Civilization IV

**Kekvit Irae** · 11-10-2005, 10:55

I got it, and right off the bat I started to hate it. The game running slowly for me (unit orders are delayed by half a second or so) is my main gripe. I would much rather play Civ3 or Civ2: Test of Time than this. Ah well, maybe a patch will help my woes.

**The_Doctor** · 11-10-2005, 11:24

I have the same problem. How much RAM do you have?

I have not really played it much, I want to play on the Earth map, but it takes 30mins to load and then it is too slow to play it. I am going to buy some RAM at the weekend. 256Mb up to 1GB, that should solve the problem.

**Kekvit Irae** · 11-10-2005, 16:46

I have a full gig of DDR SDRAM
My processor is AMD Athlon XP 2500 running at 1.47 GHz
Video card is an nVidia Geforce FX 5600 Ultra 128mb using 77.72 drivers

**The_Doctor** · 11-10-2005, 19:03

d'oh.

Other than the processor it is alround better than my PC.

Maybe the patch will fix it.

**The_Doctor** · 11-10-2005, 21:00

A quick RAM question.

I have this type of motherboard:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWeb/Product...=Specification

Is this the type of RAM that will work in it:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/sto...0&tm=undefined

512MB
DDR DIMM
PC2100

**screwtype** · 11-11-2005, 00:01

Martinus, I've seen lots of folks with problems posting their tech specs at CivFanatics, and the overall impression is that these lag problems seem to occur almost at random, regardless of spec. There are people with very high end systems who are getting severe lag, others with systems which are actually below the recommended specs who have no problems. You just can't tell whether your system will be one of those affected by looking at your machine's spec.

I seem to be one of the lucky ones, the game runs fine for me unless I enable anti-aliasing, in which case it starts getting lag and other graphical glitches. I have an Athlon 64 3000+, 1 Gig RAM, 9800 Pro. But there are other folks who have the latest AMD CPU and video card and multi-gigs of RAM who can't run the game at an acceptable speed.

Extra RAM will probably improve the performance to a degree but don't assume it will fix the problem. BTW, some people say they've improved performance by defragging, turning off their antivirus program and all other background tasks, and increasing the size of their HD swap file to a couple of Gigs. But again there are no guarantees. Other than that you'll probably have to wait and hope for the patch.

**Papewaio** · 11-11-2005, 00:35

Once you get past the amount of RAM needed to run an application it rarely improves the speed of a game.

The exceptions are where there is a memory leak... in which case the extra RAM acts as a bucket... the bigger the bucket the more time you have before it overflows and you get problems.

The other side is the amount of other applications that you can have running on your PC at the same time.

RAM is like deskspace... the bigger the desk the more books you can have out and the longer the time you have until you run out of space to use.