Terrible slowdown during space combats

from Stardock Forums
I'm new to the game and for some reason I get a terrible slowdown during space combats (between starships). After I initiate an attack the game basically locks up - if I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL then it begins to show the animation of lasers and as I continue to hit ctrl-alt-del I see the animation unfold frame by frame. After the combat is resolved the game returns to normal operation. I am running Win XP, Athlon 1.5ghz, Geforce 4 ti4200, 384MB ram, Creative Audigy sound card. I could try turning stuff off on the gfx but it seems a shame that I can't enjoy at least the modest graphics the game offers. Help!
thanks,
Bill
159 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Hmm...I think that the last time that someone reported this, it turned out to be a problem with the video drivers. Do you have the latest un-modified drivers? (One person who reported this had edited his video drivers to make them work with some other app).

Do you have DirectX 9.0a installed?

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I can tell you this too, with WinXP and 384 meg ram you are going to have quite a bit of virtual memory swapping if you are running a larger sized galaxy. On WinXP my peak commit after running GalCiv for a while in a gigantic galaxy is about 575 megs. I've also noticed some slowdowns in combat, usually involving the 'exploding ship' animation. I'm guessing a background thread is kicking in about then and grabbing significant CPU power. Possibly your thread and a background thread are both triggering a vmem swap at the same time? That would certainly give a huge performance hit if so.

Is your combat always slow every time? Or just some of the time, with the first couple of ships, then more or less normal after that? My slowdowns are normally just for the first ship or two to die, after that it's pretty much okay. But for some reason that exploding ship animation is a focal point for poor performance for me, whether because something else is going on in the background at the same time or what I don't know. I'm running a P4-2.4 with 512 meg rambus ram and a 64 meg Ti-4200 card.
Galactic Civilizations IV