Hey there. I was wondering how people who own this game have found Civ 5 runs with larger worlds and more AI players at some of the mid-high range difficulty levels. 
 
This was one thing that really disappointed me about Civ4, it became unbearably slow at mid-late game under these conditions, which basically rendered larger maps unplayable.
 
What are your experiences like playing at the top end? How many cores does your CPU have?

Don't play with DX10/11...that shit will go to a crawl.   
 
I got an i7, 8gig ram, and 9800GTX...yes my card might be a bit old, but hot damn did it make it crawl.  First game in years that's done that. 
 
It runs perfectly on DX9 though.

I think Civ V is probably still GPU-based at highest settings; I've only played the demo so far, but my quad core never went above 20% usage, I only had 30-50fps though. Weirdly enough my GPU usage never went above 30%, so I'm not really sure what could be bottlenecking it (VRAM maybe? Textures didn't seem particularly detailed, though the map is pretty big I guess). 

"The problem is, i think, the game runs every move/attack/etc in order in at the same speed you see it when you play. ie, a nice tweak would be, if i can't see the units maybe insta move them."

Played the demo and no matter what I did the DX 10/11 version was slow as hell.
DX 9 version looks the same, and (even on the highest settings) played super fast.
I have no idea what's going on there, but I'll stick with the DX 9 version.

I played mid-high with most of the things set up high in DX9, except for water, leader textures and AA. I have a quad core and GTS 250 and it runs 60 frames for the most part. The frames get a little bit more choppy when you zoom out but that's natural. 
 
It should be more optimized than Civilization IV though, simply because in that game a single empire could have a hundred units moving around (post-industrial age on the huge Earth map takes like 1-2 minutes for my computer to get through each turn). It wasn't even optimized for quad core and so it ran better in dual.

Anyone else not able to enable AA in dx9 mode? 
 
The jaggies annoy the shit out of me.

Anyone getting strange graphical artefacts on their screen? Especially when you're looking at the city hud the icons for the workers and the production queue are all over the place. I'll post a screen cap later but man, even though I'm over the minimum system requirements by a good bit it still lags in some strange spots.

I have an insane system and I am getting a bit frustrated that I have lag inbetween turns later in the game at all. Seems like some really bad programming that needs fixed.
 
Hex core 980x overclocked to 4ghz
dual ATI 5970's
256 Realssd
12gigs of 1600 mhz really low latency ram
 
I cant really improve anything on my system yet I find I am waiting around 20-30 seconds probably at the end of each turn on huge map with 12 civs and 24 city states. Also I see some posters saying they are playing with 20 ai...how are you doing that? Mods? I seem to recall maxing out at 12. Thanks! If anyone knows anything I can do to improve per turn speed please let me know! Hope they patch this or made the hex core function better with this game or at least on par with a Quard if its not already. Just know I am disappointed I am experiencing this kind of delay each turn!

Overclocked i7-930 w/ 12gb ram and a 2gb ATI HD5970 all installed on an SSD and standard maps with standard number of players (whatever the default is -- six or eight?) makes it quickly grind to a halt every turn about halfway through the default 500 turn game. I can't even imagine it on the largest maps with the most 
 
AIs.@Zurv said:

" I think it has nothing to do with specs (unless you are below it).  Everything moves at some set speed in the game.. ie, combat/movement. so if 1000000 things are moving in order == long turns.  For me, when the log turns happen i don't see even close to max % cpus being used (normally about 1/3 is) and the video cards are in low use too.  "

Quick question for you folks that say the time in between turns is too long: 
 
While you're waiting, is stuff being animated, or is it all just frozen? Or does it animate and freeze for a while at the end?

" Quick question for you folks that say the time in between turns is too long:  While you're waiting, is stuff being animated, or is it all just frozen? Or does it animate and freeze for a while at the end? "

" Anyone else not able to enable AA in dx9 mode?   The jaggies annoy the shit out of me. "

" @Gunner said:

" Anyone else not able to enable AA in dx9 mode?   The jaggies annoy the shit out of me. "

Yeah same prob here. Not sure why. "

I just know when I was doing 1 v1 deity on huge maps, around turn 200+ it would literally take 1-2 minutes per turn.  My friend told me likely it wasn't from his possibly 60+ cities and units but the fact that the pc is looking however many turns ahead.  With normal games though, late game takes 10-20 seconds per turn which is bearable.  I like to play in windowed mode and browse the internet or listen to podcasts while I wait.

I play fine on dx10/11 mode without any significant issues (on max settings). Wierd
The only problem I'm experiencing is as others have mentioned before the growing size of the save file after multiple loads, which slows down the load/save to a crawl, but this can happen even on smaller worlds at the bstart of the game.
But no graphics slowdowns in game itself.

I'm playing on max settings with dx10/11, only slows during when i end my turn and wait for my next one. That only happens when i try and move around the map at the same time, I should really stop doing that.

" Played the demo and no matter what I did the DX 10/11 version was slow as hell. DX 9 version looks the same, and (even on the highest settings) played super fast. I have no idea what's going on there, but I'll stick with the DX 9 version. "