My game is slowing to a crawl....

I play the game zoomed out (detailed graphics are just eye candy anyway) which requires much less resources and provides a better view of the overall action.

Sounds normal-ish.  Even if you stack up ships, every ship is still displayed at the same level of detail you see in the ship designer (or at maximum zoom).  This gets very resource intensive once your numbers start building up.  I find a good medium is to adjust the tactical zoom level down, and just zoom in further to keep seeing fully detailed ships.  Tactical view lets me get the big picture, the minimap keeps me alerted to what's going on where, and the normal view at high zoom lets me see all my lovely ship designs in their full glory.  I've found it surprisingly nice to be able to adjust so many visual aspects to do preformance balancing without needing to knock out portions of the game's rendering engine.

Thanks for the reply Mascrinthus. I, too, play the game well zoomed out for the better overall view, but am still having the problem. Have you encountered the same problem on huge maps, tons of planets & ships? Or is this something that is just happening to me?

Thanks Infernal, I like the different visuals and zooming in and out as well but I tend to stay fairly well zoomed out for the big picture. Any ideas on how to improve performance when playing well zoomed out on the 2-D map?

I thought one of the advantages of this game was that it ran well. even on low end systems. Mine is not a low-end system (Blackbird, quad core 6850, 3 GB Ram, and dual Nvidia GeForce 8800 ultras in SLI, all of it water cooled) and it plays Fallout 3 on the highest settings without a stutter....should I be getting performance issues with Galactic Civilizations2? 

Should you? No.  ToA is supposed be much faster than the original DL because of texture reuse.  Anti-aliasing would be an issue if your video cards were the bottleneck, which they aren't (and you have two). 

Are you playing DL or ToA?

I am playing ToA.

One mistake I may have made was that I selected "throttle frame rate" in the video options. I deselected that and turned off almost all the special video options and now the game is running better. Note that I only have an issue when I have 9 big empires, each with hundreds of ships and planets, engaged in total war on a huge map. I also have the computer show me the auto-move of the ships. I may de-select that as well because I spend a minute or two every round just watching the ships move around. That's useful in the early game when you have three ships and you want to keep track mentally of what they are doing, but late game you can't remember dozens of ship movements anyway.

Worth checking your Video drivers and motherboard drivers/chipset are bang up to date - GalCiv devs will grab each new facility/improvement in updated drivers and use them where they can, and if yours are a couple or more issues behind - I once got caught after a game update being only one driver issue behind the curve - then the game will default to a less efficient use of the graphics drivers in order to keep you going.  Given that Stardock issue so many updates and improvements, and most other game houses dont, this can crop up from time to time in GalCiv whereas in other games sticking to older driver versions its much less of an issue.

I'm running an AMD FX 60  twin 7800GTX SLI 2Gb RAM 500Gb RAID  22" Belinea LCD @1650x1080 all the highest graphics options chosen, immense/gigantic, nine players,  and its running very smoothly - even with a Climate Prediction model running in the background at the same time.  I usually play 70% in tactical view, zooming in with the mouse wheel whenever I want a closer look, not usually any problem zoomed in or zoomed out. The game does have a deserved reputation for needing less chunky hardware, so with a setup like yours, way more powerful than mine, it definitely should not be happening.  Its worth thinking through in detail how your setup works with GalCiv compared to other games in terms of the possible configuration difference/how the hardware is used. 

You could try dedicating Core 3 & 4 to the game as I believe it will not use 4 Cores, that way it  is out of the way of anything else around, and will help the process of elimination as to what is going on.

Something lurketh ..... dont give up looking ....

Regards
Zy

Thanks Zydor!

I thought something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I appreciate the excellent advice!

I am running at 1920 X 1200 on a 24' inch Dell monitor, but I don't think that is the difference. BTW, to anyone considering the Blackbird computer, I bought it for a gazillion dollars last year when it was the top of the food chain. I can't say I've been completely happy with it. It ships with Vista (ugh) and while it does work well, I've never felt that I was getting the power inherently promised in the build. It did run Fallout great (awesome game if you like RPGs), but I've tweaked as much as I dare on it, but Istill run into occasional problems where Ishouldn't as with this game. Just an FYI.

Whoa, Dell makes 24 foot monitors?

LOL!

I wish! Sorry, my Dell 24" monitor I mean! I'm actually typing this on my apple laptop and squinting to see. I think my old eyes could benefit from something larger than this laptop screen. Which is why I got a 24" for my desktop. Which still doesn't always help. Or maybe I just need to stop putting everything at maximum resolution for the crisp sharp image.....which is so tiny I can't see it.

Seriously, even with a 24" monitor, with the resolution set to 1920 x 1200 I STILL have a hard time seeing the research turn number.....whether it takes two or three turns to research diplomatic translators. The font doesn't help either, they all look the same to me.

Or maybe it's just tiime to get the lasik surgery.

No, he has a 24 foot-inch Dell monitor.  Dell's proprietary length measurement. 

Other ideas - more to trigger thought than definitive probables ....

-  Sound Card, often a culprit of the wacky faults, check driver updates

-  Registry.  Is it cleaned out?  Use a Registry cleaner to check it - Uniblue do a good one, it doesnt cost much.  Initial enthusiasm inherent in a new build means lots of loads and installs - registry can sometimes groan a bit under the weight of all the new stuff/deletions/poor software programming leaving bits behind in the Hives etc etc.

-  I note the water cooler - good move - is it doing its job?  Heat sensor check can at times show up heating issues, and that definitely is a culprit in a huge number of wacky looking faults.

-  Memory.  Is it seated properly, worth turning the beast off, grounding yourself, and giving the memory boards a firm (but controlled lol!) shove to make sure they are seated firmly.

- Its possible a memory module on one of the memory boards is going/is faulty.  Download a memory check utility, lots around, and run a test overnight.  MemCheck always a good start as a utility.

- Open her up and check for dust clogging air intakes, cpu's, gpu's.  It can gather amazingly quickly, quick squirt with a compressed air can (with PC switched off and cooled down ....) can sometimes do the trick.

-  Windows software fully updated ?

-  Read only full disk check for bad sectors etc, turn off automatic fix at first, just find any lurking and then decide what to do.

-  Run Taskmanager see whats taking up CPU resource, might be something running in the background you forgot about.

-  Check all cabling seated properly on the motherboard and that no connector is working loose.

-  Do a visual check of the motherboard of any raised capacitor. Most motherboards have built in indicators on the top of these raised capacitors, and if issues with them will show a dark segment on the surface of the capacitor dome.  Indictors showing dont always mean armagedeon, so see a qualified tech if you see any (they are sensitive indicators and will often show levels of wear and tare but the motherboards still works ok, for the moment).  Non the less if you spot some, go get professional tech advice about next steps.  If a lot of capacitors are showing these dark dome indications on part of the top surface, it can mean the motherboard is going south, dont delay go talk to someone who knows their stuff about it - its not something to ignore.  It can happen if the board or CPU was ever subjected to severe overheating and degraded the capacitors.  Keep perspective, its unlikely frankly, its rare this will show up, but it can, so keep an eye on that one.

-  If still issues  - Suicide is an option ......  .....

-  But preferably head over to www.guru3d.com log into the forum there, and post for help.  There are a number of spaced out PC Nerds there, who are amongst the most helpful, friendly and knowledgeable guys on the Planet...... who at night time subject themselves to subliminal techniques to update their latest thinking on PCs, and then spend every waking moment up to their armpits in their latest nuclear driven glycol powered nano PC, and their idea of a social event is a disertation on the register cores of the latest IBM i7 cpu ..... 

They get very impressed when people remember to say please and thank you ....

Regards
Zy

Hi Zydor,

I am overwhelmed at the length and thoroughness of your response! Thank you! I am somewhat tech-savvy for a non IT person and have done most of what is one your list as part of my normal computer maintenance routine. Except, duh, I hadn't checked for new drivers in a few months. Most of the issue went away when I disabled the frame rate throttle and once I updated the Nvidia driver with the Jan 9th iteration. Since then everything has been running great. I really appreciate your response.

I hope you save that post so you can just cut and paste it for the next guy who is scratching their head over performance issues! A bushel of good karma for you! Thanks again!

Great stuff - well done

Keep your eye on Graphics Drivers - the GalCiv devs will automatically use any improvements in the Drivers as it gives us an ever improving game.  If the driver you have loaded does not know about a particular routine they are using, it defaults to a slooooow  routine to keep you going else you would in all likelyhood crash.  It will be why the other games worked and GalCiv didnt - our Devs were using the latest uptodate facilities to improve the game, your driver never knew about that, so defaulted to the fallback routine - the other games just used the older techniques so the driver purred away no problem albeit less effieiently than GalCiv.

All game board devs yell "drivers", but its not often the case its needed and most ignore the stentorian cry, understandably when it has no effect.  However, in GalCiv its critical to keep them uptodate - works for me as we get a better game experience, a graphics driver check once every 6-8 weeks is a small price to pay for what GalCiv Devs give us.

Regards
Zy

That was added shortly after GalCiv II DL was released in Feb. 2006.  Users with high end graphics cards were having frequent crashes because their video cards were overheating!