Civ 5 - Q6600 vs E8400?

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KatalDT

2[H]4U
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Been playing on my i5 750/GTX 460 SLI/8GB DDR3 setup.. runs very well, but it starts to bog down even on a standard size map late game. :(

My fiancee is playing on an E8400/5770/8GB DDR2 (p35-ds3l) and I notice she gets a lot more lag late game.

I'm assuming it's the CPU, not the GPU.. since it's not very graphically intensive. Just wondering before I take the time to pull the Q6600 out of the media/file server and put it in her PC to swap it with the E8400, reapply thermal paste etc. if it would be worth it.

(E8400 is @ stock - but I could probably take the Q6600 up a bit - I've taken the E8400 up to 4GHz no problem before)
 
Probably not worth the effort, just overclock the e8400.

Mine would slow down a bit with my Q6700 @ 3.2 and a 460gtx. The game also made my card scream so I'd say it is more graphically intensive than it looks, but I play at 2560x1600.
 
This is one of the reasons I am considering going i7 930 instead of the i5 750. I play a lot of games that are very CPU intensive (Civilization, WoW, etc.) and posts like this make me concerned.
 
stevedave said:
Probably not worth the effort, just overclock the e8400.

Mine would slow down a bit with my Q6700 @ 3.2 and a 460gtx. The game also made my card scream so I'd say it is more graphically intensive than it looks, but I play at 2560x1600.
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She's on 1680x1050 (5770 1GB), and I'm on 1920x1200 (GTX 460 1GB SLI). Next game we play, I'll have her try DX9 mode and drop the settings some bit... and see the improvement.

I'd love to see [H] do some benchmarks for Civ 5. I'm really into the game, and my next upgrade might rest on that.
 
My i7 920 at 3.8 Hiccups here and there late game when scrolling around the world. Although it might partly be because of my 4850, I have everything on high with 2x AA
 
I don't think it's worth it. It will still bog down. My overclocked i7 920, 12GB ram, with SLI 285s also bog down late game. Love seeing the "Please Wait". I think my 5 hour/game could be reduced to 3-4 hours if the waiting was reduced.
 
I've been considering this as well. Swapping out my E8400 @ 4GHz for a Q6600 I've got lying around.

But if the E8400 is stock, I'd OC it first and see if that's good enough.
 
Q6600 " 3.2-3.6GHz would help a bit. Civ likes more cores. What's the harm? Does your media server need the extra 2 cores?
 
Spare-Flair said:
Q6600 " 3.2-3.6GHz would help a bit. Civ likes more cores. What's the harm? Does your media server need the extra 2 cores?
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It does quite a bit of video conversion... but that's not a time sensitive issue so it's not like that would really be a problem going from 4 to 2.


How many threads does Civ 5 use? Wondering if the next upgrade will be a six core... :)
 
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i think the game has a weird memory leak or something.. cores really dont matter and it doesnt even max out my phenom II 940.. the worst part is the 10 minutes it takes to do a memory dump after the game closes and causes my system to lag all to hell.. in game uses about 2.8 gigs(total ram usage) exiting game it drops to 1.69 gigs.. then the next 10-15 minutes the memory usage slowly drops back to the normal 1.23 gigs..
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
i think the game has a weird memory leak or something.. cores really dont matter and it doesnt even max out my phenom II 940.. the worst part is the 10 minutes it takes to do a memory dump after the game closes and causes my system to lag all to hell.. in game uses about 2.8 gigs(total ram usage) exiting game it drops to 1.69 gigs.. then the next 10-15 minutes the memory usage slowly drops back to the normal 1.23 gigs..
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I agree, had that same thing happen. I actually lowered the video settings (most things at medium, turned off shadows) and it's not as bad now.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
i think the game has a weird memory leak or something.. cores really dont matter and it doesnt even max out my phenom II 940.. the worst part is the 10 minutes it takes to do a memory dump after the game closes and causes my system to lag all to hell.. in game uses about 2.8 gigs(total ram usage) exiting game it drops to 1.69 gigs.. then the next 10-15 minutes the memory usage slowly drops back to the normal 1.23 gigs..
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Hmmm. I don't see my RAM usage maxing out on either machine - got 8GB on each.

I'm @ work, but later I'll try playing a game to late game until it lags, saving, and restarting my PC... see if the lag exists when it loads.
 
How long are you guys waiting per turn late game? I have an E6750 core 2 duo overclocked to 3.4ghz and at large map with 10 civilizations i'm waiting around 22 seconds per turn. This is on turn 700 out of 1500.

At stock clock speeds I would be around 30 seconds a turn.
 
Johnked6 said:
How long are you guys waiting per turn late game? I have an E6750 core 2 duo overclocked to 3.4ghz and at large map with 10 civilizations i'm waiting around 22 seconds per turn. This is on turn 700 out of 1500.

At stock clock speeds I would be around 30 seconds a turn.
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We should have somebody put up a late game save, let other people here download it and report the time it takes to start the next turn along with the specs/clocks/settings. Maybe get a baseline of what's effecting what.

If enough people wanted to do that, I could set it up. (We'd preferably test CPU by all using the same graphics settings/resolution - fairly low)
 
Johnked6 said:
How long are you guys waiting per turn late game? I have an E6750 core 2 duo overclocked to 3.4ghz and at large map with 10 civilizations i'm waiting around 22 seconds per turn. This is on turn 700 out of 1500.

At stock clock speeds I would be around 30 seconds a turn.
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Holy shit. :eek:
 
seeing around 10-15 sec a turn in late game on my phenom 2 quad at 3.6ghz that is in a standard game with 7ai plus myself and 18 city states. modern era.
 
stevedave said:
Probably not worth the effort, just overclock the e8400.

Mine would slow down a bit with my Q6700 @ 3.2 and a 460gtx. The game also made my card scream so I'd say it is more graphically intensive than it looks, but I play at 2560x1600.
Click to expand...

For whatever reason it was nailing my 5970 as well, fan speeds were higher than I'd heard them before, I'm also in 2560x1600
 
Yeah Civ 5 is definitely not optimized in either the CPU nor GPU department. Lots of work to be done there.
 
Civ 5 can indeed use 4 cores. It is also GPU multithreaded but neither Nvidia nor ATI's drivers support it yet, even though their hardware does. So when those drivers are released you'll get a performance bump right there.
 
Here I was thinking my old 4870x2 was doing ok. Still the game looks fine enough as it is.
 
Jon55 said:
Yeah Civ 5 is definitely not optimized in either the CPU nor GPU department. Lots of work to be done there.
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I agree

it is not your hardware, top of the line systems are being swallowed whole after a few hours/mid game. my lappy is not the best but it runs the game fine until mid/late game or a few straight hours.

I have to reboot to get performance back across the board because it takes forever for the OS to reclaim the resources (or for the application to release them). it is the software that is the issue...Fireaxis has some work to do, hopefully they will be able to resolve some of this sooner than later.
 
maademperor said:
I agree

it is not your hardware, top of the line systems are being swallowed whole after a few hours/mid game. my lappy is not the best but it runs the game fine until mid/late game or a few straight hours.

I have to reboot to get performance back across the board because it takes forever for the OS to reclaim the resources (or for the application to release them). it is the software that is the issue...Fireaxis has some work to do, hopefully they will be able to resolve some of this sooner than later.
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Read the article linked on the bottom of page 1. Sounds to me like they are ahead of the current drivers, and not behind in optimization.
 
Ive noticed it uses 4 out of the 8 cores (4ht) and in the 30% range for each. Ive also noticed on large maps or long games, its get SLOW and will eventually crash.

Its definitely not polished.
 
ryken said:
Read the article linked on the bottom of page 1. Sounds to me like they are ahead of the current drivers, and not behind in optimization.
Click to expand...

I cant get to the link from work so I cant review it (I gather it is about ATI/Nvidia multi core gpu drivers though) but you think they optimized the game for unreleased drivers? when it is spec-ed to run on existing equipment that wont be affected (multi-cored gpu's)? admittedly I'll have to read the article to understand fully what is being stated there though...

like I said, it plays fine on my laptop, which barely exceeds the minimum specs, just late game/extended periods the burn starts to set in and it fails to release what it has reserved in a reasonable manner, I would think that is more to do with the software (especially since its an issue that had to be resolved with civ4 as well)
 
ryken said:
Read the article linked on the bottom of page 1. Sounds to me like they are ahead of the current drivers, and not behind in optimization.
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Yeah well talk is cheap. Read the several posts a page back. It's clear there's a problem in optimization. Having to wait 22 seconds a turn on a modern system is not optimized. Not a huge deal, I'm sure they'll get it sorted out.
 
Jon55 said:
Yeah Civ 5 is definitely not optimized in either the CPU nor GPU department. Lots of work to be done there.
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My experience too w/ a 5870 and Q9550....I was quite amazed that Civ V (demo) could tax my system....heck, it worked my cpu and gpu more that BFBC2 sometimes.
 
As long as it is proper optimisation and not "crysis" optimisation, i.e it is just the fact that so much is going on that it taxes a system.
 
Monkey God said:
Ive noticed it uses 4 out of the 8 cores (4ht) and in the 30% range for each. Ive also noticed on large maps or long games, its get SLOW and will eventually crash.

Its definitely not polished.
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...and I actually figured out one cause of crashing. When I run CIV5 and foobar2000 together, I get CPU clock interrupt errors. Amazing. The sound will start to stutter, and within a minute or two, BOOM
 
Jon55 said:
Yeah well talk is cheap. Read the several posts a page back. It's clear there's a problem in optimization. Having to wait 22 seconds a turn on a modern system is not optimized. Not a huge deal, I'm sure they'll get it sorted out.
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Hate to break it to you(and everyone else) but ALL Civ games are like this. As you get later in the game, the CPU gets bogged down with the increased usage.

Don't know why this is 'new' to everyone.
 
himmy said:
Hate to break it to you(and everyone else) but ALL Civ games are like this. As you get later in the game, the CPU gets bogged down with the increased usage.

Don't know why this is 'new' to everyone.
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Because before it was never so bad?
 
Sure it was, Civ4 ran like crap on new systems at the time.

Buddy of mine bought Civ5 for his dual-core laptop with a nvidia 260M but couldnt get it to run at all. After all kinds of fighting with Steam (he didnt have Steam, didnt know what it was, couldnt get it to work, he bought it on DVD and "why do I need to be online for a game I bought", then an infinite steam update loop, etc), the game barely ran. Even the starting cutscene ran like garbage. He's a console gamer and stuff like this will make sure he stays a console gamer. Bottom line though was his year-old "gaming" laptop couldnt keep up.
 
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himmy said:
Hate to break it to you(and everyone else) but ALL Civ games are like this. As you get later in the game, the CPU gets bogged down with the increased usage.

Don't know why this is 'new' to everyone.
Click to expand...


Hate to break it to you, but it's never been this bad. I've played every Civ since Civ II. I usually play huge maps and things always tend to slow down a little towards the end, but never 20 second turns or crap like that. Maybe 5 seconds at the most.

Is this your first Civilization game?
 
Jon55 said:
Hate to break it to you, but it's never been this bad. I've played every Civ since Civ II. I usually play huge maps and things always tend to slow down a little towards the end, but never 20 second turns or crap like that. Maybe 5 seconds at the most.

Is this your first Civilization game?
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Guess every time you have played civilization you have played it on the very latest hardware costing several thousand dollars. Because I can guarantee Civilization 4 took a long time to do turns late-game on huge maps with max players, on this very computer I have listed in my signature. I can't remember exactly how long it was, but it was longer than five seconds. I'm not saying that this version isn't running worse...just that the old versions certainly had significant lag late-game too.
 
Here is my experience with Civ 5 on my rig in sig and a gaming laptop.

So far, I have found that just simply restarting the game can change the performance of the game, and its completely random. I have a game at roughly 450 turns, and during the initial run, it got so slow that it was taking over three minutes between turns, with all of the pauses and not being able to choose my production and what not. I played around with rebooting and so forth and found that simply just restarting the game sometimes made dramatic differences in the game. Sometimes it would make it worse.

As an example, in this test game, on the first restart, it made not impact to the game performance, except possibly a few seconds slower per turn. The second restart dropped the per turn times to about 35 seconds approximately. A marked improvement, so I continued to test and found it was completely random for some reason.

I have also tried playing with the direct X 9 mode, and it crashes roughly every other attempt to run in DX9 mode. While running in DX9 mode, the game is horrible looking for one, and performance was much much worse for my rig in sig, which shouldn't even run DX10/11. Now with my son's laptop, which uses a DX10/11 card, he crashes to desktop whenever he tries to use the DX10/11 mode, period. He can only run the game in DX9 mode. His I7 processor runs the game much better than my CPU by a long shot. However, his slow downs in late games is very similar to mine, meaning we can change his performance just by restarting the game sometimes...

I love the game, but its getting old pretty quick, and the long multi player games are almost not even playable unless we do the restart enough times where both of us have the performance improvement...
 
HardwareSearcher said:
Guess every time you have played civilization you have played it on the very latest hardware costing several thousand dollars. Because I can guarantee Civilization 4 took a long time to do turns late-game on huge maps with max players, on this very computer I have listed in my signature. I can't remember exactly how long it was, but it was longer than five seconds. I'm not saying that this version isn't running worse...just that the old versions certainly had significant lag late-game too.
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Agreed. Having played the original on a 386 and civ 2 on a pentium 100, late game with lots of civilizations the turns take a long time.

I imagine the AI in these games continues to become more and more complex. I also wouldn't be surprised to find that the amount of time given to the AI to do moves is fixed and that the actual processing power of the system merely limits how many choices the AI can consider in the given time period.
 
KatalDT said:
Been playing on my i5 750/GTX 460 SLI/8GB DDR3 setup.. runs very well, but it starts to bog down even on a standard size map late game. :(

My fiancee is playing on an E8400/5770/8GB DDR2 (p35-ds3l) and I notice she gets a lot more lag late game.

I'm assuming it's the CPU, not the GPU.. since it's not very graphically intensive. Just wondering before I take the time to pull the Q6600 out of the media/file server and put it in her PC to swap it with the E8400, reapply thermal paste etc. if it would be worth it.

(E8400 is @ stock - but I could probably take the Q6600 up a bit - I've taken the E8400 up to 4GHz no problem before)
Click to expand...

The game does run better with a quadcore or greater. This is a very CPU intensive game from what I have seen.
 
I forgot to mention, I have never seen this game use more than 50% of my dual core or my son's I7 720 either. I am not sure if there is a setting somewhere to enable multi core use, but currently, using task manager, this program uses only 48% to 50% cpu spread across both cores for some reason...
 
I'm at turn 1050 out of 1500. Large map on marathon setting and my turns are averaging around 35-40 seconds now. Good thing I'm close to winning because the turns are starting to take forever.
 
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