What hardware do people play DoC on?

jorissimo

Warlord
Joined
Jan 31, 2008
Messages
231
Location
Swapped cheese and windmills for cod and wine
I don't want to be a bore with more performance-related posts, but I'm curious about the rigs that DoC players use and their experiences.

I myself have far from a gaming rig, using a somewhat older lenovo laptop with 8GB ram, an intel core i5 CPU running at 2.6 GHz, and internal graphics with, according to the website CanYouRunIt, 3GB of video RAM. I am not a big gamer but like to play civ 4 and its mods (especially DoC) from time to time.

I initially had a lot of trouble running DoC, but through several adaptations managed to get it to run without major problems at least up to give or take 1700 AD. Beyond that point, turn times become quite slow and memory allocation failures happen. I would like to get some comparisons to see whether people with similar setups have similar experiences.
 
I'm currently traveling but I'll share my laptop stats when I'm back home, just so everyone knows what my baseline for judging performance is.

Rule of thumb though is that SSD > perfomance of a single core > RAM > graphics card.
 
I'm currently traveling but I'll share my laptop stats when I'm back home, just so everyone knows what my baseline for judging performance is.

Rule of thumb though is that SSD > perfomance of a single core > RAM > graphics card.
How do I check single core performance? My CPU has four cores but I guess it can't be as simple as dividing the overall clock rate by four right? When it comes to the hard drive, I remember having tried to figure out before whether I had an SSD, but in vain. Googling the serial number of the drive also didn't yield any conclusive information.
 
It's not, and I don't think you can backwards calculate this somehow (clock rates are mostly marketing anyway), but usually means that dual cores run the game way better than quads or even octo cores. The cheaper laptops that have lower clocked CPUs with less processors may be at an advantage sometimes.
 
I might have to install CIV on my SSD, been using the SATA drive the whole time as that's my games drive. I never bothered installing stuff in the program files of C:\ Cause of windows security.
 
I have never used SSD via USB to know what the response rates are compared to HDD, but I guess it must be worth it or that wouldn't exist. So yeah, give it a try.
 
My specs:

Ryzen 7 1700 CPU
Geforce GTX 960 GPU
and of course Civ4 installed on an SSD

the CPU really isn't ideal for playing Civ because the individual core clock isn't great but it's adequate.
 
I don't want to be a bore with more performance-related posts, but I'm curious about the rigs that DoC players use and their experiences.

I myself have far from a gaming rig, using a somewhat older lenovo laptop with 8GB ram, an intel core i5 CPU running at 2.6 GHz, and internal graphics with, according to the website CanYouRunIt, 3GB of video RAM. I am not a big gamer but like to play civ 4 and its mods (especially DoC) from time to time.

I initially had a lot of trouble running DoC, but through several adaptations managed to get it to run without major problems at least up to give or take 1700 AD. Beyond that point, turn times become quite slow and memory allocation failures happen. I would like to get some comparisons to see whether people with similar setups have similar experiences.

My computer is dramatically more powerful than your my game also starts to slow noticeably around that sort of time period, you need a ridiculously fast CPU for quicker turn times and I think even that has diminishing results. DOC handles the game quite well to be fair, try that Road to War mod so see civ really grind to a halt with the dynamic titles.
 
It's not, and I don't think you can backwards calculate this somehow (clock rates are mostly marketing anyway), but usually means that dual cores run the game way better than quads or even octo cores. The cheaper laptops that have lower clocked CPUs with less processors may be at an advantage sometimes.
Due to substantially improved hyperthreading, dual cores being better than quads is no longer correct. More cores can now boost as fast as the dual cores if you aren't running much stuff, as long as you are on a consumer platform.

My specs:

Ryzen 7 1700 CPU
Geforce GTX 960 GPU
and of course Civ4 installed on an SSD

the CPU really isn't ideal for playing Civ because the individual core clock isn't great but it's adequate.
swapping that 1700 for a 3000 series Ryzen would likely be a pretty decent boost

My computer is dramatically more powerful than your my game also starts to slow noticeably around that sort of time period, you need a ridiculously fast CPU for quicker turn times and I think even that has diminishing results. DOC handles the game quite well to be fair, try that Road to War mod so see civ really grind to a halt with the dynamic titles.
has PTSD flashback
 
Due to substantially improved hyperthreading, dual cores being better than quads is no longer correct. More cores can now boost as fast as the dual cores if you aren't running much stuff, as long as you are on a consumer platform.
I don't follow. Hyperthreading helps when the number of threads exceeds the number of cores. Single/dual threaded Civ4 processes cannot benefit from that.
 
I don't follow. Hyperthreading helps when the number of threads exceeds the number of cores. Single/dual threaded Civ4 processes cannot benefit from that.

I think they are specifically referring to laptops. Basically quad+core laptops have very similar clock speeds to duel core laptops.

They might also be speculating that civ benefits from more cores which certainly does not seem to be the case.
 
My point was that generally, when comparing dual cores to quad cores of the same price range, a single dual core has the better clock rate than a quad core. Since Civ4 can only use a single core (for the computational load we are talking about here), that's what should be the important criterion here.
 
Top Bottom