How do I improve Civilization V's performance?

I have pretty decent hardware and I run many games on it. But Civ 5 is unacceptably slow when it reaches an advanced stage where it shows the whole map and there are many units.

I tried to monitor the CPU and memory and I couldn't find the bottleneck. I run it in a fast SSD and I didn't monitor my GPU.

I noticed a speed improvement when I changed from DX10/11 to DX9. But the performance isn't acceptable yet.

Solution 1:

Get FRAPS or some other tool to display the frame rate and monitor the effects of your changes.

There are a quite some things you could try to do:

• reduce the graphics settings
• play at a lower resolution
• use the strategic view (doesn't help as much as one would think)
• play on smaller maps
• don't zoom out as much (as Oak already said)
• win before the modern age
• install the latest graphics drivers

If you're talking about the time between turns, you'll be happy to know that the next patch is supposed to significantly reduce that time.

You did not write your exact specifications of your computer, Civilization V is a pretty resource-hungry game, you'll need a relatively new and powerful CPU and GPU to play it at decent settings.

Solution 2:

Quick Combat and Quick moves make a difference in the late game. Evidently, AI moves/fights at the animated on-screen unit speed, even in areas that are fog-covered or have not been revealed.

Switching this option reduced my turn wait-time by half.

Worth a shot for anyone.

Solution 3:

I found there were two video options that made a massive difference to the game's playability for me:

Terrain Shadow Quality set to Off in video options completely got rid of the lag for me in the map.

Leader Scene Quality set to Low stopped the diplomacy screens from loading slowly

I assume that different setups will have different optimizations, but given that you have to restart the game every time for every video change I'd recommend trying them first. I was able to play at a high resolution with 20-30 fps, which doesn't make the map feel jerky when scrolling around.

To find these I installed FRAPs to watch the FPS and started by turning everything down to the lowest setting and gradually re-enabling everything. Nothing had a noticeable lag effect apart from the Terrain Shadow Quality in the map.