Before the patch it performed like it was doing all the graphics in software. Now it seems to be using the video card and the 128MB of VRAM in my PB. But I have all the graphics features turned to their lowest and the animations are still a bit jerky. I can't understand why this game requires so much horsepower but it will use everything you can throw at it. That said, it is playable on my 1.67GHz Powerbook G4. So if you have a high end G4 machine you might want to give it a try. If I had desktop instead of laptop graphics hardware, I'm sure it would be a bit better. But it's playable the way it is.
I'm still learning so I'm not going to review the game itself because I don't know if I like it or not yet.
Civilization IV
strategy game
Version: 1.74