What would be the BEST video card to use?

[civ_king]

For Internet surfing (of which I do A LOT) it's worth the $318 I paid for it. Plus, oh, that reminds me that I could probably get away with raising the graphic details from Low to High! (Must dash off and do that ASAP!

And what does "update your CPU Christmas 2011 for maximum value (Ivy Bridge)" mean? (Remember, practically tech illiterate here.)

There is this new CPU thing coming out next year called "Sandy Bridge"
Then later that year there is a thing called "Ivy Bridge" which is a "die shrink" basically it fits more cores on the chip it is much better than a "Core 2 Quad"
With "Ivy Bridge" quad cores are minimum even for laptops, and you can get an "octo core" which has eight cores!

understand?

 

[CaptainPatch]

I seem to to recall reading in one of the threads that according to some benchmark tests, Civ 5 apparently doesn't do too well optimizing more than two cores. That is (if I recall the wording of the statement) you could have 12 cores, but performance would be only marginal over what you can get from a dual-core.

 

[tokala]

That is at least what you can conclude from the reports here at CFC, at the 2K forums and the 2 webpublished benchmark reports.
But than there are a FEW people, who report that it runs on multicores with >75% CPU usage, and scales pretty well up to 6 cores.
And even on my lowly dual-core, apparently randomly, it runs either pretty smooth with ~90% CPU utilization, or rather choppy with 60% CPU load
So there is hope that it's not a principle problem of the engine, but rather some bug or another that limits the efficient usage of multicore CPUs

 

[civ_king]

I seem to to recall reading in one of the threads that according to some benchmark tests, Civ 5 apparently doesn't do too well optimizing more than two cores. That is (if I recall the wording of the statement) you could have 12 cores, but performance would be only marginal over what you can get from a dual-core.

Don't worry, it will be optimized and this time they have a lot of room to optimize (no longer smacking the single thread barrier)

That is at least what you can conclude from the reports here at CFC, at the 2K forums and the 2 webpublished benchmark reports.
But than there are a FEW people, who report that it runs on multicores with >75% CPU usage, and scales pretty well up to 6 cores.
And even on my lowly dual-core, apparently randomly, it runs either pretty smooth with ~90% CPU utilization, or rather choppy with 60% CPU load
So there is hope that it's not a principle problem of the engine, but rather some bug or another that limits the efficient usage of multicore CPUs

IIRC the people who have it scaling are on tough maps

 

[CaptainPatch]

Well the details of better performance have become a moot point until I sort out some crash problems that have cropped up since installing the GTX 460: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=389728