Civ V performance guide by Gamespot

[anonyjjang]

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6279244/index.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=picks&tag=picks;title;1

Definitely check this out.
Summary:

Core i7-980x @ 4.20GHz VS Core i3-550 @ 3.20GHz

*Only 6 seconds difference.



4GB RAM vs 6GB RAM

*No difference in performance



Pressing "next turn" in strategic view

*shaves off more than 20% of loading time

 

[Davor]

Thanks for sharing. Nothing I can do to upgrade, on my laptop sadly. There is one good thing out of it though.

As the article has said, there is a free upgrade for everybody. Before you hit end of turn, put it on strategic move and get a 20% boost. Or was it 20% shorter wait time? That is something to consider when in the mid to late end game.

 

[Mivo]

Hopefully there will be a patch that addresses the issue. It's not insufferably bad for me, but after the 250th or so turn in a 8-civs game on a large map on epic it does get a bit choppy between turns. Having to switch to the 1990s view every time I make a turn seems unreasonable, though.

 

[Jimbo30]

No way is the game "heavily multithreaded" if an i3 can beat an X6. Hopefully a patch will get the multithreading working well.

 

[bhavv]

The game is definitely using multiple cores evenly, I've already tested this, and it spreads the workload evenly across all the cores, and even the same for SLI (each card runs at 50-55% usage with nice low temperatures).


CPU:




GPU:

 

[Zelig]

The game is definitely using multiple cores evenly, I've already tested this, and it spreads the workload evenly across all the cores, and even the same for SLI (each card runs at 50-55% usage with nice low temperatures).

<Images snipped>

I feel like something isn't right there... where's the bottleneck?

If turn times aren't instantaneous, and none of the logical cores are hitting 100% usage at any time, then it's just running arbitrarily slowly for no particular reason I can think of.

edit:

I caught this in the guide:

Enabling the strategic map before you end your turn shaves off more than 20 percent of the time to complete a turn--that's pretty much a free upgrade!

This also seems like a glaring bug, I can't think of any good reason turns shouldn't be the same speed in regular and strategic view - animations of foxes running around on tiles should not be taking 20% of the cpu.

Too bad strategic view crashes any time I try to use it, so there's no way I can switch to it at the end of every turn...

 

[Ktulu]

I've been running the game on an integrated radeon hd 4200 on medium settings (with the exception of leader videos which don't run well at all). The game looks alright, there's a little bit of jerkyness when you try and move around the map, it's not buttery smooth like moving around the strat view.

I've been debating whether to upgrade to a Radeon 5770, but after reading about the texture caching problems I'm not sure it will be worth it.

 

[Kaitsuh]

I feel like something isn't right there... where's the bottleneck?

If turn times aren't instantaneous, and none of the logical cores are hitting 100% usage at any time, then it's just running arbitrarily slowly for no particular reason I can think of.

Yeah, that most certainly looks like it's running on single-thread, with the system splitting the work up evenly between the cores. That's not multithreading at all.

 

[Zelig]

bhavv: To confirm, your task manager screenshot includes CPU usage of between turns?

Yeah, that most certainly looks like it's running on single-thread, with the system splitting the work up evenly between the cores. That's not multithreading at all.

FWIW, here's a screenshot of the task manager for a quadcore in Supreme Commander, from HardOCP:



And a quad in GTA4:



Unless a game is GPU-bound, which turn times in civ certainly are not, at least one core should be close to being fully used.

 

[Technoviking]

I have a 6 Core processor, 6GB memory, a radeon 5770 graphics card and fast hard drive.

In the 1950s the turns are taking around 17s to resolve (on average).

That's on a Standard sized map.


That's quite unbelievable. Does anyone know exactly what is taking so long to resolve?

I hope there will be some sort of an optimization patch, because I sure hope the algorithms that are running in the background are just rushed and easily improved upon.

I can only imagine how irritating things are for those of you having to wait up to 40 seconds.

 

[Warspite2]

Thanks to the OP for sharing this, good info that I never seen before since I am in the upgrade group. I am running the game on...

Athlon X2 5200+
2GB Corsair Ram (getting 2 more GB asap)
NVidia 9600GT w/1GB DDR3
Vista 64

Running on this system, so far I get smooth performance on medium and a few high settings at 1280x800 res. So it looks ok and runs good for now. When I max everything out and hit 1680x1050 res, the game comes to a crawl and practically stops running so I can't go there.

Anyone have any recommendations as to what I should upgrade first out what I list above? Not sure if I should go with a quad core cpu, more ram, or better video card. I think my video card is ok for the game. I am leaning more on a quad cpu and added memory first. What you think?

 

[Warspite2]

I have a 6 Core processor, 6GB memory, a radeon 5770 graphics card and fast hard drive.

In the 1950s the turns are taking around 17s to resolve (on average).

That's on a Standard sized map.


That's quite unbelievable. Does anyone know exactly what is taking so long to resolve?

I hope there will be some sort of an optimization patch, because I sure hope the algorithms that are running in the background are just rushed and easily improved upon.

I can only imagine how irritating things are for those of you having to wait up to 40 seconds.

Could be a lot of things. What are you running as far as background apps in windows? Your hardware should be good enough.

 

[Technoviking]

Could be a lot of things. What are you running as far as background apps in windows? Your hardware should be good enough.

It has nothing to do with the background apps. It doesn't seem to matter whether I have a lot of stuff running in the background or nothing else (of importance) at all.

I can only guess that the problem lies in the algorithms that start running when you hit 'Next Turn'. For whichever reasons, they take a ridiculous amount of time to reach their results. If they can't be optimized then this game is just really, really slow during the later stages of the game.