(Not Quite) For Backers Only: System Specs

Any current OS use extra RAM for filesystem cache, it's can easily use even 8-12GB, not just
5-6GB. It's really important especially if you using any P2P fileshare software. :roll:

Windows 7 x64 here. If Win7 is given RAM in huge amounts it does it's best in using it.

Done.

To be honest I was quite scared when I saw the amount of dual cores. That is until I noticed that that was the 32-bit section, the 64-bit section looked a lot better.

Sigh. By idle I mean "available". Free usually runs in the single digits. I'm still way too used to the output on XPs task manager :-(

If Planetary Annihilation is less than 10GB in size, I would probably try installing it on a RamDisk to see how insanely fast everything loads.

You make me wanna buy more ram............

Steam recommends 2GB HDD space. So yeah ram-disc here we come
The difference to a SSD however is pretty small in most cases. The only difference I can notice in FA without measuring milliseconds is that the map-list in the lobby is loaded instant instead of in ~10s.

agreed, RTS games aren't usually games that profit too much from fast HDD/SSDs since they don't have to do much loading during game time. Sure initially you load faster, but then you have to wait for the rest of the crowd.
If you play RPGs or something similar where big amounts of model/world/texture loading is done continuously in the background you probably notice a fast SSD more.

I wonder if there is going to be a marketable difference between 4 or 6 core cpus for PA?

I realize it is multithreaded, but not sure to what degree!

First generation Intel HD. Don't fail me now.

...like you failed me many other times.

The plan is to make it as multithreaded (parallelised) as possible. However just how multithreaded it can get will depend on a lot of things, including internal engine details us members of the public don't have access to (at least at this point in time).

Note: the client (not running a server, just the client) will probably only need 3-4 threads anyway, so I doubt players will need more than 4 cores overall (with a min spec currently of "dual core" I suspect 2 main threads with various extras as and when). The main advantage of more cores will be for the server, or someone running a single player skirmish, where they are the client and the server at the same time.

Some calculations are serial by nature, and thus I don't expect the alpha to initially benefit from many more than 4 cores. Once you get multiple simultaneous battlefields (e.g. planets plus moons plus asteroids) there is enough scope to potentially have them running their own independant sim threads, and therefore benefit from more cores (and/or hyperthreading). However whether the benefit of writing it like that outweighs the overhead of keeping all those threads in track when running on less cores, is something I could not comment on. I've never done anything like that to even know where the potential pitfalls are, never mind having any empirical data to be able to make predictions. I'm leaving that up to the experts.

I'd expect 4-8 cores (e.g. 4 with hyperthreading) to be a good aiming point for "large game" servers up until release, with the possibility of the engine being able to leverage 8+ after release, if neutrino can do some clever stuff with parallellising in the sim. It's all TBC at this point though.

TL;DR - 4 cores will be fine for players, server end (which won't be public until beta at the earliest) we'll need to wait until Uber have more info on what the engine is capable of leveraging. Having a "spare" core or 2 for the OS background tasks is never a bad thing though

Me too! Great little card on the laptop haha. Nothign like an Asus N53S!

Thanks for taking the time to explain. I really appreciate that!

Haven't seen this question yet, so I'll be the one to ask. I only have my ultra book (had to decide whether I wanted a power house, or a school computer...) It's decent for an ultrabook, but still no gaming pc. I have the I5, 8 gigs of ram, but only the intel hd graphics 4000. I see many people on the survey have the same. Is this going to be decent enough? I don't need mind blowing graphics, just dots that will shoot and kill other dots.

Intel's OpenGL drivers are bad, but HD4000 should be suitable to run the game at least. I sure some graphics bugs will be here. Everything else depends on how PA will manage rendering.
You may make easy test: install Spring RTS based game like Balanced Anihilation/Zero-K and try to run some game/replay. If it works PA should basically works too.

But if you want to play big games with high graphics setting you need proper video card, better Nvidia one.

Done it a while back...but done.

Filled it out. I scrolled down the results and nearly died laughing that someone put 'i dont have a video card lol' in the specific model field.

That statement could be entirely true for someone running on-board graphics.
"Card" is the operative word here.

Damn I love stats. Not sure if its been mentioned but I hope PA has some sexy persistent and after action stats for us. On topic, it's amazing all the different ways people with the same CPU (Intel i7 2600k ) chose to write it.

Done.