System requirements?

[Drago Askani]

a cheapie PC you could buy anywhere comes with at least 4gb ram usually anyhow. I got one a little over a year ago for $500, that came with 6gb, with a pentium dual core 2.60. I did however have to upgrade the graphics card.

A cheapie pc doesnt come with Coursair 1600mhz ram. ;p True I'm only getting 2 sticks to begin with and I chose a more expensive motherboard then the "stock" one they have. Also my machine is coming without an OS, so that right there makes it 120 cheaper then it would be. But I already have my XP disks and will switch over to win7 this fall. The computer I am spending 620 will have about 3 times the processing power over that 500 machine you bought. I've even made sure the motherboard was set up so that I could run a dedicated PhsyX card since I have a 9800GT sitting in my closet. Its gonna be a great machine I'm excited.

 

[ancestral]

My guess is you'll need graphics support for pixel shaders 2.0 and about 1 GB RAM, plus a Pentium 4/Intel Core Duo+ or the AMD equivalent.

 

[Unclescam777]

a cheapie PC you could buy anywhere comes with at least 4gb ram usually anyhow. I got one a little over a year ago for $500, that came with 6gb, with a pentium dual core 2.60. I did however have to upgrade the graphics card.

Junk RAM maybe. I would rather have 2GB of high performance memory than 6 gigs of the slow sticks that come in cheap retail computers. Btw, your computer would go faster if you removed 2GB and ran 4GB in dual channel mode. 6GB is for i7 processors because they support triple channel RAM. Other CPUs should run with 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of RAM. OEM manufacturers will never learn.

OP, I think you will be fine. Firaxis knows that Civ V will reach a large demographic. Expect them to make a game that scales well so people with older computer can play it, just like Starcraft 2. Worst case scenario you will have to turn down a few settings.

 

[Takhisis]

The video card is fine, although dual core 2,53 Ghz is not too impressive. However, I am sure this game will no require a monster pc. With specs like that you should be fine.

@Takhisis,

I can't see why that PC would be unable to play Civ V. That PC was a mid-high end PC 1-2 years ago with a slightly underpowered video card (more mid range).

With the exception of the memory leak issues in Civ IV, most civ games are very scalable and can run on just about any present day PC.

Yes, it was in the mid-to-high range in 2008. Civ V has been announced as coming next fall, but there's a chance they could make it be 2011, how old would that be? I still think that it'll run, but I'm gearing up for SCII anyway.

I think we can safely assume it will be less than Starcraft 2. My computer is more than 7 years old so I need a new one anyway and have decided to base its design on what ever Starcraft 2 recomends plus a little more. That should cover Civ 5.

Me want Starcraft 2! me want Starcraft 2!

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I'm thinking that anything that can play civ IV will be able to play V, without getting into all the specs.

I can't imagine that a game made more than five years later than civ IV wouldn't require more from the computer it runs on. My computer can play civ IV and it's 7+ years old, but it doesn't play it well. There's no way my 7+ year old computer plays a new game.

Maybe I'm being to critical of you're statement and what you meant was anything that could play civ IV at full graphics levels on the biggest maps in the late game with no slowdown could probably run civ V at it's lowest graphics levels with slowdown on more complex maps. That might be a more realistic expectation. Because my computer playing civIV at low graphics with massive slowdown on late game medium sized maps is not going to play civ V, period.

 

[darkedone02]

From the look of these graphics, you need somewhat of a duel core... that's about it. my computer can already handle the new games, even on crysis on high and a bit of very high settings.

 

[Drago Askani]

dual core should be a given, with hopefully better performance on quads. I would suspect that any of the Mid level plus graphics cards from 8800GTS (and the ati equivalents) and up would be able to max out the graphic settings.

 

[madscientist]

My question is not really the computer itself, mine is pretty high end, but whether I will have to upgrade XP to wondows 7. Civ V announced after 7 is released makes me rather depressed about it.

 

[Drago Askani]

Good point, they have mentioned DX11 support I think. I have to go look again at the information thats on the coming soon page. I might be remembering wrong. Hopefully they still support dx9 in it. I won't be upgrading to win 7 till the fall, but depending on game release date, and which dx it requires I might have to make a sooner purchase.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Since the game is out in the fall they would have had to have been working on it for years, so it started pre-windows 7, so likely wouldn't require it.

 

[Blahblahman123]

I guess if you could run game on atleast medium graphics and Huge maps on civ 4 than youll probably gona be able to run civ v and graphics look very similar to civ 4 col and i could it run it perfectly just a thought i might be wrong

 

[Abegweit]

The only definitive thing Firaxis has said yet is that it will have support for DirectX 11. I interpret this to mean that it will be highly desirable if not absolutely required. Advantages of using DirectX 11 might include tessalation and multi-core processing.

From the user perspective, this means:
* brand new video card (within about a year of the ship date)
* only Vista or Windows 7, nothing older

 

[civ_king]

I guess if you could run game on atleast medium graphics and Huge maps on civ 4 than youll probably gona be able to run civ v and graphics look very similar to civ 4 col and i could it run it perfectly just a thought i might be wrong

Untrue, I can Guarantee you my computer wont run it, it has a single core 3GHz with 2 Gigs RAM

 

[Drago Askani]

Untrue, I can Guarantee you my computer wont run it, it has a single core 3GHz with 2 Gigs RAM

Very true, my current machine is a 5 year old single core running at 4.2ghz overclock with 2 gigs of ram and supreme commander 1 brings it to its knees. I can't wait to have my new computer.

 

[Supermarine2000]

well my computer will have to die if i want play this new version...my computer:

Intel Pentium 4 HT 3 GHz with 2 GB memory RAM and a nice Asus ATI A9250 Gamer Edition...model 2006 ....

its seems that i must save money for my new Intel Core 2 Duo computer

 

[civ_king]

Dream Computer
Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (not quite Octo)
6GB (6x1GB) (Upgrade as Needed)
2TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s (More as Needed)
4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB D)
Two 18x SuperDrives
$6,849.00

 

[civ_king]

Double Post

 

[Smidlee]

One of the major limits of civ5 will be the same that limited civ4 (as well other PC games) especially when it came to mods. That is the 32 bit 2GB limit for a single process.
Stardock was planning at first to develop a 64-bit version for Elemental which would allow larger maps and more units (no 2gb limit) but it seems lately it's not going to happen. Until games start to cross over to 64 bit the 2GB limit will be a major factor of future PC games.

 

[civ_king]

One of the major limits of civ5 will be the same that limited civ4 (as well other PC games) especially when it came to mods. That is the 32 bit 2GB limit for a single process.
Stardock was planning at first to develop a 64-bit version for Elemental which would allow larger maps and more units (no 2gb limit) but it seems lately it's not going to happen. Until games start to cross over to 64 bit the 2GB limit will be a major factor of future PC games.

1) There is a fix to make it 3GB
2) There will be 64bit compatibility!

 

[EmpireOfCats]

Valve publishes the hardware stats from Steam online, so that tells you what most people have:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Notice that 42 percent are Win XP 32 bit systems, 2 GB of RAM is the norm, only 18 percent still have single core CPU (quad core is about 24 percent already), and about 49 percent are DirectX 10 systems.

Let's assume that by Fall, some more people will have upgraded, so. Still, not supporting XP would cut out something like a third of their market, which would be stupid. DirectX 11-only would seem to be equally dumb. However, most people will be upset if it isn't multicore-aware -- in fact, that's the one thing I absolutely hate about Civ IV -- so though it should run on a single core, we should be able to expect it to run faster on more than one.

Again, this is an example of where Blizzard is doing things right (like Mac support): Diablo 3 is currently running on DirectX 9, though supporting newer versions (additionally) is not ruled out.