Let's talk performance

[player1 fanatic]

I get around 35% frame rate boost, with following tweaks compared to Max Settings:

Terrain quality at medium (performanse-optimized)
Turned off High Resolution Geometry
Ambient Occulsion resolution at 1024x1024
Shadow resolution at 4096x4096
MSAA at 4x

To improve Leader Screens fidelity, either reduce detail to Medium or MSAA to 2x.

Tested with laptop GTX 960M (which is equivalent of desktop GTX 750Ti).

 

[Menzies]

So are you saying that what I'm experiencing is normal and that everyone else's game becomes stuttery with a lower FPS when the camera is zoomed all the way out and positioned over revealed terrain? Wouldn't THAT be considered a performance issue then?

Frame rate is expected to drop in all games when you're going for the most graphically intense moments they have, that includes things like the Witcher. Mine goes from the 60s to the 40s as well, doesn't really stutter though. There's a lot of models loaded on the screen at once.

 

[smartcanuck1988]

I can't complain about performance. My regular laptop doesn't run the game because it lacks dx11 graphics. So I'm using a mini PC I had in the living room which has a Celeron N3150 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 5400rpm harddrive, and integrated graphics of course. Everything is set to "if you have a setting below Off I would like this pls" low, and game starts in strategic view of course.

I had to set the paging file to 9000 MB so the game now loads fairly quickly from hitting the "Continue" button to seeing the main menu (about 5 seconds max). Loading saved games takes about 5-8 mins (I'm typing this post while waiting for my saved game to load (Standard size map) in Turn 257, and it just finished loading while doing this). Turn times are fairly good too with about 40 seconds of "Please wait" so far.

Problem is this mini PC is hooked to a 1080p TV so it's hard to read some text from far away and the upscaling option seems disabled, so what I do is I use Steam's in-home streaming to stream the game to my laptop. Looks good and no speed issues but every now and then there's a brief black screen (I'm assuming to sync the picture).

So overall considering my convoluted setup and poor specs, I have to say I'm happy that the game runs ok!

The background music cuts off sometimes and I have to reload the save to get it back. That's about the only issue I could name. Not sure if that's a bug in the game in general or just for my poor system.

 

[King_Course]

I'd like to see someone try to explain my situation here:

I'm running a core i5 6500 @3.2 Ghz, a Nvidia GTX 1070, and 16 GB of RAM. At max settings, while the camera is positioned over revealed terrain with a lot of detail onscreen, so that would be over my cities with lots of tile improvements, when the camera is zoomed out all the way the FPS drops down into the 40s and there is a very noticeable amount of stutter that occurs. If I zoom in a certain amount the stutter goes away and the FPS improves somewhat, usually going up into the mid 50s. Normally I play with Vsync turned on since there is a lot of screen tearing that occurs if I leave it off.

Now this is very situational; it only happens when my camera is positioned over revealed terrain and there are a lot of tile improvements. Just for testing purposes I lowered all the graphics settings and turned Vsync off and my FPS shot up to about 100 or so, while the stutter went away.

My computer shouldn't have any trouble running this game; this is a computer that can run Witcher 3 with Hairworks at max settings 60 FPS at 1080p, and neither my video card or my CPU are working at 100%.

So for anyone who says that their game runs fine with no hitches, try loading a save game, positioning the camera over revealed terrain with a lot of onscreen action (tile improvements seem to be what is bogging my system down), and let me know if the game stutters, if your FPS drops, whatever. If yes, then there's an issue with the game engine. If no, then I guess I'm just cursed.

Oh and make sure your camera is zoomed all the way out also.

Turn off Anti Aliasing and everything will be smooth.

 

[Zenstrive]

I only have problem with the turn times. It feels too long compared to Civ V and Civ V:BE

 

[Selereth]

Turn off Anti Aliasing and everything will be smooth.

Umm nope. Still as stuttery as before, frame rate remains the same as before also.

 

[10KEyeCandy]

I'd like to see someone try to explain my situation here:

I'm running a core i5 6500 @3.2 Ghz, a Nvidia GTX 1070, and 16 GB of RAM. At max settings, while the camera is positioned over revealed terrain with a lot of detail onscreen, so that would be over my cities with lots of tile improvements, when the camera is zoomed out all the way the FPS drops down into the 40s and there is a very noticeable amount of stutter that occurs. If I zoom in a certain amount the stutter goes away and the FPS improves somewhat, usually going up into the mid 50s. Normally I play with Vsync turned on since there is a lot of screen tearing that occurs if I leave it off.

Now this is very situational; it only happens when my camera is positioned over revealed terrain and there are a lot of tile improvements. Just for testing purposes I lowered all the graphics settings and turned Vsync off and my FPS shot up to about 100 or so, while the stutter went away.

My computer shouldn't have any trouble running this game; this is a computer that can run Witcher 3 with Hairworks at max settings 60 FPS at 1080p, and neither my video card or my CPU are working at 100%.

So for anyone who says that their game runs fine with no hitches, try loading a save game, positioning the camera over revealed terrain with a lot of onscreen action (tile improvements seem to be what is bogging my system down), and let me know if the game stutters, if your FPS drops, whatever. If yes, then there's an issue with the game engine. If no, then I guess I'm just cursed.

Oh and make sure your camera is zoomed all the way out also.

Most likely graphical driver. Try monitor your GPU usage and tell me the result.
I'm not exactly sure how much knowledage you have towards hardwares and game optimization in general.
So I'll try to explain as many things as possible concisely.

1070 is a pretty new card. So the first few drivers fail to bring out all its power is not unheard of.
In fact, rather common in recent years since NVIDIA adopted a "one best driver for a few games".
Check if you had the optimal driver for Civ6 installed, which is 375.63.

And then, Civ series is always rather hard on the CPU, and i5 6500 suffers a little because it doesn't have HyperThreading.
Usually it won't affect things too much, but it's clear that you just upgraded to 1070, which require a powerful CPU too.
The 6500 could be struggling at dealing with game's processing and gives out rendering command to the GPU.

Lastly, check your cooling and PSU. Make sure you have enough power supply for it and the GPU isn't too hot that it throttled.
Though I really doubt that is the case here.

EDIT: What's your native resolution? It could simply because you're running 4K with 8x MSAA. And nothing would handle that well atm.
Actually, I wouldn't even recommend 1080P with 8x MSAA. 4x is enough for AA alone. You are better off with supersampling if you had the horsepower to spare.

 

[Selereth]

Most likely graphical driver. Try monitor your GPU usage and tell me the result.
I'm not exactly sure how much knowledage you have towards hardwares and game optimization in general.
So I'll try to explain as many things as possible concisely.

1070 is a pretty new card. So the first few drivers fail to bring out all its power is not unheard of.
In fact, rather common in recent years since NVIDIA adopted a "one best driver for a few games".
Check if you had the optimal driver for Civ6 installed, which is 375.63.

And then, Civ series is always rather hard on the CPU, and i5 6500 suffers a little because it doesn't have HyperThreading.
Usually it won't affect things too much, but it's clear that you just upgraded to 1070, which require a powerful CPU too.
The 6500 could be struggling at dealing with game's processing and gives out rendering command to the GPU.

Lastly, check your cooling and PSU. Make sure you have enough power supply for it and the GPU isn't too hot that it throttled.
Though I really doubt that is the case here.

EDIT: What's your native resolution? It could simply because you're running 4K with 8x MSAA. And nothing would handle that well atm.
Actually, I wouldn't even recommend 1080P with 8x MSAA. 4x is enough for AA alone. You are better off with supersampling if you had the horsepower to spare.

Recommended requirements for this game call for an i5, not an i7. But since you think that it could be bottlenecking my GTX 1070 (and it sort of does in other games), I decided to go ahead and purchase an i7. Pricey yes, but hopefully it'll be worth it. As it is, I wasn't really too impressed by the i5's performance anyway.

 

[Lord Shadow]

As far as framerates are concerned, I get 30 to 60 (at 1920x1080) on mostly high settings depending on how busy the screen is, so the later eras are slower. This is on an i7 4790 and a GeForce GTX 760.

It could probably be optimised some, but what I do feel is abnormally low is the leader screen performance. I haven't measured the FPS there, but it feels like low teens at times.

 

[Kwami]

For reference, I get 30-60 fps almost everywhere with most settings on medium-high and some of the extra flare enabled. My PC is about 9 years old, with a graphics card that's a little bit newer than that: Core i7-860 @ 2.8GHz, 8GB DDR3 memory, GTX 570, spinning platter disks. So, the game runs pretty damn well, even on older hardware. I don't understand the complaining in this thread.

 

[bladex]

no probs here 4ghz and gtx 980 ti 16gb ram

max settings except for leader animations turned off (they are annoying) running at 2k 165hz win10 64x

 

[miaasma]

the game runs surprisingly well on my mediocre computer, slightly stuttery late game but actually better than civ 5 runs

 

[alaric1112]

I am running this better than 5. Way smoother.

 

[Cao Cao Mengde]

I'm doing alright with my laptop, but I have a desktop I'm thinking of upgrading. Just one question though- would going full hardcore high specs on my desktop increase turn times?

 

[dexters]

Am I the only one surprised by how poorly this game runs?

My specs:
Intel i7 2600k @ ~4GHz
16 GB RAM
nVIDIA GeForce GTX 670

I'm having major FPS issues at maxed settings.

I realise that this is accordance with the system requirements released by Firaxis, but to be perfectly honest, I don't see why this game runs in this manner, while simultaneously being at around the same level of graphical fidelity as CIV5. One would think that a major reason for the cartoony look would be the ability to shave off a few polygons and shader effects here and there for better performance. Rather, the game looks rather unimpressive (in terms of visual fidelity, not in terms of style), whilst performing horribly. I simply don't understand where the performance was "spent".

I'm starting to think it's an optimisation issue, because quite frankly, this is a damn strategy game, and it doesn't render much on-screen at any given time. I can run pretty much any other game @ 1920*1080 with an acceptable FPS (which is higher for most other types of games). Heck, I can max out GTA5, and play at an constant 30 FPS. CIV6 dips down to the teens and even worse (leaders screens are at under 10 FPS), whilst sometimes running wild at (what I expect is) way over 60 FPS. It just seems a bit off. Like not much time was spent fine-tuning performance.

Are there, or should there be, patches incoming that better performance? Are there tricks to better the performance?

What do you think?

Both your cpu and gpu are below recommended.

You need a 4th generation core series and gtx 770 or better .

You need to turn down the settings to medium at best.

As for graphical fidelity. I have over 1k hours
Into Civ5 and Civ6 looks leaps better. no comparison.

 

[10KEyeCandy]

Recommended requirements for this game call for an i5, not an i7. But since you think that it could be bottlenecking my GTX 1070 (and it sort of does in other games), I decided to go ahead and purchase an i7. Pricey yes, but hopefully it'll be worth it. As it is, I wasn't really too impressed by the i5's performance anyway.

NEVER trust the recommended CPU for strategy games. The absent of async computation in DX11 and lower has been hurting CPU since always.

And the case here is not about i5 or i7 either. More about HyperThreading and sustained clock. A mobile i7 with lower clock and no HT can lose massively to an i5 with HT and higher clock in strategy game, yet all the while having identical performance in typical FristPerson or TP AAA games.

Now, unless you have cooling or power supply issues, your i5 6500 will always run at turbo clock which is 3.6GHz. It would be about just enough for Civ6 if you have a less powerful GPU that matches i5 6500 better, like 780ti or 970. Other game genre usually don't rely on CPU much so you would be fine too.
But in reality here you actually have a much more powerful GPU than your CPU's matching tier of GPUs (Pascal IS a rather big jump after all). This creates a situation where your GPU always finished up its work to render and constantly calls to CPU before CPU finish its work to process game mechanics like AI, unit pathfinding, etc.
The GPU is always waiting CPU to give out command, which results in a seemingly GPU bottleneck. I'm talking about the FPS drop when you zoom out, thus only changing the amount for GPU to render but not the amount of mechanics for CPU to process.

This is why I recommand you to monitor your GPU usage, because end result itself can only tell this much.
It could well be that even NVIDIA's recommanded driver failed. I wouldn't be too surprised tbh.
If that's the case your new i7 wouldn't help too well to fight the zooming FPS drop either.

And btw what model of i7 did you purchase? I'm guess something like i7 6700(K)?

 

[Plus Ultra]

I'm pleasantly surprised by how well the game is performing.

Max settings, large maps, no issues or overheating and less than 20 seconds per turn (end-game). Amazing.

Spoiler Specs :

i5 4670k
GTX 970
16 GB Ram 1833 MHz
SSD

 

[dexters]

I'm pleasantly surprised by how well the game is performing.

Max settings, large maps, no issues or overheating and less than 20 seconds per turn (end-game). Amazing.

Spoiler Specs :

i5 4670k
GTX 970
16 GB Ram 1833 MHz
SSD

That's a beefy card and the CPU is on the mark. So of course

 

[Plus Ultra]

That's a beefy card and the CPU is on the mark. So of course

The thing is, all things equal, Civ V had considerably longer turn loading times (in my experience).

 

[Sascha77]

I'm pleasantly surprised by how well the game is performing.

Yup.

I was kinda concerned when I first read the minimum/recommended specs, but it turns out I didn't have to worry.

i5 4670k (slightly OCed)
8 GB DDR3
GF GTX 660 (Gigabyte, so mildly OCed out of the box)
Game installed on my SSD
Win 10

I'm using custom settings which translate roughly to "high/high" presets-wise and I have no problem running the game.

I checked my FPS with an external program and, so far, they never dipped below 30. The built-in benchmark also looks good, usually giving me high 30s to mid 60s.

It *seems* that high res geometry and terrain detail on "high" give me the biggest performance hits. With my current settings, the only time I'm getting slightly noticeable slowdowns is - weirdly enough - in some leader-screens. Monty with all his feathers seems to be the main culprit in this regard. I have those scenes set to "medium" and while the slowdown isn't bad or anything, it is definitely noticeable when he pops onto my screen.

S.