CPU vs GPU roll in Civ5

[Puer]

Long time delay between turns is most annoying for most of us (because of bad code etc...)

I'm planning upgrade my PC (because have a buyer for my CPU, mobo & ram).
Question: will my old HD3850 be a big bottleneck for Civ5 or not. Practically only game I have time to play is Civ5.

I want to know how big roll better GPU will do in Civ5? IMO, better GPU will improve leader screen open time, high reso. world map display, AA....

Correct me if I'm wrong but CPU roll is way more important - especially time delay between turns (late game) and big maps....

Research I have done:
• Get a CPU with at least two or four executable threads.
• Brute speed matters a lot.

Civilization V doesn't need much of a video card to run.... • Get nothing if at all possible.

My current PC:

Spoiler :

* Gigabyte ATI RADEON HD 3850 512MB 256BIT GDDR3 2xDVI HDTV, TV-out, HDMI
* Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2,66/6Mb LGA775
* 2048Mb DIMM DDR2 PC-6400 800Mhz
* 2048Mb DIMM DDR2 PC-6400 800Mhz
* GIGABYTE GA- P35- DS3L P35+ICH9/ 1333FSB/ PCI- Ex 16/ 3+3x PCI- Ex1/ Dual 4x DDRII- 1066
* Fortron 400W ATX12V v2.0 (silent 120mm FAN) High efficiency PFC PSU
* SATA HDD Samsung HD502H
* SATA HDD WD3200AAKS
* IDE HDD Maxtor 6Y080PO ATA
* NEXUS NEX- CAT CATERPILLAR FOB USB/ FW.
* IDE CD-RW
* 22'' DELL 2209WA

New PC plan:

Spoiler :

1. Intel i5-2500K 198 €
2. Scythe Mugen 2 CPU-K 46.20 €
3. Asus P8P67 137,87 €
4. 4GB PC12800, 1600MHz ~42.05 €
5. SeaSonic S12II-520 Bronze 65.95 € (for overclocking to ~4,3GHz)
Summary: ~490 €

 

[valfarablaze]

GPU is more important. It has been discussed before that even people with i5s and i7s are having long waiting times between turns. Unfortunately the game is just not coded well enough. Don't get me wrong, a great CPU will rock, but as a rule of thumb, GPU > CPU when it comes to gaming (nevertheless do except bottlenecking)

 

[Puer]

Thanks for feedback valfarablaze Can you please share link where is example/proof that GPU is more important.

 

[Smote]

I don't have proof either way, but my feeling is that the between turn lag is caused by a CPU bottleneck from running thousands of algorithms. I know that going from my old laptop -> i7 950 made everything 100x faster. Of course, graphics card improved equivalently, so no proof !

 

[Puer]

Smote, I have same opinion that CPU > GPU in Civ5. (In 3D shooter it will be certainly GPU > CPU).
IMO, most threads, reviews/benchmarks confirm this option. Example: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6279244/index.html
I would be thankful if someone can paste a link where is example that GPU improves more game speed than CPU.

Maybe the Civ5 reality is that there is no notable difference if you have E8200@3GHz or i5-2500k@4,5Ghz and HD3850 or GTX480??

 

[valfarablaze]

Dafy, unfortunately you are asking for 'proof' that one is more important than the other for CIV5, which is so specific that I do not know if any research/benchmarking for that in particular has been done. But nevertheless here you go;

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388670#post9728321

As you can see, even people with an i7 are having the ridiculous slowdowns between turns, but I on the other hand, with a dual core, dont usually wait more than 15 seconds (which is still too high) towards the late game. The game is simply poorly coded. There is absolutely no reason that a game like Civ 5 should be making an i7 weep.
In general, a good CPU will indeed make a game run better, but 'better' cannot be described as faster or smoother. It is all dependent upon the system that you run.
Keep in mind that bottlenecking (in the majority case of owning a not-so-great CPU and a great GPU) is highly variable based on the settings. For example running the game in 800x600 would actually cause TONS of choppiness and lag/poor performance in smoothness, do to it causing more frames per second (since it is a lower resolution) but that means more calculations per frame for the CPU. Running the game at 1080 or higher, would mean that you have lower FPS, but it will be a lot more stable and smooth, because there are less frames of calculation for the CPU to handle.

Let me put it this way (Again, in regards to a bottlenecked computer, AKA faster GPU over slower CPU);

800x600 = 120 FPS Maximum, but 5 FPS Minimum, so the game will be a very choppy and laggy experience, because based upon the environment of the game, since there are around 120 frames a second, the CPU has to do a lot of calculation because the GPU finishes its job faster than the CPU can handle it. This causes a slow down of the game, and puts the game at around 5 FPS for a second or two. Laggy.

1900x1080 = 45 PS Maximum, but a decent 30 FPS Minimum. Now because the game is at a higher graphical setting, the GPU will have to do more work thus throw out considerably less frames each second. Even though you might have a 'not so great' CPU, it will be reasonable at handling these 45 FPS worth of calculations. In return, the slow down will be minimal and at full load times, it will only bring the game down to 30 FPS. A superior gaming experience due to decent amount of FPS and minimal choppiness/lag.

I hope this was helpful.

 

[Puer]

Thanks valfarablaze for explanation - this makes sense. Seems that I simplified CPU vs GPU dilemma too much I will measure Civ5 FPS with Fraps and will do conclusions.

 

[valfarablaze]

Sounds good Dafy and let us know what you find out!

 

[timtofly]

I think the biggest problem was trying to make a turn based game a "heavy" graphical game. For all we know it may be rerendering all of the graphics in between turns, which may seem absurd, but nothing about V has been "normal". The game can move the view of sight fairly well, but it cannot change the whole view in one shot. IMO it is not using memory well and must be relying on a swap file outside of RAM for some reason.

 

[valfarablaze]

I think the biggest problem was trying to make a turn based game a "heavy" graphical game. For all we know it may be rerendering all of the graphics in between turns, which may seem absurd, but nothing about V has been "normal". The game can move the view of sight fairly well, but it cannot change the whole view in one shot. IMO it is not using memory well and must be relying on a swap file outside of RAM for some reason.

I agree 100%

 

[VimesUK]

We recorded all the GPU results using a Core i7 processor clocked at 3.70GHz, but does anything happen if we change the clock frequency? Using the GeForce GTX 480 for this test, we found that there was still quite a bit of headroom in the i7 at 1920x1200, which is not surprising given our previous results.

Increasing the processor's frequency from 2.0GHz to 4.0GHz (in 200MHz steps) greatly affected performance, jumping from 27fps through 52fps. Clearly, Civilization V is very CPU dependent as we rarely see such varying results on a game when using such a powerful desktop processor.

and...

Using a Core 2 Duo E8500 we can see how Civilization V takes full advantage of the two available cores this processor has at its disposal.

and...

With four processing threads available, overall per-core usage levels out using ~50% of each core. As you will see on our CPU performance tests it's a balance of this, clock speeds, and architecture efficiency that pushes performance on Civ V. The only hexa-core CPU we tested failed to deliver better performance, so it appears this game's usage maxes out at four cores.

all the above, and more, can be found here...

http://www.techspot.com/review/320-civilization-v-performance/

In my experience I have found that my E8500 ran at 4Ghz perform really well. When I have seen other people posting graphs etc to show their eight core usage it tends to look like this...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4133/5037601001_37b5703efe_b.jpg

...they having a belief that Civ V can use all cores, rather than Windows sharing the load across the CPU.

I tend to believe that Civ V can use a very fast dual core CPU but is poorly optimised to fully utilise much beyond that.

My GPU is not used much above 65% load (average is a lot less), the textures do however use the full 1GB of my 460 GTX. The texture loading and retention is, for me, one of the issues that Civ V's devs might need to optimise.
The CPU can be used as much as 90% but the average is less. The greatest use of the CPU seems to be to load the game rather than the calculations between turns.

I voted as game speed being time between turn.

 

[nixen]

(snip..) In my experience I have found that my E8500 ran at 4Ghz perform really well. When I have seen other people posting graphs etc to show their eight core usage it tends to look like this...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4133/5037601001_37b5703efe_b.jpg

...they having a belief that Civ V can use all cores, rather than Windows sharing the load across the CPU.

I tend to believe that Civ V can use a very fast dual core CPU but is poorly optimised to fully utilise much beyond that.

My GPU is not used much above 65% load (average is a lot less), the textures do however use the full 1GB of my 460 GTX. The texture loading and retention is, for me, one of the issues that Civ V's devs might need to optimise.
The CPU can be used as much as 90% but the average is less. The greatest use of the CPU seems to be to load the game rather than the calculations between turns.

I voted as game speed being time between turn.

Minor nitpicking, but eight core machines are extremely rare as that would require two physical cpu's - less than 0.01 % of gamer rigs are setup like that. The eight graphs reported by task manager or ProcMon are usually Core i7 machines with four cores.

Apart from that, I can say that using tactical mode only gives pretty much the same between-turn waittimes as medium detail graphics - that's using a vaio z11 with a core i7 620M processor and nvidia 330M graphics, so I'm inclined to say it's cpu bound more than most games.

Final note: One of the configuration files actually has a field that sets "8" as the maximum core count utilized - if trying a hexa core machine, it would make sense to update that.

 

[player1 fanatic]

CPU will improve speed (time it that AI turn take, time for loading the game, etc...).

GPU, on the other hand, will improve "smoothness" of graphics (frames per second), will determine how high details will be playable and will help in scrolling speed (although CPU is importing here too, due to texture steaming).

 

[civ_king]

Minor nitpicking, but eight core machines are extremely rare as that would require two physical cpu's - less than 0.01 % of gamer rigs are setup like that. The eight graphs reported by task manager or ProcMon are usually Core i7 machines with four cores.

Apart from that, I can say that using tactical mode only gives pretty much the same between-turn waittimes as medium detail graphics - that's using a vaio z11 with a core i7 620M processor and nvidia 330M graphics, so I'm inclined to say it's cpu bound more than most games.

Final note: One of the configuration files actually has a field that sets "8" as the maximum core count utilized - if trying a hexa core machine, it would make sense to update that.

err Intel has four octo-core CPUs. OTOH AMD has dodeca-cores...