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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Previous Civ games seriously bog down mid-to-late game. It's not visual candy, it's just all the units/ai doing its thing. The more turns you take, the longer each end-of-turn takes.

I could see where suggesting 16 cores and more could be a good benchmark for a high-end experience with this game.

> For a playable experience targeting 1080p, Low settings, and 30 FPS, Firaxis recommends entry-level CPUs from Intel 10th Gen and AMD Ryzen's first generation— very old processors at this point that most PC gamers have likely long upgraded past. The graphics requirements of GTX 1050, RX 460, and Arc A380 are similarly reasonable. The old game's recommended RAM spec— 8 GB— is now the new minimum spec, probably the most significant bump for anyone already using 8 GB or less.

It's also nearly 2025 - for a desktop gaming rig, 32GB of RAM isn't really that unusual, and neither is 16 cores.

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>It's also nearly 2025 - for a desktop gaming rig, 32GB of RAM isn't really that unusual, and neither is 16 cores.

/r/USdefaultism

Plenty of people all over the world can't afford or don't want to spend so much money on a new gaming rig every few years.

I just upgraded from:

- core i5 2500 (from 2011)

- 8GB of DDR3

- nvidia 9500GT

to the following config:

- Ryzen 5 2600x 6 cores from 2018

- 16GB of DDR4

- Radeon rx570 8GB

- 550W PSU

Cost of the operation:

80€ for second hand mainboard + CPU + 650W PSU

40€ for new Corsair dimms

15€ for a second hand case (went from mini-ITX to microATX mainboard)

That is 135€ in total and there is no way I would have spent much more on a gaming computer right now. I have enough to spend on a trip on the other side of the atlantic, fixing my house, go solar + some bicycle and motorbike parts and maintenance.

I dare say you are not the target audience for 4K gaming then - which is where those recommended specs came from. The price of a GPU that can game in 4K is many multiples more than your entire system upgrade cost.

Your hardware will dictate what kinds of games you can play.

People who enjoy AAA titles and want everything on max settings - 32GB of ram and 16 core systems are not abnormal. On the high end, some folks are even starting to use 64GB of RAM.

Fair enough I have been staying off hidpu on purpose on all my devices[1] and don't necessarily look for the newest games: I only recently bought Red Dead Redemption 2 for instance and haven't launched it yet.

When you don't want to spend a lot of money on gaming, it is better living in the past and play games from several years or a console generation before. If you don't try the new ones and only keeps being loosely aware of new releases, you never feel frustrated and actually benefit from games that are finished and fully patched, decent offers for games + DLCs and sometimes well made mods.

[1] funnily enough except my mobile phone which has the biggest resolution of them all

Steam hardware survey indicates that <10% of the market has 16 or more cores. Consumer gaming-optimized CPUs also don't typically have that high of a physical core count. Not saying it is unfair for ultra settings, just not typical even for higher-end game rigs.

I would suspect a great deal of the "8 cpus" segment is really 8 physical cores with 16 vcores - but I could be wrong.

Either way, those playing on 4K are most likely to meet or exceed these hardware recommendations.

Hopefully that is what they mean. I guess we'll find out what the actual performance needs are when it makes it to reviewers.

OTOH, I understand the GPU requirement but why would 4K need extra cores of CPU and larger RAM than 1080p. Shouldn't the graphical heavylifting be mostly done on the GPU?

Taking my own Civ 6 experience as at least somewhat representative, I assume many 4K players use the extra resolution to expand visible area rather than solely to increase graphical detail.

And more visible terrain means more bits independently animated (presumably) under CPU control, leading to increased CPU usage in typical 4K scenarios.

It's also possible that the "high", "medium", and "low" referenced in the article don't only refer to graphics, but also include important gameplay settings like map size and number of rival civilizations that can significantly affect average per-turn wall clock time required to process enemy AI on a given CPU, which IME is a considerably more important metric than framerate when it comes to the playability of any Civ game.

And around 10% of the market has a GPU that meets the same tier of requirements for Civ 7. The people who buy a high-end GPU often also buy a high-end CPU, because it's possible.

It's not really the cost that's noteworthy so much as a general lack of gaming-optimized CPUs with that many physical cores, and also that it just doesn't make sense in terms of playable resolution. With that core count you're looking at future hardware (for best general gaming performance) or workstation processors (for lower general gaming performance, but maybe best for sims). It's just kind of an odd recommendation, not saying that it is right or wrong.

The actual recommendation is Core i7-14700F or Ryzen 9 5950X. At least I understand it means the expected multicore performance rather than core count.

Also, I don't think gaming-optimized CPUs are that important. As far as I know, it's a concept AMD introduced in 2022. Until then, gamers usually just bought high-end consumer CPUs, and Intel users still do. And those use core counts to differentiate the top models from lower tiers.

The design decisions make a difference when it comes to fps in real world tests, but you're right they don't theoretically have to be separate categories.

16 cores is pretty high end. I have a Ryzen 9 7900X which I bought last year and that is 12 cores/24 threads. It still retails for roughly $400.

A lot of gamer CPUs don't have 16 cores. Neither the 7800x3D nor the 7900x3d have 16 cores. In the latest gen, only the 9950x3d will have 16 cores (it will likely be a $700 CPU). The 9900x3D is rumored to have 12 cores and the 9800x3D is rumored to have 8 cores.

It depends how you count them; we're unsure what the game spec recommendations consider as cores.

The 7800x3D, for instance, is 8 physical cores with 16 threads. Many systems will report this as 16 cpus. The difference between cpu, core and thread has become blurry.

I'd bet the game recommendations mean 16 threads, not physical cores. In the PC gaming context, 16 is not unusual these days.

We don't have to speculate. If you look at the actual tweet from Firaxis, they are recommending a Ryzen 9 5950X which is a 16 core/32 thread CPU or a i7-14700f which is a 20 core CPU (8 p-cores and 12 e-cores). So they are recommending more than an 8 physical core CPU for 4K/60 High (the specs for lower resolutions/framerates are a lot lower)

Maybe a newer (AM5) 8 core/16 thread CPU will be equivalent. Like the 7700X is 8 core/16 thread but has better single core performance than the 5950X. Just depends on how well the game utilizes the extra threads.

It should be noted that Civ5/6 bog down not because the AI is that good, but because the implementation is that slow. It's just a very poorly optimized game.

I also suspect they do not take full advantage of multi-core systems.

Recommending a 16 core CPU might imply that is no longer the case with the newest Civ title.

FPS death has also been the least !!fun!! way to lose a game of Dwarf Fortress, even before it had a GUI.

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