They have to push this kind of thing to have a reason to sell a Civ Ⅶ at all considering their biggest competitor is themselves. I would consider myself to be a “Civ fan” but still haven't even bought Ⅵ. I was waiting for it to be complete and on discount, but I can't say I'm interested in spending $80 on it even though it is now both of those things: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/12218/Sid_Meiers_Civil...
I bought VI with a humble bundle, and just didn't like it. V was fine, people just wanted some flexibility when decorating cities; but developers built an entirely new set of mechanics on top of that request, and made the game more complicated that it needs to be. With VII they seem to have doubled down on that concept, so I don't think I'll buy it anytime soon.
This is talking about recommended specs. I'm sure you can play it on a toaster but if it's anything like its predecessors, large map, late-game AI moves are going to bog right down.
I've upgraded my PC mid-game just because it was taking five minutes between moves. Which is all to say, playing on a Deck will limit your game choices.
It's incomprehensible how much more excellent and accessible gaming is with food scaling tech like FSR and XeSS. I long resisted, but after my old GPU put up a terrible showing (on WH40K Darktide) I gave it a go and became a convert.
Steam Deck sets such an excellently low target for games, that they have to make possible, but it also does it at such a perfectly not-excessive resolution. So games need to target this pretty modest system, at modest resolution.
Beyond performance, it also encourages games to be considerate for low res gamers, fitting the elements on the screen and making everything readable & usable. It's amazing to me that info dense games like Last Spell (what an excellent squad town defender) have gotten ported & play well!
Deck has brought about such a fantastic renormalization of what PC games need to be able to do.
I'm surprised to hear there are high core count requirements. My understanding was that grand strategies were always going to be performance-limited based on single core performance, given the interlinkedness of all game variables.
It really isn't tough to come up with scenarios where the game can schedule off lots of independent threads to work on various things, then collect the data when ready.
But 16 cores? Not just 16 threads, but cores, where the total number of possible simultaneous threads is 32? Or is this them hedging for the total number of cores where cores could also be Intel e cores?
Either way, I'll be interested to see CPU utilization when people test out the game :)
If I had to guess, the actual calculations for the logic of the game itself are completely trivial and are not bottlenecked by any modern processor or any number of cores. They're not exactly doing MCMC to simulate outcomes.
this definitely isn't the case in my experience. I run Civ VI on a relatively high end desktop (5950x + 3080 Ti) and there is a very noticeable slowdown between turns with lots of Civs/city states on large maps
With zero knowledge of how it works, I would also expect that each tick is some trivial calculations to determine yield per square for each city (plains square starts at +1 * 3 workers * 1.2 improvement modifiers) and combat resolution. Deterministic calculations that should complete instantly.
But the AI isn't even particularly sophisticated. They needed to make it cheat at higher levels to remain difficult. Sounds like a severe lack of optimization to me.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by game logic then. Unless you're playing multiplayer civ (which I think is pretty niche even for civ standards), the AI logic is kinda central to the game.
Yeah i don’t really see how the game math for something like Civ couldn’t be run on like, a calculator. It’s fully deterministic with a very low number (relative to many actual numeric computing problems) of inputs/outputs
Real-time competitive online games need the strategy part to work well on the lower-end systems which tend to be extremely common among the player base. A player shouldn't be able to upgrade their way to a significant competitive advantage, i.e., let them argue about 10ms worth of vsync rates rather than 100's of ms of cpu lag.
But for turn-based offline games, players with fewer cores can substitute a bit of patience. They can use the time to think as well as the computer.
They probably plan for the game to be on sale for a long time, so they don't want the game to look dated too soon, and aimed for future hardware. The specs won't seem so high in a few years.
Games are long overdue to use the full CPU instead of bottlenecking of single-core performance. I hope they've actually designed for multi-core CPUs, and made as many things data-parallel as possible.
The high detail rendering and animations (especially the idle characters and scenery with seagulls and alike) are the least important in this game and adds exactly zero to the joy of turn based strategy. A schematic view is way enough for this kind of game. I am a bit sceptical about this version (just like most before with supefluous graphics) if this is what gets the time and energy of the developers.
>The high detail rendering and animations (especially the idle characters and scenery with seagulls and alaike) are the least important in this game and adds exactly zero to the joy of turn based strategy.
Au contraire, as a kid playing these games I really liked taking a moment to pause and zoom in and imagine the kinds of lives my people would be having.
I always find it interesting that Civilization (especially 5+) is basically a board game with added fog of war. These specs seem a little extreme given that fact. That being said, anyone who's played older versions knows that the AI needs every cycle it can get. I'd love to see smarter multithreaded strategy for the AI. Its combat skills border on embarrassing.
Simply increasing processing power for the AI isn't enough. Gameplay mechanics are intimately related to the capabilities of the AI.
For example, when they redesigned combat around the 1-Unit-Per-Tile (1UPT) mechanic for CIV 5, this crippled the ability of the AI to wage war. That's because even if a high-difficulty AI could out-produce the player in terms of military, they were logistics-limited in their ability to get those units to the front because of 1UPT. That means that the AI can't threaten a player militarily, and thus loses it's main lever in terms of it's ability to be "difficult."
Contrast this to Civ 4, where high-difficulty AIs were capable of completely overwhelming a player that didn't take them seriously. You couldn't just sit there and tech-up and use a small number of advanced units to fend off an invasion from a much larger and more aggressive neighbor. This was especially the case if you played against advanced fan-created AIs.
I'm hoping they get rid of 1UPT completely for Civ 7, but I have a feeling that it is unlikely because casual players (the majority purchaser for Civ) actually like that 1UPT effectively removes tactical combat from the game.
1UPT added tactical combat to the game. Before Civ 5, the lowest level of warfare was operational. If you got your units close to the enemy, they were in position to fight. You didn't have to worry much about battlefield formations, terrain, coordinating the actions of different units, and so on.
This addition of tactical combat crippled the AI, because it doesn't understand the situation on the battlefield, and it's not good at making and adjusting plans.
The combat system in Civ4 was deeper than you think. Stack composition, terrain, and positioning are crucial in MP games. This write-up [1] from a famous MP game where a 3v1 invasion was repelled by superior play shows how good the system was.
It had depth, but no tactical combat. A stack is an operational unit. Tactics deals with what the individual units within the stack do once the fighting starts. Civ 7 is supposed to introduce commanders, which are effectively stacks for moving troops combined with more specialized great generals. You can get the troops more easily to the battlefield, but individual units still need to occupy separate tiles in the battle.
I am not sure if I buy this resoning. While doom tile army is much easier to create, I found it hard to imagine major AAA game dev making same game for ever unable to create proper Ai that handles strategy and tactics with multi-tiled armies.
There are plenty of small games that handle complex armies fight with plenty units, choke-points and strategical and tactical views. Especially since the unit roaster in Civ games is quite limited in comparison to other strategy games.
Yes, difficulty scaling in CIV just equates to giving the AI unfair starting points and making it super easy and cheap for the computer controlled players to build advanced, OP units.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's for 4k. The lower res settings are far less. If you want a premium experience in a premium resolution you should have premium gear. Makes sense to me.
It sounds like they've done a fabulous job on scalability. Minimum specs is 4 cores, 8GB RAM and a 1050. That'd have been a mediocre machine 8 years ago.
sounds like the game will be perfectly playable on mid-tier hardware, and you only need better hardware for "ultra" 4K. Bit of a poor clickbait headline by Tom's which has unfortunately become the norm :(
I'm happy that there are some higher fidelity graphics that will be available for those that can use it
Usually PC Gamers buy the games first, and then if they are not satisfied with their current GPU's performance, they might upgrade - maybe... or lower the settings a little. Unlike console gamers - pc gamers have a lot of adjustability at their disposal.
Anecdotally, most PC gamers I know unintentionally go in 2-3 year cycles for upgrades - usually the GPU. It's not planned, it's just when things start feeling underperforming. Often after upgrades, people binge old games they already owned but now at higher settings or FPS.
Not being playable at 4k/60fps on a 7800x3d with the best consumer graphics card on the market is a pretty interesting choice. Hopefully it means they've improved the AI.
Eh cloud gaming's a bit of a hard sell...it's targeted at the cash strapped...don't have 2k for a gaming rig? Here spend 240 a year on a subscription... but you also need a 100+ buck a month internet connection... and some expensive hardware to utilize it.
Which is way more dough than a cash strapped players got. That's the kinda service for rich kids. Especially when you could just buy a used Xbox or Playstation in the current gen for a few hundred and a lower tier internet connection. Once it's saved and paid for its not a monthly drain like these subscription services...which if your tight on money a few months of the year because say work is sporadic and your low income can be a nightmare.
Inherently broken product/price platform. There's a reason it doesn't take off at the pace they expected to. It's marketed to poor kids but it's priced for the rich.
If your rich enough to afford game streaming and all the baggage it requires you just buy a gaming pc or console outright anyways. Folks like owning things, game streaming you own nothing and pay forever. Lose lose proposition.
It depends what kind of gamer you are. I don't play games for months preferring outdoor activities but during 5 to 9 weeks a year where daylight is short I am binge gaming.
For that, geforce now as well as cloud desktop + parsec have been great and inexpensive solutions for me.
The only reason I upgraded my old gaming computer is the lack of steering wheel force feedback support as I want to go back to simracing.
I bet they did 3d rendering in browser with javascript and every character is in separate iframe to achive compartmentalization while the logic is architecturally separated and written in prolog + llama + logo, like latest design trends require.
Reminds me of working with cloud...
p.s: rolling my eyes to the point where they fall out and I am blindly forced to search for them around the floor)
They have to push this kind of thing to have a reason to sell a Civ Ⅶ at all considering their biggest competitor is themselves. I would consider myself to be a “Civ fan” but still haven't even bought Ⅵ. I was waiting for it to be complete and on discount, but I can't say I'm interested in spending $80 on it even though it is now both of those things: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/12218/Sid_Meiers_Civil...
It has been as low as $5 - https://isthereanydeal.com/game/sid-meiers-civilization-vi-p... and it's $10 at Green Man Gaming right now - https://www.greenmangaming.com/games/sid-meiers-civilization...
Actually it's been free on epic, along with '1 add-on' according to my library, but I can't see which add-on it was without installing it.
(back in may 2020 according to my epic receipts, but it doesn't state which add-on it came with)
Thanks for the GMG link!
I bought VI with a humble bundle, and just didn't like it. V was fine, people just wanted some flexibility when decorating cities; but developers built an entirely new set of mechanics on top of that request, and made the game more complicated that it needs to be. With VII they seem to have doubled down on that concept, so I don't think I'll buy it anytime soon.
It's also great on iPad with a stylus.
You can set it to use retina resolution. Some mods even work. Better trading screen, etc.
It's kind of amazing.
Minimum spec is a Steam Deck so you can put down the pitchforks.
This is talking about recommended specs. I'm sure you can play it on a toaster but if it's anything like its predecessors, large map, late-game AI moves are going to bog right down.
I've upgraded my PC mid-game just because it was taking five minutes between moves. Which is all to say, playing on a Deck will limit your game choices.
It's incomprehensible how much more excellent and accessible gaming is with food scaling tech like FSR and XeSS. I long resisted, but after my old GPU put up a terrible showing (on WH40K Darktide) I gave it a go and became a convert.
Steam Deck sets such an excellently low target for games, that they have to make possible, but it also does it at such a perfectly not-excessive resolution. So games need to target this pretty modest system, at modest resolution.
Beyond performance, it also encourages games to be considerate for low res gamers, fitting the elements on the screen and making everything readable & usable. It's amazing to me that info dense games like Last Spell (what an excellent squad town defender) have gotten ported & play well!
Deck has brought about such a fantastic renormalization of what PC games need to be able to do.
I'm surprised to hear there are high core count requirements. My understanding was that grand strategies were always going to be performance-limited based on single core performance, given the interlinkedness of all game variables.
It really isn't tough to come up with scenarios where the game can schedule off lots of independent threads to work on various things, then collect the data when ready.
But 16 cores? Not just 16 threads, but cores, where the total number of possible simultaneous threads is 32? Or is this them hedging for the total number of cores where cores could also be Intel e cores?
Either way, I'll be interested to see CPU utilization when people test out the game :)
If I had to guess, the actual calculations for the logic of the game itself are completely trivial and are not bottlenecked by any modern processor or any number of cores. They're not exactly doing MCMC to simulate outcomes.
this definitely isn't the case in my experience. I run Civ VI on a relatively high end desktop (5950x + 3080 Ti) and there is a very noticeable slowdown between turns with lots of Civs/city states on large maps
Isn’t that more the AI than the game mechanics?
With zero knowledge of how it works, I would also expect that each tick is some trivial calculations to determine yield per square for each city (plains square starts at +1 * 3 workers * 1.2 improvement modifiers) and combat resolution. Deterministic calculations that should complete instantly.
But the AI isn't even particularly sophisticated. They needed to make it cheat at higher levels to remain difficult. Sounds like a severe lack of optimization to me.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by game logic then. Unless you're playing multiplayer civ (which I think is pretty niche even for civ standards), the AI logic is kinda central to the game.
Yeah i don’t really see how the game math for something like Civ couldn’t be run on like, a calculator. It’s fully deterministic with a very low number (relative to many actual numeric computing problems) of inputs/outputs
Yeah that is the case with V as well, even when you turn off all the bells and whistles.
Real-time competitive online games need the strategy part to work well on the lower-end systems which tend to be extremely common among the player base. A player shouldn't be able to upgrade their way to a significant competitive advantage, i.e., let them argue about 10ms worth of vsync rates rather than 100's of ms of cpu lag.
But for turn-based offline games, players with fewer cores can substitute a bit of patience. They can use the time to think as well as the computer.
Why would 4K be so ram intensive like that? Isn't it usually the VRAM (and disk speed, to some extent?).
They probably plan for the game to be on sale for a long time, so they don't want the game to look dated too soon, and aimed for future hardware. The specs won't seem so high in a few years.
Games are long overdue to use the full CPU instead of bottlenecking of single-core performance. I hope they've actually designed for multi-core CPUs, and made as many things data-parallel as possible.
The high detail rendering and animations (especially the idle characters and scenery with seagulls and alike) are the least important in this game and adds exactly zero to the joy of turn based strategy. A schematic view is way enough for this kind of game. I am a bit sceptical about this version (just like most before with supefluous graphics) if this is what gets the time and energy of the developers.
>The high detail rendering and animations (especially the idle characters and scenery with seagulls and alaike) are the least important in this game and adds exactly zero to the joy of turn based strategy.
Au contraire, as a kid playing these games I really liked taking a moment to pause and zoom in and imagine the kinds of lives my people would be having.
It's almost certainly a different set of developers working on graphics/animation than gameplay/strategy.
I always find it interesting that Civilization (especially 5+) is basically a board game with added fog of war. These specs seem a little extreme given that fact. That being said, anyone who's played older versions knows that the AI needs every cycle it can get. I'd love to see smarter multithreaded strategy for the AI. Its combat skills border on embarrassing.
Simply increasing processing power for the AI isn't enough. Gameplay mechanics are intimately related to the capabilities of the AI.
For example, when they redesigned combat around the 1-Unit-Per-Tile (1UPT) mechanic for CIV 5, this crippled the ability of the AI to wage war. That's because even if a high-difficulty AI could out-produce the player in terms of military, they were logistics-limited in their ability to get those units to the front because of 1UPT. That means that the AI can't threaten a player militarily, and thus loses it's main lever in terms of it's ability to be "difficult."
Contrast this to Civ 4, where high-difficulty AIs were capable of completely overwhelming a player that didn't take them seriously. You couldn't just sit there and tech-up and use a small number of advanced units to fend off an invasion from a much larger and more aggressive neighbor. This was especially the case if you played against advanced fan-created AIs.
I'm hoping they get rid of 1UPT completely for Civ 7, but I have a feeling that it is unlikely because casual players (the majority purchaser for Civ) actually like that 1UPT effectively removes tactical combat from the game.
1UPT added tactical combat to the game. Before Civ 5, the lowest level of warfare was operational. If you got your units close to the enemy, they were in position to fight. You didn't have to worry much about battlefield formations, terrain, coordinating the actions of different units, and so on.
This addition of tactical combat crippled the AI, because it doesn't understand the situation on the battlefield, and it's not good at making and adjusting plans.
The combat system in Civ4 was deeper than you think. Stack composition, terrain, and positioning are crucial in MP games. This write-up [1] from a famous MP game where a 3v1 invasion was repelled by superior play shows how good the system was.
[1] https://sullla.com/Civ4/RBPB2-5.html
It had depth, but no tactical combat. A stack is an operational unit. Tactics deals with what the individual units within the stack do once the fighting starts. Civ 7 is supposed to introduce commanders, which are effectively stacks for moving troops combined with more specialized great generals. You can get the troops more easily to the battlefield, but individual units still need to occupy separate tiles in the battle.
I am not sure if I buy this resoning. While doom tile army is much easier to create, I found it hard to imagine major AAA game dev making same game for ever unable to create proper Ai that handles strategy and tactics with multi-tiled armies.
There are plenty of small games that handle complex armies fight with plenty units, choke-points and strategical and tactical views. Especially since the unit roaster in Civ games is quite limited in comparison to other strategy games.
Yes, difficulty scaling in CIV just equates to giving the AI unfair starting points and making it super easy and cheap for the computer controlled players to build advanced, OP units.
Not just starting, the AI gets significant overall resource multipliers as you increase the difficulty. [1]
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_level_(Civ6)
Try V with the Vox Populi mod. While it's also changing tons of mechanics, it vastly improves the AI by a ton.
Yuck. They need to cut the flash and concentrate on playability, where performance is a big part of it.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's for 4k. The lower res settings are far less. If you want a premium experience in a premium resolution you should have premium gear. Makes sense to me.
It sounds like they've done a fabulous job on scalability. Minimum specs is 4 cores, 8GB RAM and a 1050. That'd have been a mediocre machine 8 years ago.
But then why would anyone upgrade to Civ N+1?
sounds like the game will be perfectly playable on mid-tier hardware, and you only need better hardware for "ultra" 4K. Bit of a poor clickbait headline by Tom's which has unfortunately become the norm :(
I'm happy that there are some higher fidelity graphics that will be available for those that can use it
I worry that they're pulling a Bethesda patented "starfield" fiasco.
I'm pretty sure all they really want is for us to buy newer hardware (that's the bethesda way)
may I eat my own words and may we have a nice civ 7 (won't hold my breath tho)
> I'm pretty sure all they really want is for us to buy newer hardware (that's the bethesda way)
What would a video game developer/publisher get out of you buying new hardware?
New hardware justifies new software, etc. Eventually, they'd like to sell you another game. You're more likely to buy that game if you've "kept up."
Usually PC Gamers buy the games first, and then if they are not satisfied with their current GPU's performance, they might upgrade - maybe... or lower the settings a little. Unlike console gamers - pc gamers have a lot of adjustability at their disposal.
Anecdotally, most PC gamers I know unintentionally go in 2-3 year cycles for upgrades - usually the GPU. It's not planned, it's just when things start feeling underperforming. Often after upgrades, people binge old games they already owned but now at higher settings or FPS.
Not being playable at 4k/60fps on a 7800x3d with the best consumer graphics card on the market is a pretty interesting choice. Hopefully it means they've improved the AI.
That's why specifying core count is a dumb way to do system requirements.
Sounds like a great candidate for cloud gaming. It looks like this would require the $20/mo GeForce Now tier. It's a shame that Stadia flopped.
Eh cloud gaming's a bit of a hard sell...it's targeted at the cash strapped...don't have 2k for a gaming rig? Here spend 240 a year on a subscription... but you also need a 100+ buck a month internet connection... and some expensive hardware to utilize it.
Which is way more dough than a cash strapped players got. That's the kinda service for rich kids. Especially when you could just buy a used Xbox or Playstation in the current gen for a few hundred and a lower tier internet connection. Once it's saved and paid for its not a monthly drain like these subscription services...which if your tight on money a few months of the year because say work is sporadic and your low income can be a nightmare.
Inherently broken product/price platform. There's a reason it doesn't take off at the pace they expected to. It's marketed to poor kids but it's priced for the rich.
If your rich enough to afford game streaming and all the baggage it requires you just buy a gaming pc or console outright anyways. Folks like owning things, game streaming you own nothing and pay forever. Lose lose proposition.
It depends what kind of gamer you are. I don't play games for months preferring outdoor activities but during 5 to 9 weeks a year where daylight is short I am binge gaming.
For that, geforce now as well as cloud desktop + parsec have been great and inexpensive solutions for me.
The only reason I upgraded my old gaming computer is the lack of steering wheel force feedback support as I want to go back to simracing.
even on a monster machine the turn-times get exhausting at the end of a large-map game on VI..
Maybe they're focusing on graphics so that we have more pretty things to stare at while awaiting the 45s turn end while it calculates the other civs.
Civ 1 had FPS of 5 frames per sec.
Maybe it's time to use GPUs for doing AI calculations.
Yeah but look at these graphics. The term "cinematic" is overused but wow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc3_EO6Bj2M
I put hundreds of hours into the original Civilzation and Civ2 but I haven't played in years. This might actually draw me back in.
They've yet to top Civ4 but third time's a charm I guess.
10th gen Intel is a “very old CPU”?
heh I was thinking that as well.. mind you I dont have a 4k screen
so my 34" 1440 screen with a 4070 ti super, 32gb ram and my "old" 10th gen i7 will probably be fine i suspect.
I bet they did 3d rendering in browser with javascript and every character is in separate iframe to achive compartmentalization while the logic is architecturally separated and written in prolog + llama + logo, like latest design trends require.
Reminds me of working with cloud...
p.s: rolling my eyes to the point where they fall out and I am blindly forced to search for them around the floor)
p.p.s: you need to be 45+ to understand this post
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