🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 28 Feb 2013 02:42:39 +0400, Trimble Bracegirdle <no-spam@never.spam> wrote:

> I shall purchase Civilisation V

OK. General Surgeon's warning:
"Playing Civ5 can be hazardous for your PC health. GPU especially."

Due incompetence of Firaxis programmers (who mastered DirectX API, but had no idea
about optimizations, and general programming techniques as well),
running Civ5 practically is the same as running Furmark/Kombuster hour after
hour. Quite a few gamers learnt it in hard way, forced to replace their untimely
died video cards.

So before running Civ5 (install and )launch MSI Afterburner. It will show you
FPS and GPU temperature during playing.
In game's video options:
set V-Sync ON,
set Fog of War to MINIMUM.
Begin to play, look at the temperature from time to time. If it is in normal range
and fans noise do not annoy you, keep playing and enjoy.

Otherway, save your game, return to Main Menu
(again due above mentioned incompetence you cannot change video options in game)
set V-Sync OFF,
close Civ5.

In the system tray there are 2 icons of Afterburner: a plane,
and a plane with "60" number. Click "60", it will evoke Riva Server.
click on Plus icon,
select corresponding exe file - CivilizationV_DX11 or CivilizationV_DX9, depending
on what mode you prefer (DX9 is rather ugly) in
...Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\ folder.
click Wrench big icon, and set Framerate limit to 20 (20FPS is more than enough for
this game.)

(If your CPU is an AMD with typically noisy stock fan, you might want to underclock
it creating special Power Saving mode in Windows.)

And the last trick:
If you will want to do something else and ALT-TAB from the game, it still would hog
a core of CPU which, of course, is undesirable. To "calm down" Civ5 you will need set
"Leader scene quality" to minimum. In such case evoking the diplomatic screen
will put the game on hold. (Also it significantly reduce number of crashes.)


-- 
Andrew Rybenkov