A lot of people are saying the game slows down more the longer you play, I find saving & exiting & then restarting the game helps this quite a bit. Perhaps this will get fixed in a future patch.
A lot of people are saying the game slows down more the longer you play, I find saving & exiting & then restarting the game helps this quite a bit. Perhaps this will get fixed in a future patch.
Almost certainly a memory leak.
I watched the memory usage on this baby while I played turn after turn all day long. It slowly grew to 1.2 GB.
Saved/restarted/reloaded - and it's "only" using 900 megs.
That type of behavior is usually pretty indicative of a leak.
900 megs - 1.2 gigs is indicative of NO memory leak being present.
Thats very acceptable for a game like Civ
If it was going from 900 to -1.2 gigs in an hour, it might indicate it (or may not) but 300 megs in an all day session - not too bad
Absolutely untrue. The game is consuming resources and not releasing them. That's a leak.
It doesn't matter if it takes 5 years or 5 minutes to happen (except that you'd never notice the former and wouldn't care). The fact that after reloading the game only needs 900 megs to play in the same state is good evidence that it's leaking somewhere.
Leaks are a P0/P1 bug in just about any legitimate development organization, I'm sure Firaxis is no different.
BTW, "turn after turn all day long" was maybe 30-40 turns interspersed while I was doing something else. Leaking 10 megs a turn is probably bad enough to warrant at least a look.
I can't tell if it's a memory leak or if it's my GPU overheating. Here's exactly what happens to me:
I start a game, it's insanely fast.
Midway through game it starts slowing down.
After playing for a long period of time the Civ Leader screens slow to a crawl, hitching at maybe 5 FPS, normally plays smooth as butter.
Can continue playing the game for a long period of time and only the leaders hitch, then finally, the whole game hitches.
Save, quit game, load save. Smooth as butter.
Sounds like a memory leak to me.
Take a save game and keep loading it over and over again watching memory usage. You'll notice that it grows each time you load the game, eventually it will surpass the 2GB process memory limit and crash.
The "bigger" the save, the fewer loads to crash the game.
THAT is a memory leak.
just a smidge of a leak issue....nearly 200 hits of memory leaks (heap detection in application verifier) just on start of the .exe
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90846
As a software developer myself, an avid Gamer, and Civ5 addict... I just want to make a clarification to the type of problem experienced here. The OP was complaining about slow performance over time and subsequent posters referring to memory usage by the application which are two different problem, but yes some similar causes. Let me first clarify a couple of terms here.
A memory leak is first and foremost the effect seen when memory used by an application is not released back to the OS upon exiting.
Inefficient memory management is when an application continues to consume more and more memory over time through multiple cyclic behaviors.
King_Rob was describing a great scenario with the games memory management where references (pointers) to game objects are not released by explicit calls to a function called free or other garbage collection routines.
The true memory leaks we know from 'days of yore' is more of a problem under Windows XP and older OSes where private memory address space was not reclaimed once the OS is signaled a process has terminated. This was usually a problem when heap allocations were not attached to a specific process PID. Newer OSes have seen dirty heaps as a reliability issue and security problem. More innovation has been placed in the memory management routines of the OS kernel to assign heap page allocations to a PID and to scrub and release those pages once an application terminates.
If Civ 5 has a true memory leak then a simple test should reveal it, first run Civ 5, then loaded a game, then quit. We should see memory used (as reported by the OS) grow over each repeat of this test. Eventually requiring a restart of the computer.
I personally haven't seen this problem, but then again Windows 7 has a memory manager that shouldn't allow this to occur, as it keeps track off all addressed pages allocated to a PID.
I have noticed a terrible slow turn rate starting around 200 - 300 AD in my games of Civ. I have a Core 2 E8400 over clocked 3.9 Ghz, and 4 GB DDR2 1066 Ram. I have noticed the thread balancing across cores to be terrible (i.e. Core 1 maxed to 85 - 90% utilization while Core 2 is ~30%) during turn computation. My thoughtful analysis points to a couple of areas:
1) Thread execution is in contention (Dining Philosophers problem).
2) Objects in memory aren't cached on the CPU efficiently. This would be low temporal or locality of memory in executing code, or lots of threads contending for the CPU resource at once with lots of context switches.
These are just my thoughts on some game code I haven't looked at. If its of interest to you on how a game company solves these optimization problems its worth having a look at the Eve Online Dev blogs about their war on Lag. They get into how they look for places to optimize game mechanisms and memory management of the objects in the game world.
I sure hope Firaxis is spending some time optimizing the turn logic and thinking about how a 2 core CPU is computing threads vs a 4 or 8 logical core CPU. I'd like to see a better CPU utilization balance max both cores to 90 - 100% before I feel like my hardware is shot for this game.
Okay back to conquering the world.
Originally Posted by Braeburn
+1, best post on these forums yet.
+1.
That was the single greatest forum post ever conceived, written, and published.
Ever.
Civ IV still does this after final patch.. so hope they fix it quick or they will start feeding you the same old line of "its your PC not our game".
Sure puts those fanatic boys in their place; if you are a true fan you should help criticizing the developer so they know where to improve and make more people like the developer. But you can find a handful of those fanatics here blindly defending Fireaxis, making those with issues trying to seek help feel bad.
This particular part of the forum feels alot like Civ 2; when you invade a city bunch of fanatics spawns with rocks and clubs much similar to making a post about Fireaxis and Steam.
I feel educated now.The sooner we get some patches, the better.
got 6gb ddr3, i only checked how much it uses 2 times, first time it used more than 2.2gb ram, next time 1.6gb..
next turn take ages after a while
the game usually crash when trying to load or save games, if it doesnt crash, it takes forever to load or save..
+1, great post and I enjoyed learning something.
On a positive I really enjoy the cultural victory in this game.
Correct. While I admire the educational spirit of your post, this behavior is still colloquially referred to as a "memory leak", it's just a leak that's local to the Civ5 executable. Someone's probably allocating memory and likely not using it any more. If the game is allocating that memory and keeping it on purpose, then that's still a problem if it results in poor performance over time.King_Rob was describing a great scenario with the games memory management where references (pointers) to game objects are not released by explicit calls to a function called free or other garbage collection routines.
I've noticed that this game does have a memory leak (as defined by Braeburn). If I play the game for more than about 3 hours (doesn't matter how many turns occur during this time span, just playing the game does it) that everything I do on my computer until I restart is slowed considerably. Sometimes, the .exe is still running even though the game closed and I can shut it down with the taskmanager (and release some, but not all of the memory in limbo); other times it isn't listed under my processes and I just have to restart to fix the issue.
Perhaps it's caused by a specific relationship with my computer set-up or I just am unlucky, but this game definitely has a memory leak on my computer. All other games I play before a restart, and most other programs, run slowly until a restart.
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