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I'm trying to play Civilization V on OSX. I have an i7 2.8 GHz and 8 GB of memory but it is very slow.

My mate told me that this is because the game was written in Logo running on a Sinclair ZX80 emulator.

Are there any settings I can change to speed it up?

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  • 5
    Do you mean 8 GB of RAM? Also, how fast is your video card? According to the Wiki, these are the requirements for OSX: Mac OS 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard), 2.6 GHz Quad Core Processor, 4 GB RAM, Video Memory: 512 MB en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_V
    – leety
    Commented Nov 1, 2012 at 13:03
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    Also, your mate is joking. This is a ZX80.
    – Private Pansy
    Commented Nov 1, 2012 at 13:21
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    @mfc are you on Mountain Lion?
    – Krazer
    Commented Nov 1, 2012 at 20:16

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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As a fellow Apple user I can tel that Aspyr (company who ports some game on Mac and ported Civ V) don't do awesome job.

What you can do;

  • Turn on your Activity Monitor check and close programs who use a lot of RAM (Google Chrome and Mail are first to go)
  • Use purge command to find out more free RAM before opening game or download something that do that for you for example FreeMemory
  • Use this FreeMemory or else app
  • Want to be sure that game performance will be the best? Turn on game without any active app in your dock
  • Still don't happy with your ram? Turn on and off your Mac again.
  • Change and lock your Energy Saver settings in your preference panel to "better graphics" (disable automatic changes)
  • After turning on game. Go to settings first and change resolution on one grade lower 16:10 resolution (for example I have 1680:1050 and mostly I play 1440:900)
  • Good graphics? Who need them! Set all as low or disable.
  • Turn on game! Yay. It will should work great.
  • Now change one or two graphic settings on better. Go back to game...
  • Still it is working great? Try again!

Hope that this will help you find your optimal game performance.

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  • I agree with you, the port by Aspry was atrocious. I have an 27 inch iMac with the top end video card that Apple could supply, by dumbing down the screen resolution I may as well run it in a ZX80!
    – mfc
    Commented Nov 2, 2012 at 12:28
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Civilization 5 also lets you do away with the fancy 3d graphics altogether and play on a 2d map with abstract representations of units and whatnot. It's called "strategic view". All you have to do to activate it is push the F10 key on your keyboard.

Personally, I prefer it over the graphics-heavy 3D mode.

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    I think this answer will be significantly more useful if you actually state the steps needed to activate this 2D mode
    – Private Pansy
    Commented Nov 2, 2012 at 9:45
  • I know. :( I don't currently have it installed and have been busy.
    – Crowbeak
    Commented Nov 6, 2012 at 10:44
  • Press Fn + F10. That's it.
    – Matt Zukowski
    Commented Dec 10, 2012 at 1:24
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The graphics changes are bottom right box but left side and outside the box that says “a unit needs orders.” It looks like a scroll or a set of hexes in a round button. Try them and see what you get.

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  • It's hard to visualize what you're talking about with only words. A picture would highly benefit this answer.
    – One 2 Many
    Commented Feb 23, 2022 at 1:38

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