Ashes of the Singularity

Just wanted to say thanks for linking the stream recording, was quite an interesting watch. I'm assuming that since it was mentioned in the stream its safe to talk about the fact that naval will be an expansion on its own. If they do it well then I won't mind. Heck I'll probs support them anyway since im eager to see more non starcraft RTS games in the market.

Have you been watching Roflness vids? we've been doing playing multi

actually I have. I saw. ...and I felt a little bit left out

invite me next time !

Whenever I see AOTS videos so far I still feel "aw my eyes hurt, trying to make out the small units".
:s

Not to be rude, butttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt.................................... Is masters computer a potato? or does the game not look pretty like the screen shots?

Because the gameplay didn't look as cool as the screens.

We can't play on higher than medium or so. I have a 770 and he's got a 980 I think. You need two 980s or a titan to hit ultra apparently. It's not well optimized lol.

Well I'm just gash dern happy with it that-er-way n' I don't want me ner Gash dern Strategic Zoom dammit! Keep the dern dirty stratigic zommer on the other side of the wall!! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAW!! *bang* *bang* *bang* /S

take a sneak at the minimum specs you'll turn a sudden shade of pale. http://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/game/faq
third box.

Isn't that pretty much the specs for PA though? Lol. Nothing that controversial- 2gb video card (so any mid range card from the last 4 years) 8gb of ram (people really still have machines with 4gb these days) and a quad core cpu. So a Phenom I or Core 2 Quad from 6 years ago.

PA already had high demands for min specs but didn't have a min screen resolution
it didn't ask for a specific gen of CPU or higher
it didn't ask for a certain number of cores minimum
and it allowed as low as the intel graphics for the GPU whereas this is asking for a DX 11 graphics card (and recommending a gtx 970 at least.

also the min specs aren't likely to scale down as did PA's.

Well I guess, although I think all it's really asking for is a reasonably current machine. I mean 'quad core' translates to 4 threads, so a core i3 or apu is sufficient. Dx11 gpu dates back to HD 5000 and gtx 400 cards which are both quite old.

I guess it looks bad because we're so used to games developed for the previous gen consoles that would run on a sufficiently up to date microwave oven

Given the large jump in capability with the current consoles I'm expecting minimum requirements to go up quite a bit moving forward....

It absolutely does not. that's where people gotta be reaaaaaally carefull.

4 cores is 4 .....cores. which can indeed equate to 8 threads if you are on an intel cpu or 4 if it is AMD.

this NOT something that has ever been asked before of games.

Yeah, my screen resolution isn't that big!

Might need to save for some new equipment, assuming I can cover the costs of moving into a flat next year.

No it means 4 threads the os doesn't differentiate between logical and physics threads, so to the os a core i3 is quad core. So is an A10 apu (which is advertised as quad core even though it's slower at running 4 threads than an i3).

I guarantee you can launch and play ashes on a quad thread processor. To not do so would require serious coding effort on the devs part to identify 'no this is a dual core with smt, not a true quad core, stop!'.

A few modern games need 4 threads now, to the point the games won't load on a dual core. Core i3 with its 4 threads can play all these games. Also 4 thread performance difference between a modern (haswell or skylake) i3 and same gen i5 is really small, to the point a high clocked i3 can out pace the low clocked i5, due to how wide Intel's modern execution engine is.

I3 is a quad core for all intents and purposes and it will run ashes

Edit: proof:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-ashes-of-the-singularity-dx12-benchmark-tested

The difference between the i7 and the i3 is remarkably small

hmmm figure that.

they gotta clear that up then it's really gonna cause confusion.

the thing is they built this game around multi-threading it uses all the threads it can get and it even gets more fps from you having processor with more cores which is why it would have been only natural that they require this.

Yeah, I mean currently looking at the CPU benchmarks, the performance difference between the latest i3 and i7 is quite small. There were some other benchmarks I saw showing the FX 8350 behind that i3 as well which surprised me.

That said, this game is in Alpha and I'm wondering if they haven't multi threaded everything fully yet? I mean really I think an FX 8350 (albeit quite old now) should still be a better bet in a heavily threaded game than an i3 so there's got to be a bit more room for more performance down the line (for example is the simulation multi threaded yet?).

they're evidently not developing things in the same order as PA. they seem to have way more of the engine down already then PA did at this stage. they are soon to support SLI and crossfire the crossover of the two types of cards whatever that's called. they're just slapping on functionality left right and center.

what simulation?


no seriously the main dev said himself there wasn't much projectile collision right now. it probably is multi threaded (because the freakin AI is) but I don't see it being any sort of a load on the CPU as it currently stands.

Well there has to be stuff like collision detection, path finding, etc pp.
All the things you need until you even get to see an army of units move from A to B. And it's those things that become really expensive once you hit a lot of units. Even totally unrealistic models need to be calculated.

Yeah, it's pretty weird when it comes to whether developers mean cores or threads. Usually, cores refers to logical cores, especially since the average consumer probably doesn't really understand the difference, nor are they likely to look beyond "it has 4 cores in task manager!"

Another issue though, is that an i3 is definitely faster than a C2Q, at single threaded applications and in many multi-threaded applications, however, the C2Q still retains a better multi-threaded ability because it has 4 physical cores and can make use of individual resources per core--less efficient, but more reliably better on high loads. AOTS can probably run fine on either, leaning towards the i3 just because of newer connections, instructions and technologies.
[This may not really be true with current hardware, 4th and 6th generations may have taken the lead, but this was true for Sandy/Ivy Bridge]

Also, cdrkf, DX12 tests aren't a good way to really compare hardware. You're better off looking at the API advantage over DX11, since that's what it is. In physics scores, just going from an i5 to an i7 yields around a 41% increase when running at the same speed (4.5Ghz, no throttling). Going from the i5 to the i7 is probably a much larger deal, though I don't have tests to quantify that.

PS: apparently, Haswell (Devils Canyon, I assume) out performs Skylake in IPC, and is actually preferred for bench marking for that reason. [Actually, it turns out that Skylake has higher IPC, but performs marginally worse with a discrete GPU (3-5% worse)--barely there, but still there.]

Skylake is categorically faster in *Instructions Per Clock* than haswell. Devils canyon can out perform the skylake i7 because it has a clock speed advantage due to more mature process and higher thermal ceiling but if you were to clock them the same then skylake would be ahead due to wider engine and improved branch prediction etc. It's not a massive jump in ipc, but it's definitely there.

Also what you say about true quads vs hyper threaded dual core cpus was true for ivy and Sandy, but haswell forwards increased the throughout of each core so much that they can effectively handle 2 threads with minimal penalty. The scaling on the skylake i3 is insane.