So how's the game with Dual core?

[Oldphart]

The game works GREAT with my dual Opteron

It is difficult to say if it is the big L2 cache of the Opteron 165 which makes it so fast, but civ has to sort through a lot of data.

I also notice that other civilizations are doing things while I am directing my workers or cities - messages are popping up, so things are obviously happening in the background. It would, indeed, be very strange if modern games are not heavily multithreaded. Any game which works well on an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 will have to make use of the multikernel processors on those platforms, and then it makes very little sense to build a single-threaded PC version.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Six Thousand Year Old Man
256 Mb video card, 1 GB RAM...

256 meg means nothing if the processor itself is crappy. And yes, 2 gig would be much better for huge maps. My processor isn't much better than yours, but I have 2 gig of RAM and a decent video card so I have no problems at all with Huge maps. And that's with high resolution graphics.

[meriadoc]

I agree. Civ 4 itself may not be able to use more than one core, but having multiple cores will allow Windows and other applications, like AIM, to use one core, and leave the other one free for Civ. Considering that most of us have something else running in the background, and Windows XP itself is a resource hog, having multiple CPUs is a definite help in running the game smoothly.

[LDiCesare]

I'm personnally buying a new laptop with core 2 duo 2Ghz, 2GRAM, and a 512MRAM vid card to replace the current one (Pentium 4, 1.8GHz, 256MRAM, 32MRAM vid card). I'm pretty sure the dual core will let me play maps bigger than small without huge delays now.

[Kuciwalker]

I'm pretty sure dual core will do jack **** for the map size you can play, given that none of Civ IV's game logic is multithreaded or parallelized. Rather, it'll run better because one core of a 2GHz Core 2 is much faster than a P4 @ 1.8 GHz.

[LDiCesare]

Exactly. The fact it's dual core doesn't matter in my case, unless I run in windows mode and run something in the background in the meantime. That and a vid card which the game doesn't complain it's too bad for it even though it can run the game.

[Crossfire]

Take a look at Task Manager and see how many processes are running at all times and tell me it doesn't help to have multiple cores. Civ4 runs much faster on a Core2Duo 6600 than on a P4 3.2ghz machine. I run at 1900x1200 and don't really suffer from lag in the late game but I do only play on regular size maps. 2 gig of ram really helps too.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Crossfire
Take a look at Task Manager and see how many processes are running at all times and tell me it doesn't help to have multiple cores.

It doesn't help to have multiple cores.

Civ4 runs much faster on a Core2Duo 6600 than on a P4 3.2ghz machine.

That's because one core of an E6600 is much faster than a 3.2 GHz P4.

[Nacht]

Originally posted by Crossfire
Take a look at Task Manager and see how many processes are running at all times and tell me it doesn't help to have multiple cores. Civ4 runs much faster on a Core2Duo 6600 than on a P4 3.2ghz machine. I run at 1900x1200 and don't really suffer from lag in the late game but I do only play on regular size maps. 2 gig of ram really helps too.

Also note that all those processes use 0% cpu power and civ 99%.

[snoopy369]

RAM is the main bottleneck. I've never seen someone with a halfway decent system and 2GB RAM complain about slowdowns, and I've seen plenty of amazing systems with 1GB RAM complain. So buy 2 GB

[Oldphart]

Originally posted by snoopy369
RAM is the main bottleneck. I've never seen someone with a halfway decent system and 2GB RAM complain about slowdowns, and I've seen plenty of amazing systems with 1GB RAM complain. So buy 2 GB

32-bit Windows XP can use 3GB, and 2GB is not really enough for really huge (bigger than the standard game) maps. On the other hand, 64-bit Windows still does not work too well and needs more ram for the same performance, so I doubt 4GB will be an improvement.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Oldphart


32-bit Windows XP can use 3GB...

It can use a bit more than that. I had 4 gig installed awhile back and I was getting about 3.6 showing up in the system.

[snoopy369]

IIRC you can use 3GB at higher speeds and 4GB at lower speeds.

[LDiCesare]

Of the 4GB, by default only 2 are addressable by programs and 2 for the OS. But then this can be configured to reduce OS part to only 1G.
Thus your computer may use up to 4GB RAM, but the OS is using 1 of these. So if you used 3.6GB, the OS was using between 0.6 and 1GB for its own purpose, which is huge.
I think it may be possible to go beyond 3GB but I'm not sure, as it depends on the OS quite a lot, and the solution to that memory limitation is to use 64bits OS instead of 32.

[Oldphart]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
... So if you used 3.6GB, the OS was using between 0.6 and 1GB for its own purpose, which is huge.

I suspect that he used about 3600 million bytes, and 3GiB is 3221225472. This means XP used about 370 megabytes. It is a lot, but most of it is probably buffers and very rarely used routines.