Massive Slowdowns - how can I fix it?

Massive Slowdowns - how can I fix it?

from GalCiv2 Forums
The game usually runs fine at the start of the game, but as I get more and more planets and ships, the game gradually gets choppier and choppier. When I reached 15 planets and around 50 ships, the framerate was constantly in the single digets (spelling?). Changing the verious game and graphical settings, saving and reloading, saving then relaunching the game and reloading, reinstalling, using different versions, and updating all of my drivers all did next to nothing to improve this.

My two questions are:
1. Why is this happening?
2. How can I prevent it from happening again?

My system specifications are above the reccomended:
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ @1.99ghz
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis with 128 mb of video memory (overclocked the core speed from 325 mhz to 364 mhz)
Memory: 1024 mb
Audio Card: I have no idea. It is old, though.
Hard Drive: This shouldn't matter, but I have about 40 gb remaining.
4,750 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
hey dark, i made a post on this [GalCiv2 Memory Usage]. The game allocates around 500MB of memory at the start then after a few hours of gaming (varies), i've seen memory usage go up to 1.6GB (it may exceed this).

You're video card is so-so.. but ifs a problem with that then you should see problems at the START of the game immediately. The problem is with available memory. Your 1GB of RAM will run out after a while with this game. Whats your HardDisk speed? 5400? less? The reason your peroformance gets choppy is that since u have no more ram the system is starting to use your HD space as virtual memory, meaning physical disk rotations are becoming more and more frequent. slows down peroformance considerable especially if u have a 1 year old HD.

upgrade your ram man. i did. sad though since it says 512MB is "recommended"
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The newest beta has helped a little. Now I'm in the double didgets... barely.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to buy more memory (I'm totally broke because of NO income (I am 13)).
If I wanted to upgrade my 4/5 year old hard drive to something faster, I would have to upgrade my entire motherboard into a PCI-Express motherboard with ATA HD support. That would call for an entirely new Processor, Video Card, and RAM Sticks.

I eventually will do the latter, probably from my birthday and christmas money... (My grandma is waaay too generous with her christmas money, especially that one time where she handed me a check worth $180. My other grandma still hands me fives.)
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