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Fayadi
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Overseas Chinese living in Singapore
Oct 2001
time: 13:16
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I got Pentium4 1.3 ghz with 128 memory RDRAM pc-800 400 mhz!
MY MEMORY IS 400 mhz u know!Thats the most popular ram i bought in march!Guess what 16 civ games on huge map are way too slow.In early games of course it looks fast but in 800 + ad
for one turn it took 1/2 minutes.Well i never really measure the time it's very long to be considered "a computer game"
So i normally play 8 civs game!Those who plays 16 civs game really will vomit when all the other civs got large empires already!it is too long !!to be considered a game!!
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Kolyana
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Civ3 is a perfect game. It has flaws that are the players fault. if you didn't want perfection and a game worth $45.00, there wouldn't be a problem.
Upgrade your computer. Reformat, defrag, up the memory size, install a SCSI drive ... whatever you need to do, but don't look to blame the flawless, hallowed Civ3.
You will find that everything is editable in the editor*, bugs** are actually fixed in the patch ***
Any gripe is considered a whine. Please don't whine here. This is the Civ3-General forum**** and a balance of posts must be kept. *****
16 civs is intended for those people who are willing to put up with it taking twice as long as 8 civs. Play ona map half the size, reduce the civ count by 8, or play two games on two computers at the same time. ******
* Except anything you need or want.
** Design features.
*** Which doesn't work exactly as intended and causes a few more problems.
**** No whining allowed.
***** Please scour the hundreds of threads and find something vaguely appropriate to your subject and tag it on the end of 100 previous posts, thus resurrecting a very dead thread.
****** Multiplayer currently not supported.
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felder
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It'd seem to me that the simple thing to do in this case is not play the game with 16 civs. If you play 16 civs on a huge map...then yes you're definitely in there for the long haul.
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Fayadi
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Overseas Chinese living in Singapore
Oct 2001
time: 13:16
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Then why firaxis does not want to fix the problems,16 civ games are too long to be considered a game,its sooo sloowwww 1/2 minutes per turn what the hell? in starcraft in 10 min I got bunch of armies already!duhhhh in civ 2 it took so fast!
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Ancientfool
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I thought it was decided that it was the number of cities, not number of civs that was the slowdown....
Anyone finished a huge map game with 8 civs? slowdown or no?
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Fayadi
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Overseas Chinese living in Singapore
Oct 2001
time: 13:16
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quote:
Originally posted by Akka le Vil
Just because I'm a quite nitpicking guy : your memory does not work at 400 MHz, it works at 100 MHz quad-pumped.
Just because I'm an AMD fanboy : throw your P4 and get an Athlon. Twice cheaper and 50 % more powerful. Just can't understand how people can buy P4, they're the worst pile of crap since the Cyrix P+.
Back on topic :
The slowdow is most probably due to high number of "nodes" in the map when, later in the game, most of the tiles are covered with roads. Which means that's the size of the map that is the problem. Try a large or standard map to see if it's better. |
Thanks for the Athlon advice,next time i will buy it,but many ppl says Athlon isnt as stable as Pentium's do u agree?16 civ on standard map?everybody will have not much room to expand which can probably greatly slowed everybody.I will have to start enjoyinh 8 civ gmaes now..... 
Last edited by Fayadi on 19-12-2001 at 08:11
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John Cholewa
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Valley Stream, NY, US
Oct 2001
time: 00:16
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Fayadi: To expand on Akka's words....
The K6 didn't really have anything in the way of bugs or reliability problems. The only example I can, in fact, think of was a most interesting Windows 95 glitch involving a timing loop that used the x86 LOOP instruction. Basically, if the processor's execution of LOOP was too fast, then Win95 would hang on boot. Although the P6 (PII/PIII), at the time, was faster overall than the K6, the K6 had a much faster LOOP instruction (I believe that K6 could do LOOP in one clock cycle, whereas the P6 took several cycles, which is one of the reasons why the P6 was easier to ramp in frequency). The really ironic thing there is that the Pentium 4 experiences this problem at frequencies around, if I recall correctly, 800MHz or above and the K7 experiences it at 1.10GHz and above, but Windows 95 doesn't really exist anymore, so the point is moot. 
The K5 had some sort of incompatibility with Windows NT 3.x. Cyrix's M1 (6x86) had a few incompatibilities. The Pentium Classic had a couple particularly annoying bugs that threatened compatibility (f00f and that division one come to mind). But pretty much after that there haven't really been many issues *caused by* the processor. The Athlon and Duron have no intrinsic problems. The Pentium III and Pentium 4 have no intrinsic problems. Hell, even the VIA and Transmeta processors are pretty much on the ball!
Anyway, instabilities and reliability problems are usually the domain of the motherboard. You can get a fantastic P4-based system that will crap out on a moments notice, and you can get an amazing Athlon XP box that only boots successfully on Tuesdays, if the moon is present. As a couple examples: The Intel chipsets (for the P4) have a most interesting AGP-oriented problem. Halfway through the life of AGP, Intel tried to make a change to the spec, but the change was done in a rather half-assed way. Older AGP cards that run on a higher voltage will apparently cause the i850 and i845/i845D boards to smoke and die. The motherboard assumes that higher voltage AGP cards will have a special notch (I think it was that) which prevents the card from being put into the motherboard. But cards made on the original AGP spec obviously would not have this kludge. So, that's one of those "suck" things, though it's not really crucial, since nobody in their right mind would use a cpu from 2001 with a graphics card from 1999. On the other side of the spectrum, VIA seems to have an on-again, off-again problem with their chipset design. Some of their chipsets (like the KT133 and the KT266A) are reasonably solid, while others (the KT266) are barely workable. ALi had had similar problems, which is too bad since they laid first claim to mobile DDR SDRAM chipsets. SiS, beyond all reason, has an insanely stable, reliable, cheap chipset that powers an ECS motherboard (~$60!) which is nearly top notch in speed and comes with integrated LAN. That's their SiS735 for the Athlon and Duron families. SiS's P4-based 645 chipset is supposed to be rather good, as well, and some reviews put it at the very top of the Pentium 4 chipset performance spectra, partly due to the use of 333/166MHz DDR SDRAM. I should note on the side that the AMD760MPX chipset has a rather bizarre problem in its first revision that prevents it from properly using USB1.1 devices (the 760 and 760MP, and likely future revs of the 760MPX, will likely not have this problem).
Hrm. This message is too long. Suffice it to say, cpus don't break computers (unless you do really stupid things like pulling off heatsinks while the computer is operating), other components (and especially *combinations* of otherwise reliable components) do.
With respect to performance: Characteristics differ from program to program and game to game, so it's hard to tell what the best architecture might be for civ3. But if you were to take a general mix of games and applications, where most apps aren't particularly optimized for today's processors but a healthy percentage are optimized for the Pentium 4, the following comparison would come out:
The 1.20GHz "Thunderbird" Athlon performs roughly on par with, or perhaps slightly higher than, a 1.50GHz Pentium 4. I won't go into too much detail into why this is the case, since I've probably already written far too much and will crash the Apolyton BBS upon hitting "Submit Reply", but the most simplistic reason is that the instructions usually take about twenty to twenty-eight cycles to go from the beginning of the P4 to the end, whereas they take between ten and fifteen cycles to traverse an Athlon or Duron -- this difference makes the P4 achieve much higher clocks, but it causes poor "per clock" performance.
Anyway, the "Palomino" Athlon XP is faster than the Thunderbird/Athlon at like clock due to a few internal changes, and so the Athlon XP is given a speed number which allegedly corresponds to which frequency Thunderbird it performs like. A 1.33GHz Athlon XP is called an "Athlon XP 1500+", although, in my opinion, it performs closer to a 1.40GHz Thunderbird. On the plus side, though, that XP 1500+ will outperform (if I recall my numbers correctly) a 1.70GHz Pentium 4. The Athlon XP 1800+ is *generally* superior to the 2.00GHz Pentium 4 in performance, and the 1900+ cranks it up a bit beyond that.
Starting in January, Intel will be unveiling a newer version of the Pentium 4 known as "Northwood". The Northwood/P4 is built with a finer silicon etching pen (this isn't actual terminology -- I'm just using words like this to make it easier to understand visually) which makes it smaller so that electrons can go back and forth through it more quickly (hence, it will go to higher frequencies). Additionally, Northwood has more "cache" memory attached to the processor. I'd like to wait for final numbers, but the preliminary performance tests suggest that Northwood adds some per-clock performance over the classic P4. My estimation is that the Athlon XP 1900+ and the 2.00GHz Northwood/P4 will be pretty much equivalent in performance. The Northwood should be available, though, at 2.20GHz in January, and the Athlon XP 2000+, expected at around the same time, will likely be slightly slower overall. So the Pentium 4 will be, for the second time in its life so far, the fastest processor on the planet (it was the fastest for a week or two back in August or September, if I recall correctly). The only point of hesitation is that it is very expensive compared to the Athlon XP, primarily because from 1980 all the way to 1993 and most of the years between 1994 and 1999, Intel has had the fastest chips, so they've built up a very strong brand recognition. You pay a premium for the name (though not as much as you would have had to, say, last year).
Oh, the other bit: If you get the Pentium 4, make sure that you do *not* get it with PC133 memory. Do *not* get it with the regular i845 chipset, because that takes several speed grades off the performance of the Pentium 4. Any other chipset is reasonable, though the best options are the i850 (though it's more expensive than the other options), SiS645, or VIA's P4X266A (I think that's what it's called -- I vaguely recall that they did their 'A' thing to what used to be called the P4X266).
Okay, that's it. I just wanted to make my first post at least slightly impressive, so I let myself forget to stop writing. ^_^
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
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16-12-2001 08:40
Apart from that, you may wish to experiment/tweak with the 'distance between civs' option in the editor as well, ensuring that if the map you play on has islands, not every civ will be on the SAME island to start. Otherwise you will see a colonization race for the other island that makes the European Imperial age look like a kindergarden spat.
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