Upgrading your computer

[SG-17]

Hopefully I won't need to upgrade mine. I hope the engine is as efficient as they say it is.

I run Civ IV with 4x Anti-Aliasing, High Res-Textures, and everything else on max on these specs with no problems at all.

AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 2.10 ghz
3 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 3100 Integrated Graphics
Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit

 

[PieceOfMind]

Civ 5 can make use of 8 threads so can fully utilise my i7's cores and threads.

Faster has now been replaced by smarter. The lowest core i7 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+920+@+2.67GHz
is faster than the fastest previous generation core quad extreme http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Extreme+X9750+@+3.16GHz

Artificial CPU benchmarks don't mean much without context. Most games don't push the CPU to the limit and are rather limited by something else like graphics.

I'm still very skeptical that civ5 will make very intelligent use of more than 2 cores.

 

[civ_king]

Artificial CPU benchmarks don't mean much without context. Most games don't push the CPU to the limit and are rather limited by something else like graphics.

I'm still very skeptical that civ5 will make very intelligent use of more than 2 cores.

Actually at GDC the confirmed it would be able to use 8 threads and in Podcast 5 they confirmed 12, They have no idea how far it scales... but it's 12 or more which is impressive

DB: We've tested on 12 threads but, I mean, we don't have anything more than 12 to test on but we're pretty confident it'll work with a lot more. Yeah it's amazing how it spreads across the whole system.

Spoiler :

K: I think there was a lot of careful planning that went into the design of the engine very very early on. I think there was also a lot of sort of very honestly looking at how games are produced, what needs to go into it. So effectively we've probably pulled away a lot of the extra glue and a lot of the extra (inaudible) that wind up weighing down a lot of engines and what we've got is something that's very clean. Very small set of code that does exactly what we want it to with very little to no side effects. And that's something that Dan designed the graphics layer from the ground up to be completely like that. And then we've designed the rest of the engine to be very very similar in that everything is there for a reason. There's nothing there that doesn't belong there and there's no code that gets executed for no reason whatsoever. And that's allowed us, at least in terms of efficiency, to scale very well on a single core. The second side of that is that Dan and I looked very hard at threading scalability in terms of how games typically wind up implementing that. Most of the games and the game engines you'll find out there are very functionally threaded which means they'll run physics on a thread, they'll run graphics on a thread. It's very very coarse. Very very coarse and beyond say the Xbox that doesn't scale very well. Once you get to quad core and beyond you just wind up running out of functional elements and you wind up requiring to subdivide. However if you design for a functional paradigm what happens is that trying to break that up into smaller pieces now introduces additional overhead. So we design everything from the ground up to be job-based, task-based, very well encapsulated so we've scaled up to, what is it, 12...

DB: We've tested on 12 threads but, I mean, we don't have anything more than 12 to test on but we're pretty confident it'll work with a lot more. Yeah it's amazing how it spreads across the whole system.

 

[PieceOfMind]

None of that is a confirmation that it fully utilises several cores (by that I mean pushing more than one core to capacity).

Besides, if you think about it, if they're designing it to be really demanding on 4+core computers, it's going to be very sluggish on dual cores, and dual cores are going to be a huge chunk of their audience, probably even more than the 4+core group.

The devs always love making sound everything great. Sometimes you need to read between the lines.

 

[civ_king]

None of that is a confirmation that it fully utilises several cores.

Besides, if you think about it, if they're designing it to be really demanding on 4+core computers, it's going to be very sluggish on dual cores, and dual cores are going to be a huge chunk of their audience, probably even more than the 4+core group.

The devs always love making sound everything great. Sometimes you need to read between the lines.

Or it spans hundreds of small jobs and offloads graphics to the GPU like it's meant to be, in between turn might be slow, but eventually machines catch up and after all we had Civ IV for five years

 

[chris200x9]

Do you guys think my new laptop will work? It's a 2.26 core i5 with 4gb ram and a 1gb ati mobility 5650.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I think that'd be just fine, but we don't have recommended specs for the game yet so I'm only speculating.

 

[civ_king]

Do you guys think my new laptop will work? It's a 2.26 core i5 with 4gb ram and a 1gb ati mobility 5650.

pretty much guaranteed to beat minimum specs and probably meets recommended too

 

[fromeast2west]

Actually at GDC the confirmed it would be able to use 8 threads and in Podcast 5 they confirmed 12, They have no idea how far it scales... but it's 12 or more which is impressive

'Using', and making productive use of cores are different. The game engine may be able to spread jobs over many cores, but if there aren't gains in performance, what's the point?

Games these days generally aren't CPU limited, and without supporting components (SSD, fast and plentiful RAM, and High end GPU), adding more cores will just add more idle time on the CPU.

Civ V could span 100 cores, but if they're each only running at 1% capacity you could get the same performance from fewer cores.

 

[ShaqFu]

Games these days generally aren't CPU limited, and without supporting components (SSD, fast and plentiful RAM, and High end GPU), adding more cores will just add more idle time on the CPU.

Civ games are rougher on the CPU than most others due to the AI. As the game progresses, AI turns take longer and longer due to the sheer number of decisions that have to be made. By dedicating cores to the AI, it relieves a huge load from the processor (which is already busy with a million other things), massively speeding the game up. Most games have simpler AI than Civ, hence why it matters less to them. It's a lot more CPU-intensive to wage a 2-front modern war than to aim a rifle.

As an anecdote, my friend, playing huge maps of Civ4 on a computer that barely met specs, could play normally for most of the game, but in the Modern Age could make meals between turns.

 

[civ_king]

'Using', and making productive use of cores are different. The game engine may be able to spread jobs over many cores, but if there aren't gains in performance, what's the point?

Games these days generally aren't CPU limited, and without supporting components (SSD, fast and plentiful RAM, and High end GPU), adding more cores will just add more idle time on the CPU.

Civ V could span 100 cores, but if they're each only running at 1% capacity you could get the same performance from fewer cores.

Civ use a lot of Processor between turns

 

[aMoralAtheist]

I'm curious. What games make best use of quadcores? (i.e. not just 100% of core 1 and 10% of the other 3 cores)

I suspect that in most games still, one of the best dual cores easily matches the performance of a quadcore and they're cheaper too.

Bad Company 2 comes to mind. Though its mostly useful for triple cores, as those cores see around 50% plus ussage, but the 4th only 10-20. This is on an Amd Phenom 2 x4 955 (3.2 GHz)

For people looking at hyper threaded intels, over priced for the performance, imho. PLus hyper threading does not affect gaming.

 

[aMoralAtheist]

Oh and for people going over 4GB of ram. Total overkill. The only positive is you can be more careless letting your system get bogged down by spyware with out as much of a noticeable affect.

 

[Decius]

I plan to buy a new PC in August. My one hesitation is that I might end up with a video card that will have problems with Civ V. Any word yet on the specs?

 

[The_J]

I plan to buy a new PC in August. My one hesitation is [...]

Why then not wait just a month longer?

 

[civ_king]

I plan to buy a new PC in August. My one hesitation is that I might end up with a video card that will have problems with Civ V. Any word yet on the specs?

Budget and country?

 

[aMoralAtheist]

I plan to buy a new PC in August. My one hesitation is that I might end up with a video card that will have problems with Civ V. Any word yet on the specs?

A 4890, 5770, or 5800 series will be fine. (ati)

 

[ainwood]

Oh, my post was mainly aimed at the OP, but I guess it's general enough to have applied to you as well. I have 4GB myself but when running winxp (32bit) it's only about 3.25GB it can use. 4GB in my mind should mainly coincide with a shift to 64 bit OS, so I just got win7 x64 the other day.

Steam itself has only a 32 bit version.

Presumably there is nothing to prevent a 64 bit app being launched from a 32 bit one? Has there been any discussion on whether Civ5 will ship with 64-bit support? (that said, I think some people did play Civ4 with "large memory address aware" parameters set in the OS.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I do not have a link for you (someone else might) but I am fairly certain it has been confirmed there will be both 32 and 64 bit versions (presumably they will not be sold separately).

 

[SG-17]

Is 32bit Vista limited to 3.25 GB of RAM too?