Civilization: Beyond Earth Linux GPU/Driver Benchmarks

[Nobu]

They must employ coders that think optimization is using every bit of processor power, instead leaving some for the OS to do it's thing. I have worked with such a coder.... he couldn't grasp the concept that optimization meant the opposite, make the program as efficient as possible, using the least resources.

You want it to be able to leaverage as many resources as are available (in order to be both visually pleasing and smooth), but also able to scale down as resources become scarce (in order to remain smooth when other things are going on, possibly at the cost of some...bling). Needless to say, not always a simple task.

Civ5 works fine on my A10-6800k, though it does stutter a little. After a slight overclock it handles like a champ, though.

[leech]

You want it to be able to leaverage as many resources as are available (in order to be both visually pleasing and smooth), but also able to scale down as resources become scarce (in order to remain smooth when other things are going on, possibly at the cost of some...bling). Needless to say, not always a simple task.

Civ5 works fine on my A10-6800k, though it does stutter a little. After a slight overclock it handles like a champ, though.

Yeah, leverage as many resources as possible WITHOUT making the whole system a slug. Modern day operating systems have all sorts of crap running in the background, they aren't like the good ol' days where you pop a floppy disk in, power on the computer and that's all it's running. Not even consoles work that way 100% of the time anymore.

I am wondering how much Wayland may help/hurt game play. I realize that the games will pretty much have to run with the X11 compatability layer, but it'd be interesting to see once it's in a stable state. Granted I bet some difference in performance could be achieved if I wasn't running full Gnome with the games. Though I haven't really had an issue with Civ5, it seems to me the graphical/audio engine runs okay, it's the AI that makes it slow (at least once you get deep into a game). Last game of it I played was in Windows and it took me 36 hours to win.. I just haven't had the time to dedicate to it lately.

[Nobu]

Also unlike the good ol' days, modern desktops often have 2, 4, even 8 core processors (up to 16 "cores" if they have HyperThreading, etc.). Your whole system shouldn't turn into a slug if you have at least two cores and 4-8GB RAM. I've never had issues with my OS becoming sluggish with four cores except when running programs designed to make your system cry (see, "stress" system load tester), and Firefox on occasion (but it wasn't the whole system...just Firefox). And I know Civ5 isn't a real-time/action game, so you don't need to have it focused all the time, but most people don't do other things while playing games anyway...save for solitaire and mine-sweeper, etc..

As far as in-game responsiveness, it's usually butter (Running KDE4, plasma-desktop 5.1.2). I only ever notice it slugging along when I click a button and it's still thinking (so it doesn't respond immediately), but I chalk that up to just how complicated the AI is (probably single-threaded, too). I doubt wayland will have an effect on game responsiveness--AI and Graphics are generally handled separately, AI on the CPU and Graphics on the GPU. If they ever mix, I've never seen it, and it probably doesn't look good (at least, without a great CPU).

Also, don't count recent game releases out of the Wayland game yet...if they run on SDL, it probably wouldn't be extremely difficult to patch in support for wayland (though it might require an upgrade to SDL2).

[leech]

Also unlike the good ol' days, modern desktops often have 2, 4, even 8 core processors (up to 16 "cores" if they have HyperThreading, etc.). Your whole system shouldn't turn into a slug if you have at least two cores and 4-8GB RAM. I've never had issues with my OS becoming sluggish with four cores except when running programs designed to make your system cry (see, "stress" system load tester), and Firefox on occasion (but it wasn't the whole system...just Firefox). And I know Civ5 isn't a real-time/action game, so you don't need to have it focused all the time, but most people don't do other things while playing games anyway...save for solitaire and mine-sweeper, etc..

As far as in-game responsiveness, it's usually butter (Running KDE4, plasma-desktop 5.1.2). I only ever notice it slugging along when I click a button and it's still thinking (so it doesn't respond immediately), but I chalk that up to just how complicated the AI is (probably single-threaded, too). I doubt wayland will have an effect on game responsiveness--AI and Graphics are generally handled separately, AI on the CPU and Graphics on the GPU. If they ever mix, I've never seen it, and it probably doesn't look good (at least, without a great CPU).

Also, don't count recent game releases out of the Wayland game yet...if they run on SDL, it probably wouldn't be extremely difficult to patch in support for wayland (though it might require an upgrade to SDL2).

Ha, sad thing is probably 90% of the people out there using modern desktops don't need all that extra processing power. Same reason why people are touting a keyboard with a iPad as a 'laptop killer'. I still laugh at that, since there are a lot of things you simply can't do with an iPad. Hell, I have a Galaxy Note 12.2 Pro with a keyboard, and I still wouldn't say it really replaces having a 'real' operating system on a laptop. Now if I could ditch android on it and put a full Linux system natively there, it would be an awesome, light weight laptop.

I agree though with multiple processors you shouldn't really have issues with running any games with the software running in the background choking. It's just that some programs are so anti-multitasking that they turn off your second monitor, kill any sort of alt+tab, and some of them even make it annoying to quit. I'm trying to remember which game it was that I recently played, but to quit the game, you had to exit to the menu, then when looking for the 'quit to desktop' or whatever it was, I had to scroll down in a menu that didn't really show a scroll bar, and it's not like the menu took up the whole screen so that it would need to scroll down. Games ported from consoles are notorious for doing that.

Anyhow, that was sort of an off topic rant. I've got some time over the holidays, guess it's time to test Civ5 out on Linux finally. I would've really liked to see how Civ: BE is compared to Alpha Centauri as well.

[Nobu]

Ha, sad thing is probably 90% of the people out there using modern desktops don't need all that extra processing power. Same reason why people are touting a keyboard with a iPad as a 'laptop killer'. I still laugh at that, since there are a lot of things you simply can't do with an iPad. Hell, I have a Galaxy Note 12.2 Pro with a keyboard, and I still wouldn't say it really replaces having a 'real' operating system on a laptop. Now if I could ditch android on it and put a full Linux system natively there, it would be an awesome, light weight laptop.

I'd agree, and I don't own a tablet for that reason. If I'm doing any gaming, it's on my desktop/console, otherwise my (smart) phone is more than enough for taking notes and web browsing.

I agree though with multiple processors you shouldn't really have issues with running any games with the software running in the background choking. It's just that some programs are so anti-multitasking that they turn off your second monitor, kill any sort of alt+tab, and some of them even make it annoying to quit. I'm trying to remember which game it was that I recently played, but to quit the game, you had to exit to the menu, then when looking for the 'quit to desktop' or whatever it was, I had to scroll down in a menu that didn't really show a scroll bar, and it's not like the menu took up the whole screen so that it would need to scroll down. Games ported from consoles are notorious for doing that.

Anyhow, that was sort of an off topic rant. I've got some time over the holidays, guess it's time to test Civ5 out on Linux finally. I would've really liked to see how Civ: BE is compared to Alpha Centauri as well.

Yeah, might as well if you own it already. If you have an HD7770 or similar it should handle fine will all the bells-n-whistles enabled. My overclocked APU's iGPU (with settings max'd, 1080p) struggles a little when zoomed out, but otherwise handles it fine. If you have the same chip and don't have it OC'd, or have slow ram, you might want to tone down the settings a bit.

Looking forward to the full benchmarks of Civ:BE...want to see how much more graphically intense it really is. lol