Civ V at Intel GDC: Scalability - LOW END friendly!?

https://www.cmpevents.com/GD10/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=10981 -

Firaxis developers have used the newly released GPA 3.0 PC platform tools and Threading Building Blocks to offer Civ V playability on a myriad of systems; from the rapidly expanding mainstream mobile gaming market, all the way up to the multi-core high-end enthusiast demographic...

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Whoah ... whoah ... whoah ... could this mean Civ V will have very low minimum system requirements? Possibly even lower than Civ IV? Could V be Civ's "Windows 7?"

That would be fantastic. I think there are a lot of great-looking games I would never buy because they keep demanding more hardware. I would be tickled pink if Civ V would play nicely on my low-end, non-gaming laptop!

If someone's composing a Civ V factsheet, I propose inserting a little blurb about this possibility: Civ V may be low-end-hardware friendly!

I think Civ 4 was just optimized poorly. Theres a lot of games that are better in graphics but run faster compared to its predecessor, like how Napoleon runs and looks better than Empire, if you played the TW series.

And looking at the screens, it looks nice but doesnt look demanding. Not to mention less units -> faster game.

I really hope so. Optimization should be paramount when designing Civ's graphic engine, this is an strategy game, tiles could be 8 bit bitmaps for all I care. If I would have wanted to have eyecandy, I would have bought Crysis. If they want to bring colour and inmersion to the game, bring back elements like the city view or the council instead.

the343danny said:

I think Civ 4 was just optimized poorly. Theres a lot of games that are better in graphics but run faster compared to its predecessor, like how Napoleon runs and looks better than Empire, if you played the TW series.

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So true - Mass Effect 2 runs totally fluid with full settings on my 5 years old rig and does a lot with physics engine and stuff (and graphics), so something like Civ should run easy-peasy. And I've seen Civ4 mods that actually optimise the dll and get as much as a 15% increase in turn speed... and with potentially less units in the game, I fully expect that Civ5 runs on about every rig that runs Civ4 decently.

Cheers, LT.

the343danny said:

I think Civ 4 was just optimized poorly. Theres a lot of games that are better in graphics but run faster compared to its predecessor, like how Napoleon runs and looks better than Empire, if you played the TW series.

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As a Civ4 SDK modder, I agree. It's possible to get BTS working 30-40% faster with just some SDK modifications. There were a lot of places where things could be improved.

The biggest slowdown in Civ4 was two-fold actually. The units took a lot of time, especially for the AI pathfinding and such. With Civ5's much reduced units, the game could run 30-40% faster with just that. Then, the other big factor was the poor Python-C++ parser they used. Each time the game parsed a python call in the SDK, it lagged ~0.05 seconds. Adds up really quickly, this happens a bunch of time in turns.

This looks promising.

Is there any other information on "GPA 3.0 PC platform tools and Threading Building Blocks"?

EDIT:

GPA is just Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers.

Threading Building Blocks though is an actual threading library. It received a "Jolt Productivity Award".
It's developed by Intel, which means that there is likely communication between the developers of this threading librairy, and the hardware engineers responsible for designing features for easy threading. But that speaks mostly to people playing Civ 5 on top machines several years from now