Any benchmarking been done?

from GalCiv3 Forums

I'm sitting here on my 3-year old E3-based workstation, and looking at the dual socket X5600-series workstation that's just been retired from it's job as a fileserver.

Both systems have between ludicrous (24GB) and Insane (48GB) of RAM in them for a desktop, so I don't have any real problems running GC3 massive-sized maps. And I've pretty good graphics cards in each (GTX650 / 750 Ti).

What I'm wondering is this:

Has anyone bothered to do actual benchmarking for GC3, and determined where bottlenecks are and at what point upgrades of RAM/CPU/Video make sense?

Things like:

  • After you get to a certain point, does improving the Video card seem pointless? i.e. at 2500x1600, my GTX650 seems fine, so I don't see any real point in using the GTX750, but that's just "feel", not a metric.
  • Does turn speed improve drastically with better single-core speeds, or better with more cores, or is there some inflection point?
  • How big a map can you really play on with 8/12/16/24/32/...  Gigs of RAM?

 

For me, I'm trying to figure out if the 12-core/24 thread X5660 is better than the 4-core/8-thread E3-1240 for running GC3, given that the latter's single-core performance is roughly 30% better but the latter has 3x the multiprocesssing capability. I don't want to bother swapping everything over to the X5660 workstation if it doesn't look like I'll get much (if any) gains.

 

The closest thing I can find is here:

http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=23701&compareGPU=Galactic%20Civilizations%20III:%20Mercenaries

But their site really isn't set up to evaluate turn-based systems, and the benchmarking makes little sense for 4X games.

 

17,791 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I have an I7 5960X with 8 cores.  I have similar interests as you have.  I have not found that GalCiv is straining my graphics card.  I haven't done max map with max ships, etc, but the game is just not the heavy graphics hog that many others are  So I don't expect that will be an issue.  Some of that depends on if you have a 4K screen or not.  Those are greedy.  I don't play the standard graphics intensive games that benefit from the single core speeds driving into extreme graphics cards. The best I use for that functionality is Star Swarm Stress Test, which is fun to watch as well as informative. GalCiv looks really good at high resolution, but it is not likely to be the most graphics heavy game in your library unless you are like I am, and I am strange.

CPU usage is what I would love to understand.  I can tell that a load is distributed across the cores by looking at the standard resources monitor, but I don't see anything anywhere near maxing out.  Overclocking has made the game noticeably snappier, but nothing dramatic.  The between turn delay in a many faction game seems to be more about taking the time to move all of those ships around (along with tracking what is seen where while that happens) than any other load, .  I couldn't tell you if that function is spread across cores or not.  If it isn't, then it might respond to a higher single core speed.

The multithread portion seems to be working, but the AI considerations that are supposedly happening all of the time do not seem to be loading the system at all.  It does not look like a recursive deep dive analysis type of environment.  I am somewhat surprised by that, and disappointed.  This rig is meant for another purpose, but when it is not "on the job" it is free and eager to be totally consumed by GalCiv for all it can do.  At this point, that is not happening.

I don't know what benchmarking would be meaningful, or what tools to use.  If you have suggestions, I would like to hear them.

 

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

searching a  benchmarking has no sense. I have an intel g3258 and no graphic card. The game works like a charm with huge map.

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