Running PA : Full HD with humongous planets. And related questions.

Hi everybody, I have a few questions regarding the multithreading and optimizations of the game engine.

1.) How many cores does the game actually use in single player?
2.) Will it ever be properly multithreaded?
3.) What will be the impact of multithreading on gameplay?
4.) Does the simulation/local skirmish benefit from higher clock per cpu core?

I have a few more questions.
See, I'll only play skirmishes because internet in India is shitty (constant 2Mbps is wow awesome here) and won't change even in the next 5 years. LAN is a possibility, but that too will be rare.

I want to play on humongous planets with one or two small moons with every setting on high @HD resolutions (no 4K). 45-60 fps is acceptable for me.
Here are my questions.

5.) What will be most stressed, cpu, gpu, ram or all? With average amount of units.

6.) How much ram should I get?

7.) How much VRAM will be needed? 2, 3, 4?

8.) What is CPU dependent and what is GPU dependent?

9.) PA is a ______ heavy game.

@SXX

I have a few general answers.

Yes. No. Yes. Perhaps.

*Edit*
Just in case that could be taken the wrong way, I'm not really trying to troll you. I'm just having fun with the fact that you accidentally submitted before you finished typing the questions.

Stupid chrome! Posted the thread without the content! I'll edit the original post shortly.

Phew! Updated the original post.

First 4:

2-3 cores for the client. 1-2 for the server if you play offline singleplayer.

Yes.

Not much for the client, except for better GPU utilization. More units for the server.

Yes, for now it does due to lack of propper multithreading in the actual simulation process.


And as for the last 5 questions:

Ram, RAM, RAM!!!, bandwidth, CPU, GPU. Actually it's not so much the units, but planet size which kills you. Units only kill the server.

8GB, more if you want to play offline.

2GB is a safe bet. 1GB can lead to blurry textures while moving the cam, no loss of framerate.

Rendering happens on the GPU, generating planets happens on the CPU. Unless you want to play offline, in that case the entire simulation happens on the CPU as well, also double the load for planet generation in that case.

Client is surprisingly moderate on about everything except for low RAM. Server needs high single thread performance (for now) and even more RAM.

My whole PA experience will be offline single player only.

So, which CPU should I get? (please don't say i7 K series)

Screw the i7, Hyperthreading gets you nothing in PA (or games in general). i5 is perfectly sufficient.

Do you mean 2-3 cores for client+1-2 if I play offline? That around 5-6 cores! Which i5 has 5 cores?!

Now i'm getting muggled up with client and server. If i'm playing offline, what is my machine running? client or server?

I saw a person in the support forums who said that the game runs fine on an overclocked Pentium G3258.

If you play fullyoffline, your machine is running BOTH server and client. Regular single player is still using the Uber provided servers for that specific reason, they are using rather beefy Amazon provided servers for that cause which have specs you can't afford for your private PC.

Like I said, go for i5. Unless of course you can afford stuff like this (what e.g. the Uber servers are using for hosting several server applications per machine).

Although do not that I believe planets with a lot of trees are still a real pain to load.

And the largest of planets are still kind of difficult to load even with 8GB of ram.

If it's ok I could give an example of how my current setup works out as I play on FullHD resolution.

I use a Phenom2 970 (if I remember correctlty) at stock speeds, this is a quad core cpu and it has worked really well for me when looked at performance in single player. The sim speed will dip heavily in bigger systems but it has been fairly playable even with nine additional AI:s in the game.

My system has 16GB of RAM and it has only been inadequate in amount terms for some really big systems that I have attempted to play on, 8GB of RAM should still get you a long way though.

The GPU I'm using is a GTX580 with 3GB of VRAM, this card has been enough to run native resolution on uber settings and I'm seeing around 40-50fps in mid-game scenarios.

Hope this helps a bit

tl;dr: An i5 quad core with a high GHz rating will do perfectly fine when combined with 8GB or more RAM (for big systems) and a GPU with plenty of VRAM (I'd suggest a 4GB VRAM GPU as a personal preference).

- Bastian Forge

The SIM of the game is not multi-threaded, which means to get the best performance you'd need to have a CPU with the fastest single cores.

Or just wait until the SIM is multithreaded which will probably be a looooong time..

I7 5770k released recently I think and it's cores clock at 4.0 stock and turbo is warranty good tell 4.4 after that theoretically you could do 5+ but then you need to build your whole comp for OC and that gets expensive

By single player do you mean offline?
Also, i'm getting 16GB's of ram for my pc and a gtx 760 (2GB or 4GB I ask.)

An i5 at stock clocks will do?

I wish i had the money to buy that i7.

I5 is ample. If you can get an i5 'k' version it will give you a bit of future proofing as they overclock really well.

Yes, that would be the case.

Just tried the newest PTE (in offline mode without mods) with the first appearance of the unit cannon and it seemed in the later stages that textures would no longer load properly and some geometry did break temporarily when there was many effects on screen at the same time (then again there was around 14k units in game at the time). Might have been that I got close to the 3GB VRAM limit (a wild guess for my part). Thus I would go for the 4GB VRAM version of the GTX760.

- Bastian Forge

Just to be sure, that game wasn't limited by your CPU?
I'll probably never make that much units.

The game should be limited by CPU as the server doesn't even use your graphics card.

However the client might have beeb GPU limited. Also you'd be surprised at how huge games get in PA, thousand plus units is the norm I'd say.

A dare say that it is limiting a fair bit, my CPU is from 2008 i I remember correctly and a modern i5 CPU at roughly 2.7GHz would beat it in performance. Basically what I'm try to say is that any modern hardware that has come during the past 12 months would beat my current setup fairly easily

- Bastian Forge

*sigh* The entry level i7s are entirely pointless. In comparison the equally clocked i5, they have the same number of physical cores, the same peak performance and the same power consumption. The only additional feature they have, is "Hyperthreading" which makes a single CPU core appear as two individual cores to the operating system. That *can* give a slight performance boost if the specific workload isn't suited to put the processor core to full load with one thread, but it gets you absolutely nothing if the CPU is already at true 100% load internally. Which it pretty much is with PA...

You can only get another reliable performance boost with CPUs with more than 4 physical cores, but they cost extra.And you are bound to wait until the Sim is also properly threaded.