Man, I’m in a real pickle here. Been digging around all night to see where my computer stands as far as this game goes and I’m going to come up short on the video card. I can’t really upgrade it since I’m using a slimline machine and the PSU won’t hack it with modern cards and they don’t seem to make PSUs in the right form factor over 300W. So, I’ve got 2 options if I want to play the game at maximum, buy a new computer or buy a new case, PSU and video card.
I actually wouldn’t be too against buying a new PC except I’m simply not a gamer and aside from Civ5 I probably won’t use the horsepower for anything else. Also I just dumped $150 on this one to upgrade the OS and video card earlier this year. I bought the slimline PC because I one day hoped to demote this thing to a HTPC and the case size is perfect for a media cabinet.
My current PC meets all the requirements for Civ5 except the video card, natch, so trying to run it as-is and seeing if I can tolerate the low setting is probably the prudent thing at this point. Getting a new cabinet, PSU and GPU is the next step but if I drop $350 on that plus the $150 I already spent and I’m 2/3rds of the way to a new machine. What a bummer.
Lantern, that chart is gold! Thanks for posting it.
Omniscient, there’s going to be a demo version put out today. You could grab that while you wait for your package to arrive and get an idea of the graphics quality. I understand Firaxis is using a whole new graphics engine which is optimized for multi-core machines so if your computer is tops except for the gpu, you might still be happy with the results.
You graphics card is probably not a DX11 card, DX11 is very recent and if you did not buy your card recently it is most likely not DX11 capable. Don’t worry about it, it only affects a few additional effect, DX9 is totally fine.
Well, another 30 minutes and the demo is downloaded :).
Can’t play it. pre loaded last night and it decrypted fine this morning but it won’t run after I get the screen that says select DX9 or DX11. I click on either one and then…nothing at all happens. I try to launch from a shortcut and I get a missing dll. So I’m uninstalling and reinstalling.
I didn’t have a lot of time to play, but I started it up and played for maybe 15 minutes. So far, it looks great - a good mix of familiarity from previous Civ games and new stuff to keep you interested. Very pretty graphics!
My big challenge is going to be unlearning my old patterns. Or, at least, verifying they still work. The tech tree, for example, is mostly familiar, but are my old preferences going to still be worth while?
Now if I could just quit this “job” thing and play Civ all day…
Edit: after reading Palooka’s post: I have a brand-new high-end rig, top of the line video card, tons o’ memory, fast CPU, all that jazz, and things run and look GREAT! Then again, they better, I dropped some serious cash on this machine.
Yes, it’s important to note that an x1300 mobility is like fifteen tiers below the minimum spec. It’s impressive that it even runs. Home with my overclock’d quad and SLI’d 8800s later.
My computer crashes to desktop after the opening movie. Tech support message boards are down, so I can’t ask for help there. Any ideas what could be wrong?
You should find a file called usersettings.ini in a Civ folder somewhere. For me it was in C:\Documents and Settings\Myname\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization 5 Demo
There should be a line called “SkipIntroVideo = 0” somewhere. Change the 0 to 1, and it’ll skip the cutscene and not crash on you. Obviously if you have the full version, the path will be different.
I find myself preferring the strategic view to the more graphical view most of the time. My computer is between the minimum and recommended values, though it still plays fairly smoothly with maximum graphical settings for the terrain, at least at the beginning of the game. Overall the graphics are much uglier than in Civ 4, though part of that may be from having an outdated computer.
I can understand that some weird hardware/software combo on millions of PCs cannot all be accounted for and cause issues here and there but this seems to be happening across all sorts of setups and it is smack at the beginning of the game (can’t even get to the menu screen from what I read).
Doesn’t anyone do any testing anymore? Not like this is a difficult issue to come across.
Now all worried about what will happen when I get home eager to play.
Still crashes without even seeing the menu screen.
You would think I’d know by now that the first month of release is actually the open beta for any major release. Dammit I’m so disappointed/angry.
Oh yeah and for me, this isn’t the demo. It’s the full paid for version. If I didn’t love this series so much there’s no way I’d every buy first month.
