Civilization 5, turn times and memory speed

[Galatian]

Hey guys,

I was searching the internet today to find an answer to my question: will faster RAM increase the times it takes for Civilization 5 to calculate everything in between turns? I'm running a Core i5 3570K @ 4,5 GHz right now, with some cheapo DDR3-1600 RAM. My understanding was that faster RAM usually doesn't really make sense in modern games, but most benchmarks focus on FPS count. The calculations in between turns are CPU bound, so perhaps faster RAM would make a difference? I'm looking at an 8 GB TeamGroup Kit with DDR3-2600 an CL10 for 125€, which seems to be a very good Deal.

Any thoughts?

 

[Anteaus]

More or faster ram is never a bad idea if you can afford it, but it probably won't make much difference with Civ 5 turns. It may improve overall performance though.

 

[KentState]

Will make very little difference. Turn times between my laptop and desktop are negligible on the largest map size around the 400 turn mark. The game doesn't appear to be majorly multi-threaded anyways.

 

[Galatian]

Will make very little difference. Turn times between my laptop and desktop are negligible on the largest map size around the 400 turn mark. The game doesn't appear to be majorly multi-threaded anyways.

It appears to only work with maximum 4 cores?

 

[KentState]

It appears to only work with maximum 4 cores?

That may be the case. I see no more than 30% cpu during a turn on either my desktop or laptop.

 

[paperfist]

I mis-read what you wrote.

 

[Maximilian]

That may be the case. I see no more than 30% cpu during a turn on either my desktop or laptop.

Yeah I don't see very high CPU usage between turns either.

I think its just one of these games where its difficult or impossible to have it run really well on multicore. Every players turn must happen after the previous player so its not like it can compute all 10 or whatever AI's moves concurrently.

Still, its pretty tolerable on my rig, with vanilla civ 5 on release even a standard game would bog down to become unplayable but now i can play a huge map with ~10 other civs and 20 city states and its not too bad late game. Usually a couple of civs get wiped out, the difference in turn times between 10 civs and 5 on a huge map is pretty noticeable.

 

[Clinkster]

You won't see a noticeable difference. Especially not enough to warrant purchasing new ram over.

 

[darkewaffle]

My friends claim that in multiplayer the turn times are best when someone with a strong CPU hosts, but I've not confirmed that yet and I personally haven't experienced much turnlag in singleplayer either. However if I were to hazard a guess it would probably be that Civ V lag time is affected more by your CPU than anything else. If you're running less than 4 GB of ram you might benefit from bumping it up to 4GB (and going to 8GB wouldn't hurt, but any benefit you see would likely be much more due to the increased amount and not the speed of the ram).

 

[Galatian]

Thanks for all the input. I'm running 8 gigs already. I guess I could clock my CPU higher, but I felt 4,5 GHz is the sweet spot for my IVB. With BNW my turn time on standard map has been almost 40 sec in late game (I was going for diplomatic victory so now player/city state has been removed from the game). It just does get annoying since you sometimes simply click end turn to get to the next world congress/united nations meeting.

 

[Arkaign]

Hahah, yeah honestly it's bad coding. Civ5 doesn't do anything so special compared to 4 that should take so long. I do like it, but that late game sludge is awful. It's amazing to contrast 4, which is still a really damned good game, to how they went about with 5. I like both, but many long-timers simply prefer 4 by a huge margin.

 

[el-Capitan]

From multiplayer I know that turns times are not noticeably different if hosted on a Q9300 or an i5@4.4GHz, both on 16GB and SSDs.

 

[JamesV]

I've got a couple of hundred hours into Civ 5, and only last week found the 'no combat animation' and 'no movement animation'.

That speeds up the turns immensely, especially late game.

 

[paul878]

Hey guys,

I was searching the internet today to find an answer to my question: will faster RAM increase the times it takes for Civilization 5 to calculate everything in between turns? I'm running a Core i5 3570K @ 4,5 GHz right now, with some cheapo DDR3-1600 RAM. My understanding was that faster RAM usually doesn't really make sense in modern games, but most benchmarks focus on FPS count. The calculations in between turns are CPU bound, so perhaps faster RAM would make a difference? I'm looking at an 8 GB TeamGroup Kit with DDR3-2600 an CL10 for 125€, which seems to be a very good Deal.

Any thoughts?

NOPE, that is not going to make Civ5 run faster.
If the turns take too long, play smaller map with less number of AI.

 

[Bleser]

Sorry to revive an old thread - but this topic was exactly what I was looking for. So I wonder if anything has changed with the latest revision to the Civ5 code and current crop of processors available?

I'm about to pull the trigger on a re-build of my PC (which is now five years old) and most "gaming benchmarks" seem to focus on rendering performance but not performance such as this - calculating each AI's moves and time between turns.

Disabling animations helps immensley as previously suggested - but are we now 100% sure more cores/threads doesn't help? I'm a programmer by trade so I understand you have to finish calculating player A before starting on player B's moves due to the way turn-based games work, but that doesn't mean there aren't other internal processing pieces that can't be handled by separate threads.

Basically I'm between the 4790k and 5820k - so 4/8 vs 6/12 cores/threads. I have a feeling, based on what I read here, that the 4790k will result in faster turn times due to the higher clockspeed, but was wondering if any "-E" user can comment on this.

Thanks all.

 

[Tarvaln]

I went from a AMD 1090T 6 core 3.2GHz to a AMD 8350 8 core 4.0 GHz and I haven't seen much of a difference endgame. In fact when things get really heavy it likes to kick me to the player loading screen while it calculates moves. I have not "disable animation" though. I'll have to try that.
This game was not coded for multithreading much. I think that will be this game's issue until the end of time or Steam. Whichever comes first.

 

[Bleser]

I went from a AMD 1090T 6 core 3.2GHz to a AMD 8350 8 core 4.0 GHz and I haven't seen much of a difference endgame. In fact when things get really heavy it likes to kick me to the player loading screen while it calculates moves. I have not "disable animation" though. I'll have to try that.
This game was not coded for multithreading much. I think that will be this game's issue until the end of time or Steam. Whichever comes first.

The 'no combat animation' and 'no movement animation' speeds up the turns immensely!