Why so bad game performance?
- Thread starter Nicol.Bolas
- Start date
vicawoo
Chieftain
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2007
- Messages
- 3,226
Great stuff, this sort of palpable hatred is perfect for a grudge match.
Choose your weapon: a mutually agreed upon 1v1 game
Pour fuel on the feud: increasingly outrageous and over the top insults, WWE style. Don't forget to make fun of their spelling/grammar and line by line retort all their points.
Raise the stakes: agree upon a humiliation for the loser. popular ones are temporary bans for a week/month/???, perform and publicize something humiliating.
And of course, the winner is right. How appropriate for a game mimicking human history.
phungus420
Deity
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2003
- Messages
- 6,296
Your point?
All I can say is that I've never singled out TMIT before personally, so I don't know where you get the idea of a "grudge" from. Over the past couple weeks though his posts have been negative whines harping on the same nitpicky issues he has with the game, 90% of which are fixed in BBAI anyway. Nothing out there is perfect, bringing up a certain issues you may have with something makes sense. But constantly harping on the same issues over and over again, about a game that was released 5 years ago, and one that you obviously spend a great deal of time playing (and thus apreciate) gets very old. I'm annoyed, I'm calling him out on it. Again what the hell is YOUR point vicawoo?
All I can say is that I've never singled out TMIT before personally, so I don't know where you get the idea of a "grudge" from. Over the past couple weeks though his posts have been negative whines harping on the same nitpicky issues he has with the game, 90% of which are fixed in BBAI anyway. Nothing out there is perfect, bringing up a certain issues you may have with something makes sense. But constantly harping on the same issues over and over again, about a game that was released 5 years ago, and one that you obviously spend a great deal of time playing (and thus apreciate) gets very old. I'm annoyed, I'm calling him out on it. Again what the hell is YOUR point vicawoo?
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2008
- Messages
- 27,995
Actually, my point is that civ leans on BBAI so heavily, and many of the corrections are things that probably should have been done.
That said, if you want more fruitful posts from me, you need only to look in a more fruitful subforum, as the scope of this one is questionable from the start. This is a strategy game, but here we have a GD separate from a strategy discussion forum ----> what exactly do you talk about here?
Then we get lots and lots of complaints (probably only...what...HALF of them from me
), nonsense polls that have been done a couple hundred times give or take, and discussion of game mechanics (although usually the ones relevant to playing well are also in S&T).The direction of discussion here shouldn't be a surprise then. I play a lot of forum games and that leaves me with the base game a great deal.
I know that coding isn't easy. I sure as hell can't do it. By the same token, it IS highly frustrating that patch after patch for years, we have seen questionable changes in the official patches while major, known issues or arguably incomplete parts of the game remained unchanged.
Wall overflow is probably the most glaring example - rather than fix sometime else, a new bug was introduced that hindered the trait balance a bit, added extra micro, and left a basic gameplay problem ---> controls that aren't up to snuff, untouched.
Well, as I said, GD is probably not even 1/3 of my material (probably even less). If you want something more constructive, I have probably > 100 game summaries (some done within the past week) and heavy strategy discussion over there.
vicawoo
Chieftain
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2007
- Messages
- 3,226
The HELL is my point is that if it ticks you off so much, you should do something the HELL about it, for example what is thoughtfully laid out in my post above. This is a way to forcefully resolve the HELL out of the issue while redirecting the one/two-sided caustic rage into a somewhat less destructive competitive resolution. The winner wins, the loser loses in a way that less directly injures his ego, the community is entertained, and we never have to hear about the stupid issue again. The internet has proven that this is a HELL of a good idea.
It's really not that complicated, Mr. 420. If you need further explanation, I've brainstormed the HELL out some good examples:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3306558
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=96227
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=114979
Spoiler :
georgjorge
Deity Wannabe
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2009
- Messages
- 921
But...who is representing TMIT and who is representing phungus420 now? I'm confused.
Good entertainment though.
Nicol.Bolas
King
Well I did some more testing,
and I think that slow turns are solely due to processor - it works on 100% all the time.
I don´t think adding more ram would help - doesn't seem to be issue in my games (low ram shows if your HDD keeps being used as virtual memory) - but maybe higher work frequency of the ram modules would help?
Upgrading graphics would probably help, but its not so important for me.
What really does wonders for me is restarting the game each 2 hours.... I thought the slowing tendency of the game is due to more units cities etc..... but in fact its due to memory leaks - when i restart, the game goes as fast as on turn 1 (for a while - the leaks are created faster when there are more units cities etc....) - for this reason I really suck in managing GP - no time to keep loading CS, after another AI stupid allocation
and I think that slow turns are solely due to processor - it works on 100% all the time.
I don´t think adding more ram would help - doesn't seem to be issue in my games (low ram shows if your HDD keeps being used as virtual memory) - but maybe higher work frequency of the ram modules would help?
Upgrading graphics would probably help, but its not so important for me.
What really does wonders for me is restarting the game each 2 hours.... I thought the slowing tendency of the game is due to more units cities etc..... but in fact its due to memory leaks - when i restart, the game goes as fast as on turn 1 (for a while - the leaks are created faster when there are more units cities etc....) - for this reason I really suck in managing GP - no time to keep loading CS, after another AI stupid allocation
phungus420
Deity
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2003
- Messages
- 6,296
@vicawoo
I pick Flash, TMIT can have Jaedong.
Also do you know any VOD of their recent match that are cast in English (preferably casted by Tastless or Day9)?
I pick Flash, TMIT can have Jaedong.
Also do you know any VOD of their recent match that are cast in English (preferably casted by Tastless or Day9)?
r_rolo1
King of myself
I was expecting a little discussion about causes of slowdown in BtS . Looks that I acidentally clicked in a starcraft forum link instead of that 
In the end the only thing i would like to know in this issue is how big the memory leaks issue is on BtS ( from non-existant to severe ). It is surely smaller than in Vanilla 1.00 ( oh, the glorious 1h IBT in standart maps by the time of Astro I had in my far above the minimum specs computer ... ), but I've seen some test games that seem to indicate that something is not working well under the hood ....
In the end the only thing i would like to know in this issue is how big the memory leaks issue is on BtS ( from non-existant to severe ). It is surely smaller than in Vanilla 1.00 ( oh, the glorious 1h IBT in standart maps by the time of Astro I had in my far above the minimum specs computer ... ), but I've seen some test games that seem to indicate that something is not working well under the hood ....
There are a couple of things one can do to reduce the slow down.
1. First, make sure that the graphics drivers, and DirectX 9 are up to date.
2. You can use the /3GB switch in Windows XP to allow BTS to use more RAM, but for this to be of any value, you need to have more than 3 GB in the machine. This isn't needed in 64 bit systems, and I'm quite sure it isn't needed in Vista or Windows 7. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here. This is off the top of my head) The relevant details can be found in the "MAF Error" threads.
3. More RAM equals better performance, particularly with Vista. Even using Readyboost will help.
4. A reasonable video card is really all that is required to play Civ4, however, some of the newer ones, equipped with hardware shaders, perform better by taking much of the rendering load off of the CPU. If you like really large maps, a card with better performance will more easily handle the large number of units in play. If you have an SLI or Crossfire setup, it does improve it to a point, but isn't necessary.
5. CPU speed will determine (to a point) the length of turn lag. The larger the map is, the more calculations need to be made per civ, and per unit, etc. Most of the delay in turns comes from raw number crunching. Moves must be made, buildings built... Even though you can't see these things happen, the CPU still has to calculate the changes, and apply them to the internal game engine, so that if you do click on Hannibal's city half a world away, the computer can show you his army. Having said that, a fast CPU with less memory will perform slower than one with more RAM. That's because the OS has to keep swapping out the contents of RAM to the swap file and back again, because it can't hold all of the information needed in memory. It pages out the non essential bits, and then reloads them when needed. Disks are slower than RAM, even a Solid State drive is slightly slower than normal memory. (And you shouldn't use an SSD for a swap file anyway.)
6. Civ is coded to only use one core, and you can't change that. You will, however, notice a small boost in performance when using a multi core CPU. The reason for this is that the OS can devote most, or all, of one core to Civ, and do the rest of it's business on the others. That means Civ doesn't have to stop and wait while Windows does some housekeeping.
Now that I've rattled on about all of that, how can you really improve the game play?
Simple. A reasonably fast machine, with an adequate amount of RAM, and a quality video card will play most maps up to huge with acceptable delay in turns in the late game.
If you think that you need the fastest, spiffiest hardware around to get better performance, I offer the following information about my main Civ computer: It's a quad core, and it clocks at 4.1 GHz, with 8GB of RAM, and two Radeon 4670 1GB graphics cards in Crossfire mode...
... and on a huge map with 18 civs, I wait 20 to 30 seconds between turns in the late game, using the BAT mod.
That isn't much better than my 2.2 GHz, 4GB laptop kids, so bigger isn't always better when it comes to Civ.
You don't need to spend a fortune on exotic hardware to play Civ, so save up your money for something really important.
1. First, make sure that the graphics drivers, and DirectX 9 are up to date.
2. You can use the /3GB switch in Windows XP to allow BTS to use more RAM, but for this to be of any value, you need to have more than 3 GB in the machine. This isn't needed in 64 bit systems, and I'm quite sure it isn't needed in Vista or Windows 7. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here. This is off the top of my head) The relevant details can be found in the "MAF Error" threads.
3. More RAM equals better performance, particularly with Vista. Even using Readyboost will help.
4. A reasonable video card is really all that is required to play Civ4, however, some of the newer ones, equipped with hardware shaders, perform better by taking much of the rendering load off of the CPU. If you like really large maps, a card with better performance will more easily handle the large number of units in play. If you have an SLI or Crossfire setup, it does improve it to a point, but isn't necessary.
5. CPU speed will determine (to a point) the length of turn lag. The larger the map is, the more calculations need to be made per civ, and per unit, etc. Most of the delay in turns comes from raw number crunching. Moves must be made, buildings built... Even though you can't see these things happen, the CPU still has to calculate the changes, and apply them to the internal game engine, so that if you do click on Hannibal's city half a world away, the computer can show you his army. Having said that, a fast CPU with less memory will perform slower than one with more RAM. That's because the OS has to keep swapping out the contents of RAM to the swap file and back again, because it can't hold all of the information needed in memory. It pages out the non essential bits, and then reloads them when needed. Disks are slower than RAM, even a Solid State drive is slightly slower than normal memory. (And you shouldn't use an SSD for a swap file anyway.)
6. Civ is coded to only use one core, and you can't change that. You will, however, notice a small boost in performance when using a multi core CPU. The reason for this is that the OS can devote most, or all, of one core to Civ, and do the rest of it's business on the others. That means Civ doesn't have to stop and wait while Windows does some housekeeping.
Now that I've rattled on about all of that, how can you really improve the game play?
Simple. A reasonably fast machine, with an adequate amount of RAM, and a quality video card will play most maps up to huge with acceptable delay in turns in the late game.
If you think that you need the fastest, spiffiest hardware around to get better performance, I offer the following information about my main Civ computer: It's a quad core, and it clocks at 4.1 GHz, with 8GB of RAM, and two Radeon 4670 1GB graphics cards in Crossfire mode...
... and on a huge map with 18 civs, I wait 20 to 30 seconds between turns in the late game, using the BAT mod.
That isn't much better than my 2.2 GHz, 4GB laptop kids, so bigger isn't always better when it comes to Civ.
You don't need to spend a fortune on exotic hardware to play Civ, so save up your money for something really important.
Nicol.Bolas
King
I don't understand the ram issue.
either you have enough ram for the operations, or you dont have enough ram, and os will use virtual memory from hdd, which is 100* slower and therefore ot lags the game....
but i dont have this issue, O hear hdd much less during civ4 then while browsing this site for example
either you have enough ram for the operations, or you dont have enough ram, and os will use virtual memory from hdd, which is 100* slower and therefore ot lags the game....
but i dont have this issue, O hear hdd much less during civ4 then while browsing this site for example
Goodness. In the "Completely Incorrect Statements Department" you're 2 for 2 in this thread. First there's this one:
Here's some memory math for you. My system right at this moment, with only Firefox open and some Gadgets running, is using 1.69 GB out of 8 GB. Playing a large map in the late game with BAT, I have seen my memory display show RAM usage well in excess of 3.3 GB (I am not affected by the ~3 GB RAM limit, as I use a 64 bit OS.) So, 3.3 minus 1.69 equals 1.61 GB. Far more than the 512 MB that you claim Civ never uses.
Any computer, and any application, will benefit from adding more RAM, up to the maximum that the OS can use, and what the application can "see". BTS is actually coded to address 3 GB of RAM, but the OS has to be enabled that way for it to be used. That's what the "/3 GB switch" does. It allows Windows to let BTS address up to 3 GB of RAM, if available. Standard Windows XP defaults to a maximum 2 GB of usable address space for an application, and 2 GB of address space for the system, unless the 3 GB switch is used, and the application made "aware" of that switch. It's a complex subject, which I won't delve into any further, lest you all fall asleep. However, if you're interested, there are a number of articles on the internet which discuss it. Use your favorite search engine.
And now, on to your next little gem from earlier in the thread:
If you're going to post a proclamation in a thread where the OP is asking for help, and you offer your post as an answer to the questions at hand, please consider reading up on the subject before posting information that is clearly incorrect. It helps no one.
This statement is absolutely ridiculous. The amount of RAM in a system certainly does make a difference. Try playing Civ on XP with only 512 MB of RAM, and then tell me that it doesn't matter. 500,000K is exactly 512 MB, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that Civ will use much more than that with the right map and a large mod in play. Players of Rise of Mankind often run out of memory when playing. The fabled "MAF Error" that plagues large mods is due to Civ consuming memory amounts in excess of 1.5 GB, and because of the memory leak, this number will climb higher the longer you play before restarting.
Here's some memory math for you. My system right at this moment, with only Firefox open and some Gadgets running, is using 1.69 GB out of 8 GB. Playing a large map in the late game with BAT, I have seen my memory display show RAM usage well in excess of 3.3 GB (I am not affected by the ~3 GB RAM limit, as I use a 64 bit OS.) So, 3.3 minus 1.69 equals 1.61 GB. Far more than the 512 MB that you claim Civ never uses.
Any computer, and any application, will benefit from adding more RAM, up to the maximum that the OS can use, and what the application can "see". BTS is actually coded to address 3 GB of RAM, but the OS has to be enabled that way for it to be used. That's what the "/3 GB switch" does. It allows Windows to let BTS address up to 3 GB of RAM, if available. Standard Windows XP defaults to a maximum 2 GB of usable address space for an application, and 2 GB of address space for the system, unless the 3 GB switch is used, and the application made "aware" of that switch. It's a complex subject, which I won't delve into any further, lest you all fall asleep. However, if you're interested, there are a number of articles on the internet which discuss it. Use your favorite search engine.
And now, on to your next little gem from earlier in the thread:
When Civ4 was being designed, multi-core CPUs were just on the drawing board, and at the very least, were not in full production during Civ's early development process, where decisions of what hardware was to be supported needed to be made. One core was all that they had to work with at the time, and they did a pretty good job of making a game this complex function on one core, if you ask me.
If you're going to post a proclamation in a thread where the OP is asking for help, and you offer your post as an answer to the questions at hand, please consider reading up on the subject before posting information that is clearly incorrect. It helps no one.
Running mods is things most people don't do, so that part shouldn't even been taken into consideration. So unless your in a big war on a big map, it shouldn't usually go over 500,000K, or it does, not by a margin of 1 GB. What graphic settings do you use? That also makes a huge difference. And running anything with Civ, especially firefox, is suiciding gameplay. Yes RAM helps, but I don't think it would help enough to make a big difference in this situation.
I didn't know that, I apologize for putting out a stupid comment on that one.
I didn't know that, I apologize for putting out a stupid comment on that one.
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2008
- Messages
- 14,927
That should be taken into consideration given that many people run mods; even ones that came with the base games.
You do need to set in Vista 32 bit, I'm not sure about Windows 7 though. And I really wouldn't recommend it with XP. You run into memory address conflicts with some drivers when you add the /3GB switch. I just tried it out a little while ago, and I was running into various glitches with a few of games, from sounds not playing to a complete system crash when my video drivers locked up. Not quite the blue screen of death, but very close to it.
Bull. I've seen it go up well over 1.5 gig in the end game.
Wrong again. I don't use mods other than some XML tweaks of my own. I play a slightly larger than Huge map with 12 civs, all my settings are at medium with no anti-aliasing, and I can easily go over 1 gig of RAM at the end of the game.
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2008
- Messages
- 27,995
There is considerable memory leak in this game, too.
But 2 should generally cover it unless you're doing something like playing >huge with >18 civ mods.
However even standard huge late-game bogs down with lots of necessary and unnecessary calculations every turn and units flying everywhere.
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. Plus you might want to restart the game, civ has problems with memory from time to time if not restarted.
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.
You're correct Willem. Thank you for reminding me of that. It's been a while since I've played the game on 32 bit Vista.
Again, you're making the assumption that everyone plays the game the same as you do. There is no such thing as "normal settings", unless you are calling the defaults normal. By your definition, I have never played a "normal" game. I also think that you misjudge the number of players who get to the end game in a space race or diplo/cultural win, and those that actually use mods when they play. Just going by the activity in the modding forums, I would guess that more people use a mod of some kind on a regular basis, far more than those who do not. Even BUG counts as a mod. And yes, I am making an assumption there myself, but the traffic in the C&C forum, and the Q&A threads indicates to me that "a whole lotta people play mods."
Just as an experiment, I had Lemon Labs do a little test. (The President of Lemon Labs is a good friend of mine. I see her in the mirror every morning, and she actually listens to me on occasion.
) I started a brand new game using BAT 2.3, and I recorded the RAM usage in my computer prior to starting, and then I recorded the RAM use at 3900 BC. I used BAT because it includes BUG and BULL, and is an "average" size mod. Larger than some, and smaller than some others. I then repeated the experiment using BAT 3.0. That's the one that you mere mortals don't get to play with just yet, because it isn't quite finished. I used 3.0 because it's slightly larger, and a little more stuff loads on start-up. The reason that I did not use standard BTS, is because I'm fiddling around in Custom Assets right now, and standard BTS won't load without a bunch of file moving. It's Monday, I'm lazy, deal with it... The game settings, for both games were as follows: Large Fractal map, high detail graphics, music off, no special options, random Civ (Willem) for the first one, and I deliberately chose Willem for the second test to keep the results similar for comparison. The RAM use was measured before loading BTS, and one turn after founding Amsterdam, and it was measured using the Performance Counters function in Windows 7 x64, and displayed by my LCD status display. I did not have to Alt-Tab to the desktop, which would have skewed the results.
With BAT 2.3:
RAM in use before running Civ = 1.68 GB
RAM in use after turn one = 2.41 GB
Difference = 730 MB <-- That is what Civ with BAT 2.3 is using on turn one.
With BAT 3.0
RAM in use before running Civ = 1.62 GB
RAM in use after turn one = 2.57 GB
Difference = 940 MB <-- That is what Civ with BAT 3.0 is using on turn one.
So, with settings that are about as generic as one can make them, Civ itself has proven you incorrect. A representative game (with a medium sized mod) uses more than 500 MB of RAM on the very first turn. One city, one warrior, and nothing of the terrain revealed, except what is revealed by founding the city.
It isn't exactly scientific, but it is a roughly good approximation of how the game uses memory with a large map.
If you're still confused about how memory, addressing, page files, etc. work, the article linked below is from Microsoft, and has a very good explanation of how RAM in Windows actually works. There are also some additional links on the page for further details.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555223
