Civilisation IV + MBP: big maps and RAM

[Machead III]

Right, so... Ok.

I have a 2.16 C2D MBP with a gig of ram. I'm aso a CivIV addict. However, I am running into huge performance problems when playing certain maps, and I was wondering what about my system is limiting that performance.

If you play the game, you'll know what I mean - I'm talking about the big maps here. The huge, custom maps. I'm dying for a really long game on one of the cartographically accurate world maps you can download, however, when I load up one of these, the game grinds right down to a halt. Particularly between turns, when the computer is being asked to modify and move various objects around the board, the game will lock up for sometimes 5-10 minutes until it's worked everything out.

Now, there's not much graphical wizzardy going on on the screen at all, certainly nothing that should give a 1600X a problem. This being a C2D, I can't imagine the limiting factor being CPU speed. I'm playing on Windows which is a tad faster than OS X with Civ anyway.

So, I guess, it's the ram? I was wondering if adding another gig or ram would make any significant different to the performance of these scenarios.

Thanks,

 

[wuha]

same Mac, no problems

I'm playing Civ IV under OS X with the same MacBook Pro as u have. Sometimes i have a few Performation-troubles, especially when loading and short times after loading a very big map, but nothing which lasts longer than 10-20seconds...

Greetings -Wuha

 

[peterjhill]

2 gigs of ram will be a big improvement. Also note that safari uses up alot of memory, both real and swap (virtual) for cacheing webpages. You really should consider upping your memory. To be sure, open activity viewer and look on the system memory tab and look at the page ins/outs. Each one of those is a time that some part of memory was copied to disk and back. Take a look at the numbers, play for a while, and then check again and see how fast it goes up.