Civilization VI: Performance Analysis (Techpowerup)

[chimaxi83]

What a smart, deep, meaningful post. Truly one to be remembered.

I'm glad you liked it! I have plenty more gems, you should take a look!

This realization took you long enough.

 

[Azix]

There is actually a setting in the game that turns on day night. Time of day effects or w.e. Why on earth would it default to off. Think its under "game" settings.

 

[railven]

Welps GF is happy with the game. Watching her play, I really don't even see where the performance is faltering. The animations/events are turn based so it wasn't like every unit was moving all at once.

Perhaps as she gets more into it there will be more units/events/animations to hit the GPU/CPU harder.

Game seems more then playable at 30+ FPS.

 

[Carfax83]

No, it's not common sense to me that AMD's performance would not improve under DX12 in this title after seeing AMD have superior DX12 performance, often beating the NV competitors (4870/480> 1060, 390/390X> 980, Fury X > 1070/980Ti) in AAA titles under DX12.

The jury is still out on DX12 performance, because there are currently more crappy DX12 implementations than good ones. The only good ones to me are Gears of War 4, and Ashes of the Singularity. Everything else runs the gamut between terrible, mediocre, passable and fair.

Also, your comment obviously doesn't take into account AiBs or overclocking, which is ridiculous because nobody gives a damn about reference clocked GPUs. Even a moderately overclocked GTX 980 Ti such as what you find in many AiBs easily surpasses a Fury X, and this isn't even taking into account the VRAM factor. Same thing with the GTX 1060. Overclocked it outperforms an RX480 easily and will hang with a Fury, whilst using significantly less power than the latter.

You harp on about AMD's superior hardware, but the fact that NVidia can consistently make GPUs that not only run fast as hell, but consume relatively less power than AMD's offerings, is what gives NVidia the edge with hardware enthusiasts.

I've said it several times before, using reviews with reference clocked parts only really narrows your perspective, because very few people are buying reference clocked parts, and if they do, they aren't running them at stock.

It's not my fault the NV attached consumers are too blind to realize that $0 7970 CF and $0 Hawaii Tri-Fire were miles superior to $1000 680 SLI and $1650 980 Tri-SLI. If that's being biased, I'll take it. I'd rather not waste my money on the colour green over red when I don't have to. It's not my fault I am tech savvy to NOT spend thousands of dollars on often inferior Green hardware when the competitor sells me cards that make me $ and are just as fast or the performance difference isn't discernible without benchmark scores.

The problem with this statement is, that it took a long time for the "superiority" of the 7970 to become apparent. I was actually interested in a pair of 7970Ghz cards once, to replace my GTX 580s back in the day. What turned me off was the horrible frame pacing, which was covered extensively by tech sites such as TechReport and PCperspective.

And how many months did it take for AMD to ramp up Tahiti's driver optimizations to actually make it NOT look stupid next to Kepler, but actually competitive?

Nobody wants to buy a GPU that runs much slower than it should at launch, and have to wait months or years for AMD to work out the kinks.

 

[Carfax83]

Anyone saying that the graphics in this game are worth the garbage GPU performance are nuts. The game seriously looks like it could have been done with sprites and run on integrated graphics, not killing $600 cards.

You took one of the worst pictures you could find to illustrate your point I don't even play these types of games, but I am impressed by the amount of detail on the screen, and I can see how the game could easily become CPU bottlenecked with DX11..

Watch the Gamespot review. It has some good footage there, like at 1:40 when the map is zoomed out a bit and you can see that the level of detail is far superior to Civ V.

 

[Bacon1]

You took one of the worst pictures you could find to illustrate your point

I'd been asking about that since page one, yet everyone ignored it. Please explain to me why that part of the benchmark which has nothing happening except some smoke from two buildings and waves on the beach is causing the 1080 or w/e they are testing with to drop frames like crazy.

I never said the game was ugly when zoomed in, I think it looks decent. But no where near as demanding as many many other games. Why is it that a turn based game is running so much worse than real time ones? I mean honestly when you don't have to do many computations because almost everything is static because it can't move, why is so much GPU power being wasted?

I'd be giving this game a hard time no matter which GPU was ahead. It shouldn't be so slow with almost no detail or anything on the screen. The game should slow down when you zoom in because more details are rendered. The things that aren't being rendered when zoomed out need to be properly culled and FPS would skyrocket for no IQ loss.

 

[railven]

I'd been asking about that since page one, yet everyone ignored it. Please explain to me why that part of the benchmark which has nothing happening except some smoke from two buildings and waves on the beach is causing the 1080 or w/e they are testing with to drop frames like crazy.

I covered this. Whomever made the benchmark did a shitty job. For whatever reason the camera focus a good portion of the time in an area with little visual activity. It later moves to an area that is densely populated with lots of little animations. As far as I know, those animations are still occuring off-screen which is what is creating the CPU bottleneck which obviously hinders the GPU performance.

Watching the GF play, there are a lot of little details they put into the game. While not something I'd find impressive, for fans of the series, they are enjoying them. She's said its perhaps the best visually CIv to date. /shrug Not a Civ fan.

I never said the game was ugly when zoomed in, I think it looks decent. But no where near as demanding as many many other games. Why is it that a turn based game is running so much worse than real time ones? I mean honestly when you don't have to do many computations because almost everything is static because it can't move, why is so much GPU power being wasted?

I'd be giving this game a hard time no matter which GPU was ahead. It shouldn't be so slow with almost no detail or anything on the screen. The game should slow down when you zoom in because more details are rendered. The things that aren't being rendered when zoomed out need to be properly culled and FPS would skyrocket for no IQ loss.

Watch actual gameplay. The images are far from static. Even your little peon guys are animated.

The benchmark did a poor job showing what is happening on screen.

EDIT: I'd be curious if the animations are still active behind the fog of war that was introduced in this series. Even when it's not your turn, your city is still active.

 

[USER8000]

Welps GF is happy with the game. Watching her play, I really don't even see where the performance is faltering. The animations/events are turn based so it wasn't like every unit was moving all at once.

Perhaps as she gets more into it there will be more units/events/animations to hit the GPU/CPU harder.

Game seems more then playable at 30+ FPS.

Of course it does,its a turn based game. But this is the interwebs - I remember people comparing one Fallout 4 benchmark to another without realising the game engine has issues over 60FPS and overestimating what card would be required.

If anything,from my experience of Civilization V and other RTS games,a decent CPU is important. RTS games like Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire are incredibly CPU intensive towards the end of the game.

Its still fail,that we don't have a DX12 or Vulkan path for the game,and I would certainly have expected AMD to have pushed for it to be at released after Civilization:Beyond Earth had Mantle and helped their cards. They really need to be careful not to keep their eye off the ball like that.

 

[Piroko]

Why is it that a turn based game is running so much worse than real time ones? I mean honestly when you don't have to do many computations because almost everything is static because it can't move, why is so much GPU power being wasted?

Generally speaking, because turn based games can get away with [physically, on the screen] smaller objects and display a lot more of different ones at the same time. You wouldn't be able to have so much variety in Starcraft 2 for example without running into game engine issues.

I think the new Civ looks quite nice. TB mentioned some late game performance issues in his review, but that's rather normal for a Civ and even rather mild this time around. I might buy it this weekend.

 

[EightySix Four]

I like the cartoony look of the new Civ, I think too many games get into a trap using a limited and boring color palette, but just because it looks colorful and simple doesn't mean it isn't graphically demanding. As mentioned before there are a ton of on screen shadows and animations, the water looks great, and things like the sun reflecting on the ocean look really great. I do think the game is poorly optimized considering the hardware I have played it on but it hasn't stopped me from enjoying the game at all.

I've been able to play it on my mining rig (3x480s), my work rig (380x), and my Surface Book w/dGPU at reasonable settings for each machine without issue. It's a fun game. Lighten up.

 

[Bacon1]

As far as I know, those animations are still occuring off-screen which is what is creating the CPU bottleneck which obviously hinders the GPU performance.

That would seriously be the definition of unoptimized!

Spending time to render items that aren't on the screen is unoptimized! Thank you for agreeing with me.

 

[railven]

That would seriously be the definition of unoptimized!

Spending time to render items that aren't on the screen is unoptimized! Thank you for agreeing with me.

AMD should crack the whip then. This game they feature on their Gaming Evolved website is putting them in a bad light.

 

[dogen1]

That would seriously be the definition of unoptimized!

Spending time to render items that aren't on the screen is unoptimized! Thank you for agreeing with me.

That depends on the cost of culling vs shading, and whether the game is mostly CPU or GPU bound.

I mean, frustum culling is dead easy to implement, so if it helps the game you can assume it's there.

 

[Bacon1]

That depends on the cost of culling vs shading.

Well considering a 1080 (or whatever they were testing) is getting terrible FPS with almost nothing good looking on the screen.... They should figure out something

AMD should crack the whip then. This game they feature on their Gaming Evolved website is putting them in a bad light.

Its not really up to AMD to do, its the developers and their engine. But yes it would be good for them to optimize the game. A 4x should not be more GPU intensive than a FPS. CPU maybe. RTS CPU? Sure lots of AI and pathing. For a 4x / turn based though?

 

[railven]

Its not really up to AMD to do, its the developers and their engine. But yes it would be good for them to optimize the game. A 4x should not be more GPU intensive than a FPS. CPU maybe. RTS CPU? Sure lots of AI and pathing. For a 4x / turn based though?

Ummmm...I don't think the GPU is even hitting 30-40% load in the benchmark. I'll test it when I get home tonight. Pretty sure this game is CPU bottlenecked to the moon. When I said the animations are still happening, I didn't mean rendered by the GPU. I meant the CPU is still calculating them.

When I get 33 FPS in WoW: Legion it isn't because the game is GPU intensive. It's because my CPU is choking and my GPU is coasting at 20-30% loading waiting on the CPU.

 

[Bacon1]

Ummmm...I don't think the GPU is even hitting 30-40% load in the benchmark. I'll test it when I get home tonight. Pretty sure this game is CPU bottlenecked to the moon. When I said the animations are still happening, I didn't mean rendered by the GPU. I meant the CPU is still calculating them.

When I get 33 FPS in WoW: Legion it isn't because the game is GPU intensive. It's because my CPU is choking and my GPU is coasting at 20-30% loading waiting on the CPU.

I discussed that before, but you can clearly see that the only CPU limitation is actually around the 1070/1080 spot as thats why the 1080 doesn't go much faster than the 1070. As you go up in resolution the FPS drops for all except the 1080 as well.

http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=thread...ysis-techpowerup.2489523/page-5#post-38536444

SLI caps out @ same as single 1080 (CPU bottleneck)

CFX caps out above Fury X so Fury X wasn't CPU bottlenecked though close, and Nano sure wasn't.

So all GPUs are performing pretty poor and not because of CPU.

 

[railven]

SLI caps out @ same as single 1080 (CPU bottleneck)

CFX caps out above Fury X so Fury X wasn't CPU bottlenecked though close, and Nano sure wasn't.

So all GPUs are performing pretty poor and not because of CPU.

Does this game even have mGPU support?

EDIT:
Woof, only card seeing any good scaling in that chart is 780 Ti.

 

[Bacon1]

Does this game even have mGPU support?

EDIT:
Woof, only card seeing any good scaling in that chart is 780 Ti.

Yep 290 and 780 Ti have great scaling, but again, only because their original fps is poor and the others end up CPU limited. But both 290 and 780 Ti CFX/SLI are cpu limited as well :\

But back to the main point.. Its not CPU limited just poor GPU performance all around (probably because it does spend time rendering way more than it displays).

 

[dogen1]

(probably because it does spend time rendering way more than it displays).

Do we know that?

 

[Bacon1]

Do we know that?

Well people have said that it renders slower when zoomed out than when zoomed in so that's what I'm guessing is happening. I don't know how the rendering is taking place so said "probably"

 

[cyclohexane]

Frame rate is completely irrelevant. What always sucks is the 20 second waits in between turns as the game progresses.

 

[dogen1]

Well people have said that it renders slower when zoomed out than when zoomed in so that's what I'm guessing is happening. I don't know how the rendering is taking place so said "probably"

So, it's faster when zoomed in? What's wrong with that?
Doesn't that suggest it's rendering less?

 

[Bacon1]

So, it's faster when zoomed in? What's wrong with that?

Because its faster when there is more eye candy instead of slower as you'd expect when its gpu bound.

Why would it be slower while the detail is being removed unless those details aren't properly being removed from the rendering pipeline?

 

[dogen1]

Because its faster when there is more eye candy instead of slower as you'd expect when its gpu bound.

Why would it be slower while the detail is being removed unless those details aren't properly being removed from the rendering pipeline?

Cause zoomed out you're rendering way more stuff in general(GPU load could stay constant or potentially increase).. and the cpu workload is a lot higher with 10-100x as many things on screen.

I don't think we can make any accurate judgments without more information.

 

[Rifter]

This is a Civ game. Regardless of performance, it is going to take a year and a couple major patches to make it decent and then an expansion to make it a truly great game. Smart move is to wait until a steam sale for the base game, you will have a much better experience.

This, 100000 times this!