Spec Question

the overheating issues and the general pricing are the prominent reasons why I for one wouldn't recommend a notebook as a game pc. I tried it once and the heating issues drove me nuts. Sure, there might be gaming laptops which are better at cooling than mine was, but in general you can't really expect performance on near to desktop level without heat production on near to desktop level, and on a desktop you have far better ways to make the heat transport work.

The other issue is, that nowadays you probably get a gaming pc + some halfway usable mobile pc (tablet,netbook,..) for the same price as a gaming notebook (at least if your upgrading and can reuse some stuff, monitors, hdds, etc). So if you don't need the gaming part to be mobile it's probably better to separate both functions.
(in OP's case it might be a case of combined necessity, so this is more my general recommendation )

Where's the fun in that. you'll never get low temps under load in supcom using a laptop.

I got a desktop with a Athlon II and 1 terabyte hard-drive. Is that enough? I am not a very techy, i think my parents and grandma know more about computers :? than me.

Athlon 2 is hideously old....

Also, it really is easy to learn basic terminology, "not very techy" isn't much of an excuse.

What video card you have is at least as important as what CPU you have. And the size of your HD is pretty much meaningless as long as you have space to install the game. How much RAM and dedicated video memory you have is far more important than HD space. Personally I would only use a quad core CPU for PA.

The video card is typically more important than the CPU for modern games. Also, qklilx, don't expect a random guy who has never heard of the game to guess the required specs of a game based on prealpha screenshots.

Hard drive size is irrelevant.

Right click on your computer, and select properties.
That will tell you the speed of your Athlon II
&
Your RAM

Click on Device manager > Display Adapter
That will tell you your graphics card

Those are the three things that matter for judging performance.
CPU, RAM, GPU

Actually even RAM is pretty irrelevant, if you've got 4gb or more on a 64bit OS then you shouldn't have any problems gaming. In most games the FPS difference between 4gb of the slowest and cheapest available RAM and 16gb+ of the fastest most expensive RAM is rarely more than 5%.

We don't know how much he has. If he has 1GB, it's relevant.
But sure, once you get past 4+ GB its not an issue.

If 4 gigs of ram is plenty enough then you aren't building enough tanks.

I plan to fill all 8 gigs in my box with enough units to blot out the sun.

That does bring up an interesting point, to use more than 4GB of RAM (well technically 2GB without some modifications to the OS) you need to be using a 64bit OS with a 64bit executable, I'm curious as to if Uber will be compiling for 64bit or not, a lot of people (though not me fortunately) still use 32bit because often the 32bit versions of Windows are pre-installed on PCs instead of the 64bit version. If they aren't going 64bit then having more than 4gb still won't matter for PA. Besides instances of units probably aren't going to be larger than 500 bytes in which case 1gb of units would be a little over 2million units, and I think you'd have a lot of CPU performance issues long before you got to that many units let alone enough to max out your RAM even if you only had 4gb .

It'll be compiled for both 64 and 32 bit.
Also, there'll be a lot more in memory than the units.

Awesome, I look forward to playing the 64bit version .

Yeah, but my point was that it is unlikely that creating more units will use up the memory.

Kind of true, a 32-bit executable has an internal address space of 4GB (the maximum addressable using 32-bit unsigned int, (2^32)-1), which a 64-bit OS can assign from the pool of memory available; on a machine with e.g. 8GB RAM you can give a 32-bit executable a full 4GB of usable memory while the OS uses or reassigns the rest. There are also various paging options you can use to allow the 32-bit executable access to more than one "page" of 4GB address space, although you need to write the exe to be able to play nice with whichever options (if any) are presented by the OS.

For a 32-bit OS, they should in theory be capable of addressing a full 4GB, but most for various reasons (usually hardware address mapping) will only use a subset of the addressable 4GB. For instance XP 32-bit would only show ~3.5GB of available RAM as a maximum, even if there was >4GB installed.

Inside the sim, yes. Methinks you are forgetting that on the client, the unit mesh is going to be more than 500 bytes, and there is no way in hell it'll be less than 500bytes for the unit textures. Rendering resources are one of the biggest memory hogs in current games, it's why high-end graphics cards come with up to 6GB of onboard memory these days

In light of that, I would thoroughly recommend to anyone who is intending to purchase (or upgrade) a machine with more than 4GB RAM, that they also ensure they have a 64-bit OS installed. Most branded systems using a 64-bit processor come with a Windows license for both variants (e.g. HPs usually give you a choice on first boot), so if for some reason you are running 32-bit Windows on a 64-bit processor, it may be possible to backup your data and reinstall the OS as the 64-bit variant using the manufacturer supplied discs (e.g. Windows 7 Home 32-bit -> Windows 7 Home 64-bit). Not for the faint hearted, since as a minimum you'll need to go through and reinstall all your programs again, and copy all your data back on, but it'll significantly future proof things if you are intending to add RAM further along the line.

Worst case, if you know the system is using a 64-bit processor but do not have the option to update / reinstall a 64-bit Windows version, consider dual booting to a 64-bit Linux variant (I use Mint personally) since PA is getting a native Linux version. Check hardware compatibility first, I know that at least one Samsung model with UEFI that has issues with some Linux installers. Samsung have promised to rollout a BIOS update to fix that, other manufacturers may or may not be affected too.

Honestly no gamer worth his or her salt should be running a 32 bit version of Windows. There is just no excuse these days. Do they even still make 32 bit only processors outside of the netbook and mobile markets?

I probably should have specified Windows rather than just OS, the default address space for a 32bit Windows application is 2GB, you have to set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag to be able to use the full 4gb.

Yeah, it needs to include all memory addresses in the 4gb address space of a 32bit OS, so if you have a 2gb graphics card that will use up 2gb of the address space and you are left with less than 2gb of system RAM, 512mb was the common amount of VRAM in the days of XP which is why it was common for there only to be 3.5gb of system RAM available.

True, but I said 500 bytes *per instance*, you only need to load the mesh and associated textures into memory once and it's shared by all instances, so each additional unit of the same type would only need another 500 bytes, though that's really quite high and I'm sure Uber can probably get the size of each instance to be MUCH less. Unit count isn't going to hit the RAM much, unit variation could though because as you said the rendering resources are very memory intensive, but I doubt it'll be an issue for PA.

Agreed, I'm really surprised that Microsoft even bothered with 32bit variants of Windows after XP, both Vista and Windows 7 are great in 64bit, and pretty much all desktop CPUs after the Pentium 4 have been 64bit.

The MSI I plan to get (the guy is on holiday so he said come back on Friday) has very good temperature reviews. One test put the computer under load with I think Arkham Asylum and even after an hour it was surprisingly low. I think it peaked around 93 degrees under heavy load, but it took a lot of work and it still rated lower than the other two gaming laptops they were comparing it to. MSIs, including the GT60, gets consistently high reviews from what I can tell. I wasn't able to find out much about the ASUS G series but the latest one isn't even available in Korea.

As for the random guy, he IS a Korean who runs a computer store. But I kid, I kid.

I'd like a desktop as much as the next person, but again I'm in a foreign country and I may or may not have to pack my bags in February. Most likely not, but the possibility makes a desktop a risk. If I wind up settling in here for the long term, which is my goal, then I will totally get a desktop, but that's a year or two away from now.

This discussion and research is making me want to get back into the tech scene. I used to know a lot about computers but then I fell out of the loop for such a long time. hahaha I appreciate all the advice that everyone is posting here. It's making the process a whole lot easier and I'm learning a lot.

I'm probably massively out of touch with current rendering techniques, but I has assumed that the engine would need to do all the mesh transformations (e.g. animations) in memory and pass the current static to the GPU to render, rather than pass the baseline mesh and a set of "change it this way for this unit" instructions. This would lend itself to needing a mesh in memory for each unit, as you would need one for each unit state (turret at 90 degrees to the body, elevated 30 degrees etc.). If the GPU now deals with dynamic transforms itself that'll save a buttload of memory resource, because you would indeed only need one mesh (plus transform instructions) for each type of unit.

I last looked at rendering techniques a couple of decades ago, so feel free to let me know how out of date I am

The old demon of "backward compatibility" is the only reason. There are still people running old software with 16-bit code fragments in, and Windows only provides one thunking engine; 32-bit windows has a 16-bit VDM / compatibility layer, and 64-bit Windows has a 32-bit compatibility layer. You cannot (definitively) run 16-bit Windows/DOS code natively (for a given value of natively, since the compatibility layer can be considered a VM) on a 64-bit Windows OS.

That's why you need DOSBox or ScummVM to run (very) old games on new systems, they provide the virtual machine that then runs the older (8/16-bit) code, since Windows x64 refuses to even touch it at all. The TA installer is full Win32 (I know, it ran fine on my Win8 x64 box) but the installers for Core Contingency and Battle Tactics aren't, I suspect they have some legacy 16-bit calls in there (to be fair they were written for Win95) which Win8 flat out refused to run.

The company I work for only recently started upgrading to Win7 x64, and it was worrying how many "business critical" applications broke because they cannot run on an x64 platform (i.e. contain decades old code, and nobody has bought/written an update in years). We actually had to install and configure XP Mode (the free XP VM that MS provided with Win7 Professional) in order to work around a couple of the more stubborn issues. It was not my preferred solution, but apparently "just buy the ****ing upgrade to the compatible version" was not considered a particularly tactful response, for some reason :roll:

Sorry about the thread hijack

Buying new hardware is all about "fit for purpose", sounds like you've decided on your required feature set and requirements, and found hardware that best fits them

Given the GT60 apparently maxes out at 32GB RAM, ensure it's the 64-bit version of the OS. Other than that you should be fine; I'm going to be testing PA on my ZBox, which is an Atom D525 (1.8GHz dual core, with hyperthreading), nVidia ION GPU (512MB VRAM, only 16 cores!) and 4GB RAM. I am fully expecting it to be basically playable; the same box runs Serious Sam 3 at 1366*768 at 20fps, on low graphics detail. It's not my main gaming rig of course, but since the GT60 exceeds all of those specs massively then I highly doubt you will have any issues running PA, or indeed any current or new title in the next 12+ months

One thing to note; if the offer is for a 60GB SSD plus HDD setup, Win8 will scoff most of that 60GB pretty quickly after a few months of updates and app installs. I'd recommend at least 100GB for the OS partition just to be safe (I bought a 120GB SSD for my desktop for that very reason). My work Win7 box is using over 100GB for the OS partition (my home Win8 box is over 50GB in just 6 months, from memory), and I have all my data on a seperate disk for both of those machines. I can heartily recommend getting an SSD for the OS, but if 120GB is out of your budget then consider getting the HDD only option just to be safe; there's nothing worse than watching Windows eat all of your spare space and be stuck constantly having to pare down data just to get Windows to shut up. I once stupidly set up a Vista box with only 20GB for the OS partition; oh my god was that a mistake :evil:

Haha, yeah you are a bit out of date, you must have been looking into it before Quake 1 was released, after that the approach to animated meshes for a lot of games (like Quake) was to store each frame of the animation as basically a separate set of vertices in the mesh and just index into the most appropriate one for the animation time. But even that method has long since been superseded by skeletal animation which was introduced in games around the time hardware transformation and lighting was added to video cards (the time of the first GeForce, but it wasn't really popular till the first Radeon and GeForce 2). Skeletal animation basically animates the bones in a skeleton rather than the mesh it's self, the vertices in the mesh are then transformed by the GPU on the fly based on the bone(s) that the vertices are attached to. Skeletal animation is still the primary method of animation in games however there have been a number of advancements to it such as the bone matrices can now be calculated from dual quaternions which can improve the quality of the animation and reduce the data per bone that is sent to the GPU.

More importantly, especially for an RTS, vertex shaders in modern GPUs (nVidia 8800 or newer) can now access special textures to lookup large sets of data, commonly called Vertex Texture Fetching (and I think Mavor mentioned this would be required for PA in an early stream), this allows the bone data for animations to be baked into a texture that can be used in the vertex shader, and with simple skeletons and short animations like you would find in TA or SupCom (and I assume PA) you can actually pack all the bone animation data for a unit at 30FPS (perhaps even 60FPS) into a single texture which a unit just has to reference correctly for it's current frame using the instance data it sends to the GPU. This can get the animation data per instance down to just a few float values (under 20 bytes) per instance if needed, however the more common approach is to just bake the bone data for each instance into the VTF texture because the extra data allows you to render a lot more instances per draw call than you would normally be able to using just the standard vertex shader constants. Of course there are plenty of different methods to handle the animation and VTF data, and I've got no idea exactly how Uber plan to do things, so I'm basically just guessing based on my experience from other games I've worked on.

TBH though I had forgotten about animation data, and if they do use a full skeleton per unit instance then each instance could very well be up to 2 kilobytes or more and that does start to be a memory consideration since Uber are aiming for a million units in a game.

Ahh, that explains things, thanks .



But back to topic
qklilx, new hardware has a lot better control over thermal issues than it used to, if it starts getting too hot it can slow it's self down to allow it to cool off a bit, it can be a bit annoying for gaming but IMO it's a lot better than burning out like my old dell kept doing . And if you do find the laptop throttling a lot after you get it (93 degrees sounds pretty high to me, I'd never let my desktop parts get that hot, unless that's in Fahrenheit in which case it's suspiciously low) then there are plenty of thermal pads you can put the laptop on to help keep it cool while gaming. But it's specs sound decent enough for gaming, and in your situation it's a pretty good option, I hope the wait to get it isn't too long and I'm you'll enjoy the hell out of it once you do .

I dunno about the backwards compatibility thing. XP mode will run old 16 bit crap just fine on Windows 7 64 bit. I know its technically a VM bit its integrated into the Windows 7 desktop so well you can't really tell.

And honestly I have only ever found one program that wouldn't run in 64 bit Windows 7 and that was the 32 bit Cisco IPSec VPN client. But since there is a 64 bit version of the client that works perfectly it wasn't really a big deal.

Besides, you do have to drop old stuff at some point. Apple did it. MS can too. People that really need to use the old stuff can just choose not to upgrade until the lack of security updates drags them kicking and screaming into the modern era whether they like it or not. At some point force is an acceptable option for the good of everyone else.