Civ 4 Patch 1.52

[Verbena]

I saw at Civfanatics (http://www.civfanatics.com), that Firaxis released a new patch for Civ 4.

v1.52 is a major upgrade to Civ IV and includes numerous optimizations for memory usage that should help performance on
all machines but are tailored to especially improve performance on machines at or near the minimum specification.

Major changes include:

- Shared low-level graphics buffers
- Removed many unused fonts and reduced interface memory usage
- Paged out units which are not visible
- Reduced terrain data size and overhead
- Reduced route data size
- Created a set of low-res movies for machines without dynamic texture support (this is a separate download)

These changes not only reduced the amount of system memory required, but lowered video memory usage extensively.
Also, the rate at which the game consumes memory in the late-game has decreased, which is extremely important.
You can use the in-game auto-patcher or one of these Download Mirrors:
3D Downloads (http://www.3ddownloads.com/Strategy/Civilization%204/Patches/v152PATCHREL.exe" target="_blank) | Take2 Germany (ftp://ftp.take2.de/patches/civ4_update_v152.exe" target="_blank) | FileFront (http://files.filefront.com/Civilization+IV+v152+Patch/;4509756;;/fileinfo.html" target="_blank) | 3D Gamers (http://www.3dgamers.com/dlselect/games/civilization4/civ4patch1.52.exe.html" target="_blank) | Koldar (ftp://ftp.koldar.net/CivilizationIV/v152PATCHREL.exe" target="_blank)
Worthplaying ([URL=http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=30755)

[Syl]

Major upgrade on the smoothness on my end after installing this patch. I still can't play "huge" games without some massive framerate issues (probably because i have multiple background programs downloa....er... running), but overall the framerate is far more manageable.

Game still takes a gigantic amount of memory on large maps though, last night my Earth-huge map (1800's or so) was taking around 700 megs of ram up.

[ÜberJumper]

Excellent!

[Nesta]

Oh, this is great fricking news. Now maybe I can play on large maps!

[Acidpoptart]

I think they learned their lesson. For those that dont know, someone in the community created his own optimization patch that helped ALOT of people out. Everyone forwarded his work to firaxis, and I hope this includes most of those optimizations. Yay.

[Heretic Machine]

Major upgrade on the smoothness on my end after installing this patch. I still can't play "huge" games without some massive framerate issues (probably because i have multiple background programs downloa....er... running), but overall the framerate is far more manageable.

Game still takes a gigantic amount of memory on large maps though, last night my Earth-huge map (1800's or so) was taking around 700 megs of ram up.

I played last night from 3am to about 9am, it was my first game. I had no trouble up until that last hour, when Windows started telling me I was running out of virtual memory :p

[The Iron Weasel]

I can feel this game start sinking its claws in everytime I play it for more then 3 hours, so I immidiatly have to stop for fear of not going to work.