Time for a new rig

[Ashmantious]

I have (had) a 2013 iMac. It ran Civ VI okay but the video for the leaders wasn't too great (wierd colors and shading, Jadwiga had blond hair for example) and the game would sometimes lock up towards end game (too much going on I suppose). My computer screen is fried, took it in to get looked at. It'sgoing to cost about $800 to get the computer fixed. My thinking is, that's too much to pay to repair a 7 year old computer. I looking to spec out a new Mac. I know enough about computers to pretend like I know something but at the end I know I don't know too much. I'm trying to figure out what do I need in a new computer to make sure the graphics work like it is supposed to.

 

[CGPanama]

Just about any modern Mac will run CivVI well enough. Obviously the higher you go, the better the performance. The only one I would hesitate on is the MacBook Air (In case you were thinking portable). All of the laptops have slower graphics cards and performance than desktops. (Disclaimer: I have a 16 inch MacBook Pro)

The caution I would give is to wait a week. WWDC (Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference) is a week from Monday, and there is a rumor of new hardware, including an updated iMac.

 

[LFRANK]

Just ordered the new mid-range iMac with the Radeon Pro 5700 GPU. I think it's comparable to the last iMac Pro in performance but only time will tell.

Plan to put Civ6 through the paces once I have it setup and report back.

 

[LFRANK]

New rig just arrived, the iMac 2020 with 32GB RAM and updated AMD Radeon Pro 5700 8GB graphics card. Spent the night transferring data. This morning it's time to test all my apps, update them as necessary, and of course, run the Civ 6 benchmark. Overall it does feel like it runs much faster than on my iMac 2017, but I couldn't find my numbers from those benchmarks to compare. Raw values are:

Average Frame Time: 9.223ms
99th Percentile: 12.413ms

Once I complete the entire swap I'll start a new game and see if it runs faster or not. I suspect it will, booya!

 

[LFRANK]

Good news, Civ 6 does feel faster as it processes each turn. Even late games with hundreds of units are snappy.

Bad news, it crashes at the oddest times. First time it happened I suspected a mod but a subsequent game without mods had the same issue. Basically the game appears to locks up, spasms through a few random updates (map repositions itself), then graphic glitches appear. Once they do the entire machine locks up. I'm unable to tab out or force quit Civ 6. A force reboot with the power switch is the only way to recover.

Finally had a normal crash a few minutes ago and sent off an error report. Previous crashes either didn't create a log file or I as simply unable to find it in the Console app. Very annoying.

The graphic issues almost make me suspect some issue with the graphic card (AMD Radeon Pro 5700) or Metal firmware that totally disorients the OS. Difficult to do in UNIX systems but not impossible.

Will keep plugging away and see if I can really narrow it down to the real problem.

 

[footballciv]

Bad news, it crashes at the oddest times. First time it happened I suspected a mod but a subsequent game without mods had the same issue. Basically the game appears to locks up, spasms through a few random updates (map repositions itself), then graphic glitches appear. Once they do the entire machine locks up. I'm unable to tab out or force quit Civ 6. A force reboot with the power switch is the only way to recover.

I'm having exactly the same problem. Posted in a separate thread. I'm more pissed by the graphic glitches than normal crashes, because I need to hard reboot with that.

 

[LFRANK]

Originally thought the game freezes was due to my new iMac (graphic card) but further testing showed the same issue happens on my MBP as well. Symptoms are very similar on both machines but the only common elements are Civ6 and the use of Metal since OpenGL is no more. Submitted a bug report to Aspyr telling them what I experienced. Hopefully they will find and fix the issue asap.

The fact that it affects the screen (in my case anyway) indicates to me the issue is somewhere in the graphics system. The appearance of random geometric shapes indicates an overflow in the calculations which are then drawn onscreen using the new odd coordinates. The screen freezing and stuttering looks like buffer overflows where the same buffer is redrawn multiple times in slightly different locations.

Thank goodness for turn by turn backups for resuming right where I was kicked out of the game.

 

[Alexis Layton]

It seems to me that the freeze most often occurs when the game is panning the screen while trying to do something else, or when you move a unit and it moves halfway but then something like a cut-away scene is supposed to trigger, like meeting an new leader.

 

[LFRANK]

It seems to me that the freeze most often occurs when the game is panning the screen while trying to do something else, snip...

Hadn't noticed that particular issue but now that you mention it, it does seem to always happen when the AI is moving things around and not on a Next Turn action.