Civ 5 on the m11x?

I'm trying to get a decent frame rate with DX9. I tried everything on high, and have been going down from there ... so far lots of things are at off/minimum/low ... now I am trying it with fog of war and terrain set to medium. :/

I have turbo mode on but overclock off (I am having trouble getting a stable overclock). Anyone have any suggestions ... ?

*Edit1* using the alienware in my sig ...

*Edit2* After setting everything at the lowest settings (default settings) I'm getting decent framerates. Am I missing something here?

*Edit3* Am overclocking at 166 now ... I don't think its that stable but its not giving me any noticeable boost. What settings are people using who say they can do dx9 mode in high?

*Edit4* I am using the stock dell drivers. Is there a big performance gain with modded drivers for Civ5?

 

In general I think people have reported better game performance with the modded drivers starting with 258.96. Give those a try.

What frame rates are you getting? I have everything set on high except shadows and I'm getting low 30s to 50s. During the interval between turns when the AI kicks in I see it drop lower, but I honestly don't have a problem with that.

 

I'm getting framerates in the teens. It sucks. I'll try the modded drivers then, I hope they fix things

 

Are you white-listing the game? It doesn't automatically use the Nvidia gpu for me. It works flawlessly when it's white-listed for me in DX9. I just hope an update comes for DX10/11 because it looks SOOO much better with increased tessellation. I know that sounds stupid since it looks great on DX9 but it's true!

I played it on my desktop for the first time and my jaw dropped at how much better it looked.

 

When I first tryed playing the game it used the integrated gpu and would run on either dx9 or 10/11.
After I switched it to the nvidia gpu it crashes on start with dx10/11.
I've been playing on dx on all medium and my framerates are more than fine at start. Late game the game crawls though.
I'm running my fsb at 150 with turbo on and powermizer disabled.
The cpu will hover around 100% on turn changes and starts taking a really long time late game and gets super choppy.
I also have noticed some heat issues... I just had my first hard freeze in a long while and the cpu was reading almost 80 degrees!
I will definitely be playing this on my m11x but I do wish that the late-game performance wasn't so horrible.

Seeing as how all of my performance issues appear to be cpu related I think I'll try turning the graphics up to high.
One last thing, I also notice late-game that when my screen is whizzing around the map that the textures and models are really delayed. I'll have a second or 2 of absolutely no textures sometimes (not the normal low-res textures while the high-res ones load)

 

I bought it off of steam so only steam needs to be white-listed, right? At least thats what I thought.

I played it on my girlfriend's desktop - dx10/11 mode with all settings on high running at nearly 1080p. Was so amazingly pretty.

 

White listing Steam does absolutely nothing for games. Same goes for any game launcher. This seems to be a common misconception by people here. You need to whitelist the game executable itself.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\sid meier's civilization v\

There are two exe's in there, one for DX9 and the other for 10/11.

 

Sorry what is white listing ? i know a noobish question but my game is slowing down alot then again it is the biggest possible game possible (marathon, and world and 12 civs )

 

Do you have an R1 (C2D) or an R2 (Ci)?

White listing applications is required for the R2's nvidia Optimus driver. You can force affinity to either the IGP or the GPU for any application you like, making it a hands-free affair from that point forward. As simple is it is, people are still often confused by it.

The R1 has manual switch via Fn+F6, so white listing doesn't apply.

 

Thanks,that and getting a steady overclock more than solved it.

 

Just as a FYI...

There is a feature on Gamespot showing how different RAM, CPU and graphics settings effect Civ 5's performance and the visual differences between the different graphics settings.

Sorry, I am at work right now and cannot link to it (the Gamespot site is banned and locked), but it is one of the very recent main PC features.

Stain

 

Or...

His having it properly white listed /fixes/ it. There is no problem getting mid 30s to mid 50s on high settings. The only drop in frames you'll see is between turns when the AI kicks in.

 

I get terrible framerates in the single digit range on my R1 M11x on a huge map. But this only occurs when moving around the map or during AI turns. Sadly, this also occurs on my i7 desktop with a HD5850. Has anyone noticed how textures load so slowly? They seem to pop-in from grey to the textures.

 

Yeah, the weird thing is that going from low to medium to high doesn't seem to make much of a difference... Civ 5 is a strange game. Very good, but strange programming...

 

Really? SC2 runs flawlessly on Ultra settings for me. Football Manager, which is the most calculation intensive game ever, also quite snappy on my M11x. There is a difference between the engine that it is used you know?!

 

I suspect the problem lies in the R2's cpu "extra" features like Turboboost... Slowing and speeding up the CPU is already a tricky thing, but then you add games that might or might not make intensive use of multiple cores, etc etc...

I doubt Civ 5 was meant to be run on a cpu like the one on the M11x, it was probably never even tested in one.

 

Has anyone else experienced "jumpy" graphics on menus? When I start the game in DX9 mode, the menu text is very unstable. What can I do to resolve this? I'm using the Verde driver version 260.89.

 

Any other thoughts on this? I understand this game might be cpu intensive at the later stages, but and I can deal with choppy in turns but I hope I'm not getting artifacts and regular (every 30+ mins ) crashes at later turns like i'm used to now.

 

Has anyone tried the Game in Huge Map, Marathon Before building Roads. I trying to See if the m11x are having the Same crash as the M17x

 

I'm playing Civ5 on Huge with DX10, its slow but completely stable (over 50 hours now). DX9 will HUGELY increase FPS (and the fact that tesselation is non-existent) but beware! Civ 5 crashes if you try to load a DX10/11 game save after you've started the program in DX9 mode... So make your choices before you start any game!

If you do want to play on DX10/11 deactivate tesselation, it eats the GT 335m for breakfast!

 

Cool, good to know you can run that well in a M11xR1 with only 2gb of ram, I have a R1 but with 4gb.

 

Yeah stability wise no probs but even with my momentus XT load times are pretty long (ie minutes) so thats why I'm upgrading to 4gb RAM.

 

Well, since you brough it up, I wonder if i´m gonna see any significant improvement if I upgrade my M11xR1 ram from 4gb to 8gb.

 

I doubt you will. There are some good articles from tomshardware.com who've done comparisons betweeen 4gb/8gb/16gb and application speed. Very little gain, even in photoshop. Pretty much no gain in games. Don't forget that games which are programmed for 32bit which you run under 64bit STILL can't use more than the 3GB that 32bit allows for!

As a rule of thumb, only progs programmed in 64 bit will be able to use >3GB ram, most, if not all games these days are programmed in 32bit, so will not be able to use more RAM even if you have it.

There are some tweaks that you can apply to Win 7 to make 32bit progs use more RAM but...do it at your own risk.

 

I can't seem to get the game working under DX10/11 on my R2, it gets through the intro and then crashes.

I'm currently running the modded 265.90 drivers, and both the CPU and GPU are OC'ed, along with gamebooster going.

Any ideas on how to get this game working on DX10/11, as it seems to run ok on my Asus G50 (Although I only get about 15-20 fps), whereas I can get this game to even load

 

nvidia 260.99 drivers run fun with dx 10/11

 

Where can you disable tesselation? The game options only let you set it to low, medium, or high.

 

Disable tessalation and disable AA in nvidia control panel if you haven't. It messes up all games for now.

 

Thanks for the clarification. My system came with Steam preloaded and for some reason it was already on the whitelist but I figured that it didn't need to be. It's probably bad actually because I have Steam up a lot and I would think that the graphics card switches over to the high performance settings when really I don't need it up.

Fun stuff...

 

More on this -- It already has Steam and the Windows Sidebar whitelisted but it's not allowing me to remove them from the list.

Anyone encounter the same thing? If so, anyone know of a way to get them off the list?

 

I took off AA, but I can't find tessalation under the control panel, which exact option is it?

 

That option is for 400/500 series cards only. nVidia cards before them didn't have any tesselation abilities.

 

Applications that nvidia includes in their default list can't be removed via the control panel. I believe I recall some sort of back end means of editing the list though. Google that if it's really important.

In any case, having steam.exe white listed isn't really a problem. It doesn't appear to activate the 335 - at least not on my system - not even during video playback within the client.

 

With Kopicha's new drivers (the 266.44), I was finally able to run Dx11 Mode, and have it run decently, I haven't had a chance to play an extended game yet, but will keep you guys informed.

 

Somewhat unrelated note.... when the hell is Nvidia going to fix the 260.99 drivers so that we can use AA again? Not having any AA is pretty annoying, especially for games that are old enough that you can run it at 4x or even 8x.

and secondly... I don't hold much hope for Civ 5. My friend has a fairly high end Core i5 gaming laptop w/ 8 gigs of RAM and says he can't seem to get very good framerates. Granted, this is all heresay... but I probably won't even attempt to get this to run on my M11x until I get some more proof that it's even viable.

 

Civ V seems to work ok on my new refurb m11x r1. I took the dx10/11 option because I'm trying to see what it can do. I'm using the Dell supplied nvidia driver at 1366x768.

Maybe I haven't picked a demanding enough scenario ? I just started playing whatever happens when you select a new game. Played to around 700 AD so far.

 

Reviving this thread. Just got my R3 in the mail, and the first game I tried to load was Civ V...not a great game, but it was a complete mess on my last laptop and I wanted to see what it would look like when it worked.

Instead, I'm getting the ApphangB1 error. I can only load a black screen, whether I'm starting in DX9 or DX10/11. I've had this before, but not with games; DirectX is up to date, as are my drivers. Other programs work fine so far. Am I missing something...anyone else have this problem?

 

yep i am getting the saame on a new r3- i7 6gig . it wont run

 

Works great on my R3. Were you loading it from an external DVD drive or from Steam?

 

ok i have got it to run on by lowering the res in the nividia control panel- i am personaly using steam.

sas do you change the res to run it or not?

 

Hmmm... I am also going through Steam, playing it on a 23" 1080p monitor hooked into my R3 via HDMI cable. I let it autoselect settings at native 1080p resolution and i remember them being relatively high.

Are you sure the .exe steam is using is whitelisted in nvidia's 3d settings?

 

Hello there,

Bumping this topic as I couldn't run Civ V on the m11x r3 I just recieved.
Found a solution that's not listed here: Games don't run on my M11X-R3 - Alienware Forum - Alienware Club - Dell Community

In short: seems like the game not launching in either Dx9 or Dx10/11 was due to a problem with the intro movie. All one need is to disable it;
"Go to "My Documents/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization V/"
Open the file "usersettings.ini"
Search for the option "SkipIntroVideo = 0" and change the 0 to a 1"
Note that it still takes a good couple of seconds for the game to launch after a black screen, just give it time.

Worked for me, now I can play the game without any further tweakings