Civ IV / Bink Video (*.bik) Stutter/Lag

Hi all,

There are many games today that use Bink Video for cut scenes and intros. Civ 4 is one of them, I know Oblivion is another, along with so many other games. I'm having problems with my Z96JS in that the videos lag like mad. The games play perfect with no lag at all, it's just that the video stutters every second or so and is just not smooth in general at all.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this? I remember they used to be smooth as anything on my old outdated system, the G732 w/2.66 GHz P4 + ATI Radeon M9000 64mb - my new Z96JS w/2 Ghz Dual Core + ATI Radeon M1600 256mb should be able to eat it for breakfast. I'm not sure if I had to do some tweaking on the G732 to get them smooth as well...but does anyone have any ideas? I've tried different binkw32.dll file versions out of the ones I had (some were too old and didn't load at all - others were the same), Compatibility mode, upgrading graphics drivers, changing the Civ4 config file. I've also tried playing the videos down at the minimum 1024x resolution rather than my native 1680x res. They play perfect in RADTOOLs, it is only in the game that it gives problems.

Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated,

Thanks very much,

Cat

 

If they're being streamed from disc... Try setting your power settings to max performance or an equivalent, sometimes laptop drives 'pulse' to save power which is fine most of the time but will make movies stutter.

 

I believe there's a patch out for Civ4 that fixes that. It's pretty much with ATI drivers that Bink video doesn't work well. Are you using the Omega drivers? New drivers may also help.

It's basically just that bink+ATI sucks I switched back to nvidia when I bought my new laptop, and now the video just runs like it should.

 

Check the Civ4 website ( www.firaxis.com somewhere). As Pitabred said, there are several patches out, and I'm pretty sure one of them talked specifically about this issue.

 

I have the 1.61 patch, I should have mentioned that to start - sorry about that. I also have Warlords and it's most recent patch as well. It does mention in 1.61 that it should fix the issue, but I didn't try it before patching, I'm seeing this issue with the patch already installed.

I am not streaming from disc, the files are on the HDD (which I've tried running both Ultra DMA5 and PIO Only modes to check, and also tried enabling and disabling write caching to no effect).

I have the latest ATI drivers, I updated them to 8.33 last night trying to resolve this. I'll try the Omegas again, but I don't know if it'll help. The only vid card I've ever had fail on me was a brand new nVidia I'd only bought 4 months before and hadn't overclocked - all 6 ATI's I've owned have never failed, even when overclocked lots more and for years. I'll stick with ATI thanks though

I'm not on Battery and I have PowerPlay disabled (though SpeedStep is enabled on the CPU). I have the CPU set to 'Super Performance/Game' which in all the other games and programs I've tried works great, except during Bink Videos.

Bink plays fine outside the game, its just within the game that I'm having problems. Could this be that the game is eating up so much in the way of sys resources that it is lagging the playback? If that's the case though I don't know why my M9 system with the P4 CPU was so much better...there must be some fix for this.

Thanks for the replies so far guys - does anyone have any other ideas?

Cat

Clarification: The M9 Laptop played the Bink Videos fine, but lagged in game - The M56 system I have now is the opposite. I think the M9 may have originally lagged the Binks out as well until something was changed...but I don't know what - I'm hoping one of you might ... I'll try any idea aside from getting a new laptop (This one is brand new) thanks.

 

I found the following on Firaxis' website:

 

Thanks for trying but I had tried all those things already before posting.

Here is the answer for anyone out there in the future looking for it.

How to get the Bink Videos to play properly in Civ 4 as well as Warlords:

Set the option

; Sync input to smooth interface (may run slower)
SyncInput = 0

to 1 in the Config file. Just do that, and you're all set

Thanks to all who replied,
Cat