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Comment by evantbyrne | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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