I've noticed that late-game, even on standard maps (say turn 150+) the game can slow down considerably, and that I'll occasionally run out of memory on larger maps (despite having 20 GB of RAM). So I was wondering, what are the most important components for fast, huge Old World maps?
My first thought was CPU, since that's such a large factor in Civ3/Civ4, but I am not sure if that's really the bottleneck here, or if there is good multi-threaded scaling. Is a hex core noticeably faster than a quad, all else equal? Does CPU cache make a considerable difference? Some Civ3 players used to swear by Cedar Mill Pentium 4 CPUs being faster due to having twice the cache, and I'm wondering if the Ryzen 5800X3D would have an impact on Old World for the same basic reason.
But now I'm thinking memory might be the main component, the more the better. It looks like I'm using a lot of virtual memory, so maybe I should put 64 GB of main memory in my rebuild this fall.
Graphics, I'm less sure about. I usually play on Medium on an 8 GB RX480. It gets slow late sometimes, but is the GPU the limiting factor? It feels like both the graphics/scrolling, and the AI turn times slow down, so I'm really not sure what the bottleneck is. But my hunch is putting an RTX 3080 in my computer probably wouldn't make everything blazing fast.
I'm especially interested to hear from players who regularly play on larger maps, or who made upgrades and can speak to whether they made a difference or not. It would also be cool to have some sort of benchmark - back in the Civ3 days I had a notoriously slow save file that I shared, and a few people posted back how long the AI turn took, so we got a better idea of which CPUs were relatively fast for Civ and which were underwhelming.
No particular hurry - I plan to wait until AMD's next round of processors are on the market - but once they're available I'd like to have a good idea of which components to focus on. And while non-gaming tasks will be a significant factor, at this point Old World is the only game that I kind of want to make run significantly faster than it does today. Well, and maybe those humungous Civ3/4 games that have been on my back burner for a few years...
My first thought was CPU, since that's such a large factor in Civ3/Civ4, but I am not sure if that's really the bottleneck here, or if there is good multi-threaded scaling. Is a hex core noticeably faster than a quad, all else equal? Does CPU cache make a considerable difference? Some Civ3 players used to swear by Cedar Mill Pentium 4 CPUs being faster due to having twice the cache, and I'm wondering if the Ryzen 5800X3D would have an impact on Old World for the same basic reason.
But now I'm thinking memory might be the main component, the more the better. It looks like I'm using a lot of virtual memory, so maybe I should put 64 GB of main memory in my rebuild this fall.
Graphics, I'm less sure about. I usually play on Medium on an 8 GB RX480. It gets slow late sometimes, but is the GPU the limiting factor? It feels like both the graphics/scrolling, and the AI turn times slow down, so I'm really not sure what the bottleneck is. But my hunch is putting an RTX 3080 in my computer probably wouldn't make everything blazing fast.
I'm especially interested to hear from players who regularly play on larger maps, or who made upgrades and can speak to whether they made a difference or not. It would also be cool to have some sort of benchmark - back in the Civ3 days I had a notoriously slow save file that I shared, and a few people posted back how long the AI turn took, so we got a better idea of which CPUs were relatively fast for Civ and which were underwhelming.
No particular hurry - I plan to wait until AMD's next round of processors are on the market - but once they're available I'd like to have a good idea of which components to focus on. And while non-gaming tasks will be a significant factor, at this point Old World is the only game that I kind of want to make run significantly faster than it does today. Well, and maybe those humungous Civ3/4 games that have been on my back burner for a few years...