I have the3 game set to fastest and it still is slow.  I can play for about 2 hours before the game starts lagging and then freezes.  After that I have to reboot my laptop to get it working again.  I suspect they have some bad data leaks within their loops.

I've got a recent and expensive build as well and didn't experience MUCH lag but the amount I saw was still a lot compared to what should be expected. Most common occurences were during the monument select screen and city overview, while passing specific turns, for whatever reason turn 190 has been a constant issue across multiple games, and while looking at the tech tree, which I also was never able to finish despite making science a preeminent focus of mine throughout the game.

I have had to rent a VM in the cloud to play the closed beta because the game's graphics are so demanding. It makes it quite unlikely that I will buy the full game if this is still the case at launch, though I'm still on my first playthrough so maybe I will change my mind.

Thanks for the info Facist. But it changed nothing here. I'm afraid there is no time now to fix it before the end of the closed beta.

Quite a frustrating experience.

Lord_Funk wrote:

For all of You having issue with Your PC's and GPU's running very hot. The-Cat-o-Nine-Tails made this reply to that issue in another thread. 

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Hello everybody,

There is a workaround for this, but it is a bit technical, so please be careful with this:

Go do "Documents/Humankind/User/[alpha-numeric code]" and open the registry file there with a text editor.

Find the "<Display>" section in this document.

At the end of this section, add the following line: <MaxFrameRate>30</MaxFrameRate>

When you're done, it should look something like this (with the appropriate resolution and quality level and your desired framerate, of course):

<Display>
<DisplayMode>FullscreenWindow</DisplayMode>
<Resolution>3840x2160 (0)</Resolution>
<VSyncCount>0</VSyncCount>
<QualityLevel>Medium</QualityLevel>
<MaxFrameRate>30</MaxFrameRate>
</Display>

This will limit the framerate and should help with the overheating issues.

The fix definitely did something because I went from "game won't load at all anymore" to "it will now take 30 minutes to load", but it hasn't done much of anything else. Going into the Diplomacy screen is hilariously long. I have had time to smoke a whole cigarette while waiting to talk to Purple. The game still refuses to show me movement point costs before I click on the tile where I want the unit to go, meaning I have to calculate and improvise. Every Era Star or Science pop up is fighting for precedence with the notifications Tab, which sometimes doesn't understand "Acknowledge" means "I'm done" and will cycle on a loop between notifications. And so on and so on... still with low CPU usage.

I really don't get it!

Well, I'm passed not getting it and I'm now just pissed. I've played 68 turns of this beta over the last week as a whole. I'm not gonna waste my sunday trying to load an unstable beta only for it to endlessly crash after i'm done watching Will's intro video on a loop.

Well, I did a final test and found that there is a real memory leak problem.

I did several times the test, I start a new part, and I watch the consumption of the ram and the vram without doing anything in 5 minutes, on the ram of the computer I have a consumption that runs between 11go and 15go, on the graphics card vram, I start at 1.2 gb and end on 5.7 gb which is the maximum possible, whatever the tests the card always saturates after 5 minutes.

I did the test on other games like civ6 or anno, I never had saturation on the vram, of course I did the same thing I start a game and I do nothing.

So there is a real problem that I hope will be corrected before the release of the games, because I have a higher configuration than recommended and I can not even play in normal conditions for games, having set everything to minimum quality like fps.

dragonrunne wrote:

Well, I did a final test and found that there is a real memory leak problem.

I did several times the test, I start a new part, and I watch the consumption of the ram and the vram without doing anything in 5 minutes, on the ram of the computer I have a consumption that runs between 11go and 15go, on the graphics card vram, I start at 1.2 gb and end on 5.7 gb which is the maximum possible, whatever the tests the card always saturates after 5 minutes.

I did the test on other games like civ6 or anno, I never had saturation on the vram, of course I did the same thing I start a game and I do nothing.

So there is a real problem that I hope will be corrected before the release of the games, because I have a higher configuration than recommended and I can not even play in normal conditions for games, having set everything to minimum quality like fps.

Exactly my point since the very start. The good news is that if they catch the leak on time (which I am sure they will), the performance will increase considerably across the board. The leak is very noticeable, when I start the run the performance is top notch and the VRAM is a little higher than Highest Setting Civ 6 (which is already a hog)... a few minutes and turns later, the stuttering begins and the FPS start to drop, while VRAM is maxed out.

Clearly a memory leak, or memory overusage (might be the engine drawing rendering un-necessary objects, as Civ 5 used to do in the early versions and it was a disaster in performance).

Go get them bugs, devs. You have a winner in your hands, don't ruin it with poor performance. We vets CAN be forgiving in terms of these type of problems, but the newer generation of gamers won't.

Just for fun, I tested with a friend, a fixed standby config which corresponds to the minimum asking just a little higher but not too much. (I7, gtx770, 32gb ram, ssd)

it is a watercooled tower.

the result at the very least, the game starts and I can start the game, but it is unplayable, and even with the watercooling, the temperature rises quickly, the vram saturates and the game ends up crashing.

therefore, the minimum config on the steam sheet does not run the games