How does BNW effect performance?

[glider1]

No probs Cicerosaurus we now have three Aussies in this thread.

Minimizing heats up the GPU *really seriously* to the point where I would honestly say that if some poor sucker were playing civ5 and was interrupted by something and they were to minimize the game but leave the computer turned on, if they came back three hours later I would say there is a good chance they will have a bill to replace their beloved graphics card! No card is designed to run at 100% (read 100% max load) for hours on end which is what happens in minimized civ5! Not even a FPS game runs at 100% continuously.

Check it out with any of the freeware GPU monitors out there. If it is confirmed by others, Firaxis have got a serious problem on their hands because this game could fry expensive hardware.

 

[Makavcio]

The thing about minimizing the game is really a very serious issue. I don't see 100% resource use, but it increases by ~30% and stays higher when I return to the game. It doesn't affect my performance, because it's still way below my max, but I bet I see it at electricity bill.

When it comes to turn times, there are 3 important in-game factors that determine their duration:
- size of the map;
- difficulty level;
- current era.
All the above are pretty obvious, however it's noteworthy that the biggest impact on performance comes between emperor and immortal levels due to huge increase in AI army strength.

One more thing that hasn't been yet said in this thread:
if you suffer from low performance, look around steam workshop. There is a group of mods that replace some game files with their much smaller equivalents. For example, farm graphics weighs now only 1/4 of the original file and I, personally, see no changes other than drop in both ram and gram used.