background. I'm on XP though.

 

[morchuflex]

Mods like FfH2 routinely eat up to 1.5 Go by turn 300 or so.

 

[ruff_hi]

Late game civ is slow with large numbers of units on single tiles during human play turn because of all of the screen refreshing that the unit plot takes. With all of the goodies that are added via BUG (promo frame, upgrade, action, GG star, etc) that refresh is even longer.

We have added a BUG version of Unit Plot that is much quicker and only updates things that change on the screen. The initial plot selection will take the same amount of time, but scrolling over the units is quick (<4 ms instead of 150 to 250 ms).

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Is 850Mb physical memory or virtual memory usage though?

 

[duckstab]

The controls not working as they say *always* a valid complaint for a game. Some people don't like doing triple to what, 100x the actions that would be necessary if things actually worked.

Was tweaking unit strength really more important? Was making siege unable to strike amphibiously REALLY more important than fixing controls? Really?

I have yet to go a single game where these things haven't harassed me at least once when selecting a stack, it's not like it's a rare occurrence. I guess enough people don't do things to save micro, I guess...?

The complaint is still absolutely valid, not that we're likely to ever see a Civ4 patch now that 5 is out.

However, software development teams have to prioritize which issues to fix based on a lot of factors, of which the individual user's pain is only one. Maybe, as you say, there aren't enough people actually experiencing the issue enough to complain. Or maybe it'll take months to fix properly when the developer only has two weeks, so they spend it doing an easy nerf to Quechuas instead. Or maybe the click-handling code was written by somebody who quit and left a rat's nest that nobody understands or wants to touch for fear of breaking something larger. Impossible to tell from the outside. But I think the most likely explanation is probably more along these lines rather than Firaxis just being deaf to users.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Is 850Mb physical memory or virtual memory usage though?

850 is just what it says in the processes tab. The 1.7 gb ram usage is from the peak commit charge which is a little less than my physical memory.

 

[s.bernbaum]

There's definitely some kind of memory leak. Sometimes late game earth18 or something gets extremely annoying late game, but the lag goes away if i restart the program-- for a while at least.

In any case, I prefer normal sized maps because of this.

CIV is known to have a memory handling bug that the developers never fixed (or perhaps found?). The bigger your map, the more civs present, the longer the game, the more likely that you will crash due to a MAF. However, unless you play short games on small maps with few civs, it will happen. That is why I reset the autosave to every turn in the .ini. That way the most I lose is one turn and the time to restart the game.