Civ IV slow graphics performance!

sweetthing

Not sure if this is the correct place for this, so mods feel free to move if I've posted in the wrong forum.

Finished my MA thesis so I've allowed myself to play Civ IV on my laptop again (will def have to wait for a new rig to play Civ V!), but have been infuriated by serious graphics slowdown. My machine uses an INtel Dualcore processor at 2.2ghz each. 3gigs of RAM and about 100gigs free hard disk space. Graphics card is an old one (Nvidia Geforce 9200GE) It's okay if I play at the lowest settings and graphic resolutions (but who wants that?!) Now I know my machine is far from up to date but neither is the game and I remember it used to play fine for me in the past. I'm wondering if it might have anything to do with viruses/spyware I picked up in the past year as I used my computer heavily for course work. But my AVG and McAfee antivirus haven't found anything awful lurking in my computer and I have 'Spybot-Search and Destroy' anti-spyware software installed. What I have done to try and cope with the slowdown is

-defrag (first thing I tried and seemed to work - game was flying at highest details and resolutions - but after a couple hours gaming slowed to a crawl again.

-clean startup

Neither of these has worked satisfactorily for me yet. Any one have any other suggestions of what I can do to help the game performance? It's really ruining my enjoyment of this terrific game. Any help would be really appreciated!

sweetthing

Oh ya and OS is Vista - is it really as bad for performance as people let on?

Blitzkrieger

You seem to have covered all the bases. When it was running more quickly before, did you have Vista installed then? The bad thing about laptops is even if they have a seperate graphics card, they often still use the main board's memory. 3G is not a whole lot when you're running Vista. Only thing I could suggest is a clean up and defrag to see if you can sqeeze a bit more performance out of virtual memory.

sweetthing

Thanks Blitzkrieger!

The bad thing about laptops is even if they have a seperate graphics card, they often still use the main board's memory.

is there any way I can force my laptop to use the graphics card rather than the built in memory?

Game's slowing down now even at the lowest resolution, so i'm thinking there must be some kinda virus/spyware lurking somewhere.

Blitzkrieger

Not really. Unless the graphics card has it's own memory, it has to share with the CPU. [smug]This is why I always buy a big clunky desktop.[/smug] No harm in checking for viri again, but is it slowing naturally as the game progesses? If you've had the laptop on for a long time, there may be some memory wasted with processes not shutting down properly. That's not supposed to happen but....

Chaotic_Forces

I could run the game on a geforce fx 5200 and 512 mb with a dual core 2.8ghz.

It can be one of two things (if it's neither you might be outta luck ) Basically update the game: I know for a fact that there is some problems with the shipped version of the game (minimum spec cards run it horribley). Try running it in admin/XP mode. Right click the game icon/shortcut, go to combatibilty and chnge the settings for run as admin/run in combatibilty mode.

sweetthing

is it slowing naturally as the game progesses?

Slowdown seems to occur completely randomly. It could happen 30 minutes into play or straight away. It's just plain unplayable now at any setting. Considering I had no problems with it when I was playing it last a year ago, this is just plain puzzling

It can be one of two things (if it's neither you might be outta luck ) Basically update the game: I know for a fact that there is some problems with the shipped version of the game (minimum spec cards run it horribley). Try running it in admin/XP mode. Right click the game icon/shortcut, go to combatibilty and chnge the settings for run as admin/run in combatibilty mode.

I'm pretty sure I downloaded the latest patch (think its 1.72 or something) but is there any way of checking which version I have?

Tried running it as administrator and still had graphical issues. Also tried running it in XP mode, but the game just stalled at the loading screen when I tried this

Thanks so muchfor all your help Blitzkrieger and Chaotic_Forces but I've pretty much lost all hope of getting this terrific game to work now. Think its back to Civ 3 for me!

Chaotic_Forces

sweetthing wrote: »

Slowdown seems to occur completely randomly. It could happen 30 minutes into play or straight away. It's just plain unplayable now at any setting. Considering I had no problems with it when I was playing it last a year ago, this is just plain puzzling



I'm pretty sure I downloaded the latest patch (think its 1.72 or something) but is there any way of checking which version I have?

Tried running it as administrator and still had graphical issues. Also tried running it in XP mode, but the game just stalled at the loading screen when I tried this

Thanks so muchfor all your help Blitzkrieger and Chaotic_Forces but I've pretty much lost all hope now. Think its back to Civ 3 for me!

You are quite welcome.
Well 1,74 would be the latest.
http://www.firaxis.com/support/support_detail.php?gameid=6&patch=1

Haven't played the game in a few months but I believe if you go to... Options, could be settings and then About, that will show the version (patch number).

There coudl be one thing that might really slow it down. Is your card a Nvidia or an ATi card by any chance? If it is: you may just have the card's options to override that off the games. Essentially for some games editing the options on so the card gives higher quality can make it look better than the games options and sometimes people (me ) forget to change them and have major lag/slowdown.

Hey, are you sure you have a "Nvidia Geforce 9200GE"? If so; are the drivers updated?

sweetthing

Just checked there and it is vers 1.74 I have

There coudl be one thing that might really slow it down. Is your card a Nvidia or an ATi card by any chance? If it is: you may just have the card's options to override that off the games. Essentially for some games editing the options on so the card gives higher quality can make it look better than the games options and sometimes people (me ) forget to change them and have major lag/slowdown.

How would I go about sorting that?

It's def an Nvidia Geforce 9200GE I have, and I've updated the drivers for the cards recently too.

Blitzkrieger

Unless it's something really weird like the position of the laptop blocking a cooling vent and the cpu/gpu being forced to run slower because it can't cool down, or general ****ty architecture of the laptop itself, I have to think it's a Vista problem. I used to run Civ4 on a 2GHz pentium 4 northwood on XP. It didn't run particularly quickly but it ran consistently and never got unplayable. No idea what a solution could be, sorry.

Civ3 :eek:

cherryghost

Graphics drivers updated or is running on the default crappy one?

sweetthing

hey guys thanks a million for all your help. Good news is the performance issues are sorted! I pretty much tried everything again (reinstalled the game, patched it, installed the drivers, ran a system restore beforehand) and now the games absolutely flying at the highest resolution, even a couple hours play in, Delighted! Again, thanks for all your help!