Some hardware testing and performance analysis with Civ V

[bhavv]

I just ran some testing on Civ V to see how much of my PC resources it uses up, and I think that this information could be useful for others:

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/8308/19999524.png

My spec is:

I7 980 @ 4 Ghz
12 Gb 1866 Mhz ram
SLI 1 Gb GTX 560 tis
1920x1200 resolution monitor

Civ V was maxed out on DX11 mode with 4x MSAA.

The main reason I did this test was to identify if going over my Vram limit negatively affects performance, which it doesnt seem like it does.

My Vram usage was capped throughout the test. Upon loading up the game it immediately hit 980 Mb usage, and quickly went up to stayed at 1011 Mb.

Gameplay remained at a constant 55-60 FPS, with short unnoticable dips when leader scenes popped up, but still remained over 30 FPS.

Surprisingly CPU usage was very low, but I think that this goes up a lot towards the end game which is the cause for hellishly slow turn ending.

More surprising was the system ram usage. The physical ram use went up to 4.21 Gb, but together with caching, the total ram use was 7.6 Gb!

I believe I discovered that Vram is not a limitation for Civ V, as it seems to handle caching into the system ram very well without any slowdown or lag, but 8 Gb system ram is very advisable to have, and its currently very cheap.

OFC my CPU is pure overkill and Civ V still runs like crap, this game and Skyrim were the reasons I splashed out on a hex core, and any other upcoming games that may use 6 cores (Skyrim also uses all 6 cores as does Civ V, but the difference isnt much compared to a 2500k).

Im also loading the game of a Crucial M4 512 Gb SSD connected to Sata III, and its still slow at loading new turns in the end game

 

[durian]

Thanks for the work! Useful tip with the RAM.... now I might just consider a RAM upgrade to 8 gigs

 

[BlindZenDriver]

Surprisingly CPU usage was very low, but I think that this goes up a lot towards the end game which is the cause for hellishly slow turn ending.

More surprising was the system ram usage. The physical ram use went up to 4.21 Gb, but together with caching, the total ram use was 7.6 Gb!

I believe I discovered that Vram is not a limitation for Civ V, as it seems to handle caching into the system ram very well without any slowdown or lag, but 8 Gb system ram is very advisable to have, and its currently very cheap.

<SNIP>
Im also loading the game of a Crucial M4 512 Gb SSD connected to Sata III, and its still slow at loading new turns in the end game

Interesting observations. Thank you.

I haven't done any benchmarking as such myself but I have made a few observations which may be of interest.

First my specs for reference/context:

Core i7 - 870
4 GB ram
AMD Radeon 7970 - 2560x1440 resolution and everything in game at max.
Intel SSD
Windows 8 Consumer Preview (64 bit)

I find the observation with regards to main memory usage very interesting. Obviously my machine does not allow for 4 GB+ physical memory usage but the odd thing is that the full 4 GB is not even used (which is why I haven't taken advantage of the cheap RAM prices).

I'm guessing CivV manages it's memory use in a way so it doesn't max out what ever the machine has, so now I wonder what sort of difference more memory does. Most likely performance is better with more physical memory but it could even be that the AI is different. I would really like if to learn if anyone has observations on how an memory upgrade from say 4 GB to 8 GB or more impacts the game?

I have a friend that suggest letting Windows do it's file system compression thing and that it may make loading the game faster. I shall give that a try and I suppose that if it makes much of a difference with an SSD it may even matter more with a traditional hard drive (I remember doing something similar back when there was a program called Stacker).

Also something I have noticed on another friends system. He has all his Steam files including CivV on another physical drive than Windows and when playing the drive with CivV goes into sleep mode. It's only when one has a talk with a leader one notices this because then there is 3-4-5 seconds of waiting so this tells me the game only ever needs to load files in that situation.

 

[FeiLing]

More RAM never helps games (unless you have less than 4GB in the system or have your RAM being sucked up by other applications). Developers want to sell games, so they have to make them so they run on the majority of systems out there. That means being limited by 32bit and therefore never use more than ~2 GB. For me CiV is at 800-1200ish MB RAM usage. The maximum if it ran for a whole day. It was not made to take more otherwise it would do that, as I've got 8GB on a 64 bit OS.

I'm sure the numbers the OP pulled out are not what CiV uses but his system in total. Shall not matter what he ran to make all that RAM being used.

I would really like if to learn if anyone has observations on how an memory upgrade from say 4 GB to 8 GB or more impacts the game?

Play CiV like you always do (with a media player running in the background or listening to a stream or whatever you usually do). Then tab out and see how much RAM is used by the system. If you're over 3.5GB usage you might consider upgrading. Otherwise there is no chance the additional RAM will ever be useful.

 

[callan]

More RAM never helps games (unless you have less than 4GB in the system or have your RAM being sucked up by other applications). Developers want to sell games, so they have to make them so they run on the majority of systems out there. That means being limited by 32bit and therefore never use more than ~2 GB. For me CiV is at 800-1200ish MB RAM usage. The maximum if it ran for a whole day. It was not made to take more otherwise it would do that, as I've got 8GB on a 64 bit OS.

I'm sure the numbers the OP pulled out are not what CiV uses but his system in total. Shall not matter what he ran to make all that RAM being used.

That's not true. It's a common misconception that 32Bit programs are limited to a 2GB address space on 64Bit operating systems. Civ 5 is what is known as Large Address Aware by default so it's capable of addressing amounts of memory in excess of 2GB, assuming your other system settings support this. More specifically that you are running a 64bit OS or have toggled the /3GB switch on a 32bit OS. More memory does help, just not as much as it probably should.

 

[V. Soma]

Can I have a noob question?

I play tiny/small map and quick/normal speed.

Can 2GB RAM be enough for my PC if nothing much else is running?

I have i5 760 / Radeon 5770

 

[BlindZenDriver]

Can I have a noob question?

I play tiny/small map and quick/normal speed.

Can 2GB RAM be enough for my PC if nothing much else is running?

I have i5 760 / Radeon 5770

Not a noob question but maybe a bit off topic for this thread.

The 2 GB in your system is fine and as I recall it's also what is mentioned on the box.

You should be able to play the game on the bigger maps as well but most likely you'll find game speed to be somewhat lacking late in the game (this we all do but it is likely worse with less memory).

You should consider getting more memory. Not so much for CivV but just for general use as memory is cheap these days and it's a good upgrade for the money. Something like $50 should let you double your memory.

 

[BlindZenDriver]

I have a friend that suggest letting Windows do it's file system compression thing and that it may make loading the game faster. I shall give that a try and I suppose that if it makes much of a difference with an SSD it may even matter more with a traditional hard drive (I remember doing something similar back when there was a program called Stacker).

I tried the file system compression thing on the CivV folder in steamapps\common and the results:

Starting CIV
21 seconds uncompressed
22 seconds compressed

This is from selecting CivV DX10+11 in the menu till the ESRB message appears - the video is of course disabled.

Loading a save just after starting CivV
97 seconds uncompressed
97 seconds compressed
The save I loaded was a late game large map. Note I did not compress the save file itself.

The file compression made CivV physical space usage go down from 5 GB to 3.75 GB.

I did everything three times so the figures are repeatable (on my system at least). I'm a bit surprised to find that compressing did very little and I suspect the numbers will look different depending on storage just as the amount of memory and choice of OS may also influence the numbers. If the game is running from a traditional hard drive I think there could be something to gain while with SSD it seems it's mainly saving space (the 1.25 GB saved is equal to around $2 in SSD space).

 

[VimesUK]

I'm not sure how the OP's image is meant to show that Civ V is using 4.21GB....? That shows the total amount of memory being used, inclusive of that being taken up by the system.

If you then click on the processes tab of the task manager you will see just how much Civ V takes up as it shows the memory amount being used against the exe file of the game. For me that typically means 800mb to around 1.2GB, rarely do I see more.

My GTX 460 1GB often its memory is used, I run the game @ 1680x1050 with quite a bit of eye candy on.

My CPU is a E8500 running at 4Ghz and I typically see both cores being used up to 85% to 90% at most.

I remember reading quite an in-depth review about Civ V and its use, or lack of, multi cores and the thoughts were that it seems more optimal to have the fastest dual core over that of a quad. Albeit there are other advantages to be gained from a newer quad than just the additional two cores.
I have found that Civ V makes use of my dual core better than Shogun TW 2 - that game seems appallingly bad at being optimised for multiple cores.

So for me when running Windows 7 x64 and 4GB of memory I have never seen Civ V (I used to have a 24" monitor and run it @ 1920x1080) use a great deal of memory. I have also noted that people with 2GB of Vram ("upgraded" from the same card just gone from 1GB to 2GB) have not seen any performance increase.

I have increased the speed of my overclock from 4Ghz tp 4.4Ghz but I did not notice that much of a difference in the time between turns in the late game era - it can still take a while depending on map / size and civ factors and whether the map is revealed etc etc etc.

When I placed the game on my SSD I also found no real difference in performance or load times to make it a better experience.

I would have been very very tempted to buy a 3570k and a Z77 board (I already have two sticks of DDR3 8GB memory) if I could be guaranteed of a worthwhile performance increase but unfortunately I do not have enough faith to believe that I would see that for the cost of doing so.

Thanks to the OP from the tremendous amount of work that you have done in what you prepared and then shared with us. I remember doing similar work with plenty of graphs etc over at the official forums to help to understand Civil V's performance, especially when the game was in its more active patching phase.

One of my biggest gripes of the game was the seemingly unnecessary unit dance, where units would shuffle one space up and down through moves just to create some animation on the screen. That still wastes a lot of game play and CPU time, especially during the late game stage.

 

[timtofly]

I'm not sure how the OP's image is meant to show that Civ V is using 4.21GB....? That shows the total amount of memory being used, inclusive of that being taken up by the system.

If you then click on the processes tab of the task manager you will see just how much Civ V takes up as it shows the memory amount being used against the exe file of the game. For me that typically means 800mb to around 1.2GB, rarely do I see more.

My GTX 460 1GB often its memory is used, I run the game @ 1680x1050 with quite a bit of eye candy on.

My CPU is a E8500 running at 4Ghz and I typically see both cores being used up to 85% to 90% at most.

I remember reading quite an in-depth review about Civ V and its use, or lack of, multi cores and the thoughts were that it seems more optimal to have the fastest dual core over that of a quad. Albeit there are other advantages to be gained from a newer quad than just the additional two cores.
I have found that Civ V makes use of my dual core better than Shogun TW 2 - that game seems appallingly bad at being optimised for multiple cores.

So for me when running Windows 7 x64 and 4GB of memory I have never seen Civ V (I used to have a 24" monitor and run it @ 1920x1080) use a great deal of memory. I have also noted that people with 2GB of Vram ("upgraded" from the same card just gone from 1GB to 2GB) have not seen any performance increase.

I have increased the speed of my overclock from 4Ghz tp 4.4Ghz but I did not notice that much of a difference in the time between turns in the late game era - it can still take a while depending on map / size and civ factors and whether the map is revealed etc etc etc.

When I placed the game on my SSD I also found no real difference in performance or load times to make it a better experience.

I would have been very very tempted to buy a 3570k and a Z77 board (I already have two sticks of DDR3 8GB memory) if I could be guaranteed of a worthwhile performance increase but unfortunately I do not have enough faith to believe that I would see that for the cost of doing so.

Thanks to the OP from the tremendous amount of work that you have done in what you prepared and then shared with us. I remember doing similar work with plenty of graphs etc over at the official forums to help to understand Civil V's performance, especially when the game was in its more active patching phase.

One of my biggest gripes of the game was the seemingly unnecessary unit dance, where units would shuffle one space up and down through moves just to create some animation on the screen. That still wastes a lot of game play and CPU time, especially during the late game stage.

The OP is running an i7 and they have 8 cores, and he was still unhappy late game turn times. The pairing of cores and RAMM should be taken into consideration though. In order for each core to function properly, they have to have memory allocated to them. If you have two cores and 2 Gigs for each, you may be fine. If you have 8 cores, but only 2 Gigs between them, it seems to me one is missing out. The OP did have 2 Gigs for each core. I only have 1 per core.

On my below specs laptop, I kept having corrupted file issues. I put steam and games on a 16 Gig USB jump drive. Corrupted files vanished. I was afraid leaving them on the jump drive when I moved to my new i7 laptop, in that the USB would be a bottleneck. I do not have late game turn times any different on a huge map than on a regular map. I am only running a 2.2 GHz i7 with 8 Gig RAMM. I have the Nvidea GT 555M which is an ok 2nd class GPU and even it stutters when I pick a unit to move with a mouse (USB bottleneck?), but I am also running everything max.

Resources to me is the key. I think the constant pulling files from the same drive as the memory swap file and the slowness of the computer kept messing with the files on my old laptop. It took 10 seconds to even open up the city screen late game. Every time I added an item to the build que, it would take an agonizing 20 seconds just for it to register and let me choose the next item. Scrolling between cities inside the city view would most always cause the game to crash. Turns themselves took from 2 minutes to 5 minutes. In fact now when playing I am sitting there waiting and then look down and realize that I could have started seconds earlier and the computer was actually waiting for me. I played so many games on my new laptop, in a few weeks, that I was burned out on the game. It used to take me 3+ weeks just to play one game. I played one 2000+ turns game in one 8 hour sitting.

 

[VimesUK]

When I was putting a system together for a friend we tested his CPU out on my system first, as his motherboard had not yet arrived. As it was a quad core Q6600 I was interested on how it performed in Civ V as that was the game which I played the most at the time but was also a little frustrating at the late game stage, due to the time taken between turns.

The memory allocation used by the game remained the same, no difference at all regardless of the number of cores.

The load across the cores suggested that the game was using each of them but I would tend to think that was Windows using a type of load levelling across the cores rather than the game engine being optimised to use them.

The overall game performance was much worse than it was when I played on my dual core, which was clocked to 4Ghz at the time. I put this down to the maximum clock we could achieve without stability and heat issues being a problem, which ended up between 3.4ghz and a max (not fully stable) at 3.6ghz.

Going back to what I had read it seemed that the better performance was to be found when the very highest of clock speeds was achieved and not that the game would take a real advantage of a multi core system.

Going back to my system...

I tried Civ V and then later on Shogun TW 2 and later again Skyrim on my SSD drive and apart from less noise once the game was loaded I did not see a great difference to make me think that they benefited much by being on that drive over my mechanical one. When my new Samsung 830 SSD arrives (256GB) I will have all my photos and home videos on it for editing etc and also there will be room for my Steam folder as I tend to only keep games installed that I am currently playing. I do love the SSD drive for General Windows and photo and video editing but for the games I noted I did not see enough of a difference to think that they were helped much.

I have stopped playing Civ V now until the expansion is out and then I will start playing again. I have been playing RTW and that can still tax my system depending o nthe settings used and the map size etc.

As you have noted with your laptop the time between turns can sometimes be frustrating and yet at other times, for me, as long as it can keep up with my continuity of thought I don't mind the delay. I used to change the map view to the strategic one and zoom right in when I played on a huge map at the late game stage and that helped the delay issue.
I suppose the delay is also relative to what we expect and want to what we actually get.