Looking for Civ4 thoughts

[Guest vulture]

I have an Advent 7049 laptop, 3.08GhZ P4, 1 Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce Go 5300 (64 Mb memory) graphics card. I recently upgraded the defalt drivers (6.4.10.4487) to v 81.85 (obtained from Jeroen's page).

The older version of the driver had problems with Civilization 4 when it tried to play in-game videos (.bik format). Sometimes they were fine, but sometimes they wouldn't play and/or the game would crash. This went along with continual hard disk usuage - the computer was using 1.5 Gb of page file (I have 1 Gig of memory remember). Other times the videos (even the same video) would play fine. My impression was that the problem cropped up when the game tried to play a video at the same time as saving the game state to disk.

So, as I said, with the updated drivers, this problem disappeared (I had some saves that crashed every time upon loading and trying to play a video segment, which then worked fine with the new drivers). Does anyone have any ideas about what has changed between the two driver versions that could cause this difference? I don't think it is limited to this graphics card - I've seen quite a few reports of similar problems from other people, and the odds of them all having Advent / Medion laptops seem quite small. The large page file usuage makes me suspect that there is some memory leak assosciated with playing the videos, but I'm a long way from being an expert in this area. Any ideas gratefully received (and forwarded to the Civ4 developers, since I'm a beta-tester).

[Night Fire]

Well I replaced bink.dll to fix my videos, the version that comes with the game is an older version, and the new one fixed the movies and wonder movies. I hadn't heard of newer drivers that fixed it, but then you may have had a different problem to the corrupt bink ones.