Memory hog?

Falconer · Post by **Falconer** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 6:08 am

While I do enjoy the graphical style in the game, no one will contest that it isn't much of a looker when it comes to detail. The GameBryo engine, also used in Civ, -is- able to generate much more detailed views (see for instance Oblivion, yes, I can that you are astonished, but it's the same engine) but Firaxis chose to keep it a bit simpler.

So, if the game's graphics aren't the problem, and if Oblivion runs much smoother on many of our PCs, what's with the major slowdowns in the latter 2/3's of the game? Is it a memory problem?

If you consider that Civ4 runs fine on my machine and has much larger maps and many more things to do, you'd almost think that the problem is with AI -or- with the fact that the game is realtime and has to process so much at the same time.

Either way, this simple looking game eats up nearly 800megs of memory which causes me to wonder if there are some memory issues...

Gackbeard · Post by **Gackbeard** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 12:43 am

You're thinking the graphical detail isn't very high because the visual style of the game is so bright and colorful, but we're using more advanced rendering techniques than any prior Firaxis product and pushing a pretty significant amount of polys and textures around every frame. Consider that every train is animated with tons of effects, that the entire world is self-shadowed and reflected into the water, and that all adds up to a lot of processing and memory use.

In any case, comparisons to Civ IV and Oblivion aren't particularly useful ones. Our rendering engine is part Gamebryo, part homegrown terrain system.

d53642 · Post by **d53642** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 12:49 am

Man I wish Microsoft would fix their damn product so stuff will use my dual core better. I have an SLI setup, 2 gigs of ram and a 3800 dual core that I run at single core for alot of games.

d53642 · Post by **d53642** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 12:51 am

Oh ya, what the hell you still doing at work Dan, its the weekend go home and have some beers. Put the feet up and relax. If Sid asks you were your going tell him I said you can leave

rupertlittlebear · Post by **rupertlittlebear** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 2:33 am

Gackbeard wrote:You're thinking the graphical detail isn't very high because the visual style of the game is so bright and colorful, but we're using more advanced rendering techniques than any prior Firaxis product and pushing a pretty significant amount of polys and textures around every frame. Consider that every train is animated with tons of effects, that the entire world is self-shadowed and reflected into the water, and that all adds up to a lot of processing and memory use.

In any case, comparisons to Civ IV and Oblivion aren't particularly useful ones. Our rendering engine is part Gamebryo, part homegrown terrain system.

um

I am trying to be nice here, but you seem to be saying
that eye-candy is more important than substance in a game.

I draw your attention to the ancient Grandaddy of all Eye Candy and how it so quickly wound up in the bargain bin -

SkyFox.

Gackbeard · Post by **Gackbeard** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 3:11 am

rupertlittlebear wrote:um

I am trying to be nice here, but you seem to be saying
that eye-candy is more important than substance in a game.

That dog won't hunt. Nothing I said above implied or otherwise stated that eye-candy is more important than substance in a game.

What I posted was a very non-techie explanation of the capabilities of the graphics engine we're using and reasons why someone who was able to run Civ IV well might not have the same experience with Railroads, necessarily.

Atheai · Post by **Atheai** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 7:48 pm

Something is wrong, that's for sure. The minimum requirements are listed as follows:

Operating System: WindowsÂ® 2000/XP
Processor: Pentium 4Â® 1.4 GHz or AMD AthlonÂ® equivalent
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Video: DirectX 9.0c-compatible 64 MB video card with hardware pixel & vertex shaders

Yet my PC (listed underneath) barely has what I would call "minimum performance" on minimum settings. How can a worse PC do if this one doesn't work smoothly?

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2
Processor: Intel Core Duo T2400 1.8GHz
Memory: 1024MiB RAM
Video: ATI X1600 w/ 256MiB dedicated GDDR3 RAM

rupertlittlebear · Post by **rupertlittlebear** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 8:43 pm

Gackbeard wrote:
rupertlittlebear wrote:um

I am trying to be nice here, but you seem to be saying
that eye-candy is more important than substance in a game.
That dog won't hunt. Nothing I said above implied or otherwise stated that eye-candy is more important than substance in a game.

What I posted was a very non-techie explanation of the capabilities of the graphics engine we're using and reasons why someone who was able to run Civ IV well might not have the same experience with Railroads, necessarily.

this machine can barely run CIV4
but cannot run SMR at all.
eye candy not CPU load killed the game for this machine

Gackbeard · Post by **Gackbeard** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:16 am

rupertlittlebear wrote:this machine can barely run CIV4
but cannot run SMR at all.

I'm glad your computer can run Civ IV. Unfortunately, that has next to no bearing on whether it can run Railroads or not.

Gackbeard · Post by **Gackbeard** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:17 am

Atheai wrote:Something is wrong, that's for sure. The minimum requirements are listed as follows:
Operating System: WindowsÂ® 2000/XP
Processor: Pentium 4Â® 1.4 GHz or AMD AthlonÂ® equivalent
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Video: DirectX 9.0c-compatible 64 MB video card with hardware pixel & vertex shaders
Yet my PC (listed underneath) barely has what I would call "minimum performance" on minimum settings. How can a worse PC do if this one doesn't work smoothly?
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2
Processor: Intel Core Duo T2400 1.8GHz
Memory: 1024MiB RAM
Video: ATI X1600 w/ 256MiB dedicated GDDR3 RAM

What are your settings, out of curiosity? At home, I run an x800 on a P4 2.0 Ghz with a gig of RAM and get 30fps.

d53642 · Post by **d53642** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:16 am

How can you tell your Frame Rates in game Dan?

rupertlittlebear · Post by **rupertlittlebear** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:27 am

d53642 wrote:How can you tell your Frame Rates in game Dan?

um

buy his computer on Ebay.

Gackbeard · Post by **Gackbeard** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 2:19 am

d53642 wrote:How can you tell your Frame Rates in game Dan?

I can enable it via console commands, but you can get the same data by using a program like FRAPS which can gauge framerate of any DirectX application. I actually prefer FRAPS to our internal fps calculation because with FRAPS I can see a graph of the framerate over time on my Logitech G15 LCD...

Atheai · Post by **Atheai** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:29 pm

Gackbeard wrote:What are your settings, out of curiosity? At home, I run an x800 on a P4 2.0 Ghz with a gig of RAM and get 30fps.

Resolution: 1280x768
Everything else: As low as possible.

Played with FRAPS for a while, and the FPS was heavily dependant on what I was doing, and what part of the game I was in:

Just watching: 30fps or 60fps.
Don't know why there would be a limit at 30 at times, but it's certainly there. These values are lower towards the end of the game.

Building (and up to 7 seconds AFTER building, or canceling building): 5-15fps.
Maybe a small increase in lag towards the end, but pretty much unoticable.

General playing: 25-30fps or 50-60fps
However, there are fps drops at times, that I cant really account for, I don't know why they're there.

Now, I know you've improved performance while building in the new patch, so I'll be waiting for it, but I do think it's a bit weird that I have to run it on minimum settings to get it "working"

Atheai · Post by **Atheai** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:45 pm

Hum. Are there any coded limits on FPS? I'm gettings some rather strange numbers when I yank up the graphics to the following:

2x AA
High texture quality
Full tree density
Low shadow quality
Medium Shader quality

FPS while watching: 16-20fps. (often 20, but never over).
FPS while building: 5-10fps.

An overall lower FPS of course, as expected, but I'm a bit wonderous about the behavior of the FPS at times. If I zoom in on an empty area and wait 5 seconds, I'll get 60fps, but simply zooming out and waiting 5 more seconds shoots the FPS down to 30 again. What is this?

Ah well, I'll wait for the patch anyway