Civ V oddity with video cards.....

Meghan54

Lifer
Oct 18, 2009
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My 6950 1GB card is beginning to artifact at stock speeds, so it's off to RMA-land for it.

Looking at AT's bench page for specs on some games I play (mostly RTS type) at my usual resolution, 1920 x 1200, and noticed something odd.

Civ V's bench results on AT show that for a single card solution, the GTX 560 Ti is the fastest card. It even outperforms a GTX 580 SLi setup.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU11/203


Of course, it's just in that game at that particular resolution, but I play that game a LOT! And honestly, that 6950 absolutely sucked when the display was full of units.

So what is it about Civ V and the 560 Ti?
 

Meghan54

Lifer
Oct 18, 2009
11,504
5,028
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2500k @ 4.5GHz

8GB G. Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 CAS 8

Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H mb

Sapphire 6950 video cd.

WD Black hd's

Corsair 850HX ps


You know, the usual stuff......plus....

WC'ing via Heatkiller 3.0, dual DDC2 pumps, Thermochill 120.3 rad, TFC 240 rad. Mess of fans, too.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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480
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Mabe they never updated the benchmark page?
The gtx560ti is right where it should be, close to the gtx470.

I remember reading about Nvidia enabling something in there driver in January,that made Civ V run much better.



edit: this one is from June 2011..looks like the gtx560ti will solve your peticular problem.

37890.png
 
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AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
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The situation with the GTX560 Ti being faster than the GTX580 is probably because of older drivers.

Generally Fermi cards perform much better in Civ V and i believe the Game needs more than 4 threads from the CPU (especially with lots of units in the game) but i haven't tested that yet to verify it.
 

Spjut

Senior member
Apr 9, 2011
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Nvidia's dominance in Civ5(at least on DX11) is because they support the DX11 multithreaded rendering and AMD does not
 

mmaestro

Member
Jun 13, 2011
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FWIW, I've found Civ V on my 560 Ti to be smooth as butter (at 1600x900) with all details turned up at the start of the game, but it gets slower in the end game with a lot of units for me. When I OCed the card (I have it up to 920Mhz core clock now) it ran pretty smoothly with a lot going on. Interestingly, I could stress test the card with no problems at 950Mhz but Civ V would crash at that speed.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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FWIW, I've found Civ V on my 560 Ti to be smooth as butter (at 1600x900) with all details turned up at the start of the game, but it gets slower in the end game with a lot of units for me. When I OCed the card (I have it up to 920Mhz core clock now) it ran pretty smoothly with a lot going on. Interestingly, I could stress test the card with no problems at 950Mhz but Civ V would crash at that speed.

WHat cpu are you running?
 

notty22

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2010
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There are also various benchmarks included with Civ5 that highlight different architectures, high and low points of various models from either gpu company.
I don't have the game, so I can't give more detail. But I read various articles mentioning the various benchmarks. As to which ones reflect actual game play-single or multi- I'm not sure. I know one is particularly tessellation heavy. So we know Nvidia dominates that one, there are others that show the cards at their usual respective tier relative to price etc. The tesselation highlights the landscape in that game mostly. Another aspect some love the effect, and others can live without.
 

peonyu

Platinum Member
Mar 12, 2003
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Dont compare Civ 5 running on a Nvidia card to a AMD card. Ever. It is probably the most skewed and unfair comparison there is today. Virtually any game but that one is a apples to apples comparison.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
14,387
480
126
Dont compare Civ 5 running on a Nvidia card to a AMD card. Ever. It is probably the most skewed and unfair comparison there is today. Virtually any game but that one is a apples to apples comparison.

" but I play that game a LOT! "

I think you need to read the whole first post.:biggrin:
 

96Firebird

Diamond Member
Nov 8, 2010
5,709
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Dont compare Civ 5 running on a Nvidia card to a AMD card. Ever. It is probably the most skewed and unfair comparison there is today. Virtually any game but that one is a apples to apples comparison.

Even when the OP says he mostly plays Civ V?

Weird, that doesn't make any sense... :hmm:
 

Madcatatlas

Golden Member
Feb 22, 2010
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Civ5 is a great game, and if i was only playing Civ5, i would definetly get a cheap geforce until AMD unlocks multithreaded support this that particular game.

I expect great things from AMDs GCN architecture though, it might be a beast in terms of multithread performance.
 

greenhawk

Platinum Member
Feb 23, 2011
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As peonyu said, Civ 5 is about one of the most unbalanced games to compare AMD to nVidia video cards. The reason is taht Civ 5 makes use of a lot of tessilation (sp?) and the AMD cards can not keep up.

OP, if you are serious about wanting Civ 5 at it's best, you need to look at a nVidia card, any one really. Though the older 8800GT I had also sucked in the game, but my GTX570 plays it nicly.

No other fix I can see for getting Civ 5 to run nice. Even when I had my 8800GT, lowest settings and disabling features still had the game running crap (though I think the game is ment to be CPU heavy, and I still only have a Q6600).
 

AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
14,000
3,357
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Dont compare Civ 5 running on a Nvidia card to a AMD card. Ever. It is probably the most skewed and unfair comparison there is today. Virtually any game but that one is a apples to apples comparison.

As peonyu said, Civ 5 is about one of the most unbalanced games to compare AMD to nVidia video cards. The reason is taht Civ 5 makes use of a lot of tessilation (sp?) and the AMD cards can not keep up.

So, because Fermi cards are faster it is unfair and unbalanced to compare the cards in this game ?? :eek:

well sorry, I didn’t know we only compare the graphics cards in games that make them produce the same frames :p

You have to be joking me right ???
 

bryanW1995

Lifer
May 22, 2007
11,144
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Dont compare Civ 5 running on a Nvidia card to a AMD card. Ever. It is probably the most skewed and unfair comparison there is today. Virtually any game but that one is a apples to apples comparison.

I played that game almost exclusively for 6 months, and since then it has remained a steady player in my rotation. I like AMD a lot, but I would be pissed if I needed a 6950 5870 just to match the performance of my gtx 460 768 in that game.

BTW, I'm embarrassed for AMD that they STILL haven't solved this issue. Apparently nv gave Ryan permission to discuss it in that thread b/c they knew that either amd wouldn't or couldn't add support for that anytime soon. In 5 months civ5 has gone from a very popular/current game to old news, by the time amd gets their support up for it the game will be well over a year old.
 
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tviceman

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Mar 25, 2008
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FWIW, I've found Civ V on my 560 Ti to be smooth as butter (at 1600x900) with all details turned up at the start of the game, but it gets slower in the end game with a lot of units for me. When I OCed the card (I have it up to 920Mhz core clock now) it ran pretty smoothly with a lot going on. Interestingly, I could stress test the card with no problems at 950Mhz but Civ V would crash at that speed.

Weird. I'm running the game at 1920x1200 with 4x MSAA, on an i7 2600k and gtx560ti @ 1000mhz and it never, ever slows at all with a game of 9 AI's and 16 city-states. Granted, my card is running at higher clocks, but I'm also running at a higher resolution and with 4x MSAA.
 
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mmaestro

Member
Jun 13, 2011
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Weird. I'm running the game at 1920x1200 with 4x MSAA, on an i7 2600k and gtx560ti @ 1000mhz and it never, ever slows at all with a game of 9 AI's and 16 city-states. Granted, my card is running at higher clocks, but I'm also running at a higher resolution and with 4x MSAA.
What I found on mine was the difference between 850Mhz (the card's speed out of the box) and even 900Mhz was really noticable. Made a huge difference. So an additional 100Mhz on top of that I can totally believe would be enough to give you the performance you're seeing.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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480
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What I found on mine was the difference between 850Mhz (the card's speed out of the box) and even 900Mhz was really noticable. Made a huge difference. So an additional 100Mhz on top of that I can totally believe would be enough to give you the performance you're seeing.

Did you up the cards voltage any? Or is that 920 with stock voltage?
 

mmaestro

Member
Jun 13, 2011
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Stock voltage. I've just been using EVGA Precision. I keep meaning to download Afterburner to see how much higher I can get, but I've been strapped for time recently.
 

greenhawk

Platinum Member
Feb 23, 2011
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So, because Fermi cards are faster it is unfair and unbalanced to compare the cards in this game ?? :eek:

well sorry, I didn’t know we only compare the graphics cards in games that make them produce the same frames :p

You have to be joking me right ???

not joking, but I perfer comparisons that are a bit of this, a bit of that and seeing how well each fairs over all.

comparing the current nVidia and AMD video cards with Civ 5 is like how intel had reviewers compare intel CPUs and AMD cpus back in the early 90's. Back when intel made sure their system had the best drives, the best video cards and twice or more the amount of RAM vs the setup AMD system, then run a comparison between the two "systems" to show which was better.

If someone likes justifying <x> over <y> by stuffing up any chance of a level playing field, then yes, I will carry on about the testing method.

Do not take my previous post to say the card I have is the best, The point was that Civ 5 is unbalanced more than the difference between cards should be when looking at 80% or so of other tests/comparisons. The % difference in Civ 5 is abnormal so as a comparison, it is a crap test.

Unfortunitly, if the OP cares about Civ 5 as they have mentioned, they do not have a huge list of options given this information if they want the game to run at it's best.
 

Meghan54

Lifer
Oct 18, 2009
11,504
5,028
136
Well, I do care about Civ V, so I bought last night an eVGA Superclocked 560 Ti as a substitute card. Would have liked one of those Sapphire Toxic 6950 2GB cards, but someone keeps buying them! ;)


And, as it turns out, the 6950 that's in the computer right now, isn't bad. It only acted up in Civ V. Running Furmark got no faults from it......so probably the tess./whatever Civ has running that the AMD card doesn't like was the culprit. The card also was perfect running Starcraft 2 and anything else I threw at it.
 
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