Civ5 Presentation Scheduled for GDC 2010 in March

In the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Firaxis, 2K Games, and Intel will be making a joint presentation on the workings behind Civ5's game engine, as reported by Gamasutra.

According to the GDC 2010 website, Dan Baker will be speaking on behalf of Firaxis during the 60 minute talk. Here is the official presentation description:


This sounds like good news for essentially everyone, as it shows Firaxis' commitment to making sure the game is playable for a wide range of people. Thanks to CanuckSoldier and V. Soma on the forums for the news tip.

Sounds interesting. Anyone got a date in March for the conference?

EDIT: Just saw the links. 11th of March.

This makes me think the Intel uses the game to propagate their new stuff - a strong reason to replace the processors/motherboards ... ok from one side, but I'm sure not to replace my desktop just because of Civ5.

So I keep warm my CivIV, still got a lot to discover anyway

I would better read news about version with simplified graphics, no need of power reactors under my desk... but for this, my hope in the freeciv project.

Anyway, if there's market for it, just go on

A wide range of people with a new Core i-series system, at least. But will it be playable on an older mid-range machine?

This seems like good news to me.

Can't wait to play huge maps without lag on my i5.

For those in the know- does this sounds like it will have any bearing on running in native OSX? or are these only different hardware variants of win machines? Thanks.

Just to point out this was first posted on the forum by CanuckSoldier in this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=354907.

Hopefully just optimization on Intel chips. No biggie.

Dale said:

Just to point out this was first posted on the forum by CanuckSoldier in this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=354907.

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Thanks Dale. I have corrected that.

Cheers :b:

sounds like civ5 would be multi-threaded, so it should run better than civ4 (assuming graphic is not an issue) on most modern PCs.

Sounds great! I didn't really expect Firaxis to do this given that they hadn't for Civ4, but certainly am pleased they are. And now I really want to go back to San Francisco for this conference. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg just for the conference part (if you want to go to the sessions, at least).

Weasel Op said:

A wide range of people with a new Core i-series system, at least. But will it be playable on an older mid-range machine?

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Sphinx said:

Can't wait to play huge maps without lag on my i5.

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Depending on how old "older" is, I'd expect Civ5 to be in the same performance ballpark as Civ4 on a single-core system, graphics notwithstanding. If you've got a dual-core system, you'll certainly see a performance boost. Maybe not "without lag" - but with less of it.

bio_hazard said:

For those in the know- does this sounds like it will have any bearing on running in native OSX? or are these only different hardware variants of win machines? Thanks.

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Well, if there is an OSX port, it'll run faster with multiple threads (although I don't know if this news means that any potential OSX port will be multithreaded - I'm not in the know enough about how porting games works). But this news doesn't make an OSX version any more likely. The video optimizations in particular are DirectX, and thus Windows-only.

gaiko said:

Hopefully just optimization on Intel chips. No biggie.

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Yeah, Intel's tools focus on making performance better on Intel's chips, and they might exacerbate the difference between an Intel and an AMD chip's performance (assuming the Intel one would be better to begin with) slightly compared to using, say, Microsoft's development tools, which Firaxis used for Civ4. But the difference won't be very big - a few percent perhaps. And thanks to mutliple threads, any dual-core or better AMD will still run Civ5 much faster than it would had Civ5 been developed to use only one thread, regardless of if Intel's tools had been used or not. So this is good news for (recent, at least) AMD users, too.

Yep, quad-core Phenom II chip on an Asus M4A79 Deluxe MB, Civ 4 runs faster too

Quintillus said:

Yeah, Intel's tools focus on making performance better on Intel's chips, and they might exacerbate the difference between an Intel and an AMD chip's performance (assuming the Intel one would be better to begin with) slightly compared to using, say, Microsoft's development tools, which Firaxis used for Civ4. But the difference won't be very big - a few percent perhaps. And thanks to mutliple threads, any dual-core or better AMD will still run Civ5 much faster than it would had Civ5 been developed to use only one thread, regardless of if Intel's tools had been used or not. So this is good news for (recent, at least) AMD users, too.

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Well, hopefully this means that there will be performance increases on other quad cores, not just intel's (Phenom II 965 ftw!)

It's not like this is huge news. There are presentations like this all the time, only this one we care about.

I would be thrilled if Firaxis released an Iphone version of Civ V, like they did with CivRev....So I don't have to upgrade my computer.