upgrading for SH5

[Factor]

Hi, as the title says, i have to upgrade for SH5. My PC from 2006 will show it's age with this title. Right now it has a Nvidia 7900 GTX vid card, AMD Athlon 3800+ single core processor, and 2 gigs of ram.

I am thinking of upgrading to AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+, and a EVGA 9500 GT PCIe video card.

So, my question is, do you think this will be enough to run the game at medium to high settings at 1280x1024 resolution.

I can purchase both items for a total of roughly 115 dollars. Not really wanting to spend much more, times are tight these days.

That should put me in the middle of the min/recommended specs.

[Adam84]

Hi Factor,

I expect that with that setup you will be able to run the game on low/medium settings with that resolution.

I have a similar setup (AMD FX62 duel-core processor, XFX GTX 260 Black Edition, 2 gig ram) and I am pretty sceptical about it's ability to run SH5 on high settings. I hope I am proved wrong but I would suggest something more powerful given expected future titles...then again if you're not going to be playing alot of PC games and just want SH5 to run then go for it.

Hope this helps,

Ad

[martes86]

I think that what you have will probably run much better SH5 than what you had in mind. Maybe upgrading the processor helps, even putting in more RAM. But a 7900 is a high-class card within the 7000 series while the 9500 is a mid-class card within the 9000 class. And, higher class, doesn't mean extremely improved performance, it's the card range where you see the difference, so I wouldn't change the card, I'd say it's perfectly fine.

Cheers :rock:

EDIT: Forgot to mention that, if you can run SH4, you should be able to run SH5 anyways.

[Schunken]

I would suggest you put all your money in a Quad-Core.

Singlecores are badly outnumbered by actual titles.... with resolution for a 19`` monitor your graphiccard still can go 20-30fps with AA off.

Poeple often underestiminate the difference of load to the graphiccard when it comes to wide resolutions on 22´´ and 24´´ Monitors.

By the way...even my 3 GHZ Quad core comes to 100% on all cores in FS X at Frankfurt Airport with 300 AI Planes all over the place...:damn:

Andreas

[weeksatsea]

Have we heard anything about whether or not SH5 will be configured for Quad core ?

I know ETW couldn't do Dual core until they patched it up.

[Schunken]

Hm....quad cores are on the market more than 2 years.

Anybody who programms nowadays that not support tham should be shoot to Mars... :arrgh!:

...even SH4 use all my cores...so Sh5 should do it also...

Dont forget physic simulation and AI put a heavy load on a single core.

I quickly run a test here with Anno 1404 on my GTX 260:

Anno limeted to 1 core: 10 FPS

2 cores 25 FPS

4 cores 51 FPS !!!

That is a huge performance gain, isnt?

and why? Because the CPU must feed the graphic card with data.... if the graphic card always wait for the singlecore it cant be fast...

I also think in the next 10 years games will not be a problem anymore....Intel have prototypes with 48 Cores:D

A word to RAM:

You will often not feel a performance gain in most games between 2gb it and 4gb Ram....I Only feel the computer is more smooth when quick switch between programms that open like switch from a game into a open word document because both programms be stored in the Ram and not in the page file on hd....

...on the other hand ram is cheap.... when you use your PC for render 3d images or video editing Ram will help...

Andreas

[TH0R]

...even SH4 use all my cores...so Sh5 should do it also...

Dont forget physic simulation and AI put a heavy load on a single core.

I seriously doubt that. IIRC SH4 was not optimized for multi-core CPUs. However, SH5 should be optimized for dual core CPUs.

I don't think there is a game on the market nowadays which supports more than 2 core CPUs. Except maybe ArmAII (says in the requirements), but I doubt it uses the whole potential of all 4 cores. Not even close IMHO.

It is just too difficult and time consuming to program it, or should I say match / fine tune different tasks for all 4 cores. Also, not everyone has 4 core CPUs. ;)

[THE_MASK]

I would expect that to run sh5 on the highest settings on 1600x1200 or more with decent frame rates you would need a fairly high end graphic card and good cpu .

[martes86]

A little note about CPUs, don't confuse support with resource optimization. The first one is about stuff working the way they should if a multi-core CPU is installed (as opposed to not working at all). The second, is about that same CPU making a difference on the system's performance (as opposed to stuff working as if you had a single-core CPU).

Cheers :rock:

[Schunken]

believe me SH4 does....even SH3

I constantly have 25-40% load on all 4 Cores with only Sh4 as open programm...as soon I end it load drops to 1-2% when win7 idles around...

I can only speak for germany:

Single cores: 21%

Dual cores : 51 %

Quad cores 28%


But germany is a strong PC-Player household...we have fare less Consoles in households than UK or US....

And i cant say it loud enough: Single core is dead with todays games...


But yes, I do not take reccourses optimation into account, that is true!


I do not know how clever Win 7 is....maybe its really clever switching loads to all CPus in the background....Also I take not in acount that I run a 64bit system and have my games on a 60gb solid state disk...

Andreas

[TH0R]

Than this improvement in FPS you're seeing is definitely due to Win7 and has very little with game optimization. Yes, some games are optimized for more cores, but not as much as Win7 can utilize them for resource optimization.

[Schunken]

I wonder what my test will show on a quad core with XP and Vista...

anyway I be sure Vista will be last place....:03:

but even when it only be because of better ressource optimation we can generally say that a step from single to a duo CPU will improbe game performance drasically...

Andreas

[martes86]

Than this improvement in FPS you're seeing is definitely due to Win7 and has very little with game optimization. Yes, some games are optimized for more cores, but not as much as Win7 can utilize them for resource optimization.

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. W7 is much better optimized than previous Win releases, so it'd be surprising if it didn't actually improve overall performance of all applications.

Cheers :rock:

[Feuer Frei!]

I would suggest you put all your money in a Quad-Core.

Why? This would be correct if you are looking at a "cover the future" type of thing, couldn't agree more, however, dual cores are the sweet spots at the moment, and are being utilized by game devs the most at the moment....and as has already been mentioned before, only a very limited number of pc games are actually designed to utilize 4 cores......





Anybody who programms nowadays that not support tham should be shoot to Mars... :arrgh!:
Andreas

unfair! (and before you fry me, i'm not critizising you for your comment)...
game devs are aware of the majority of people's systems in their homes, most, including myself have a dual core......sure, i concur that a lot have quad cores, for various reasons, i personally did not come to the party re a quad core when custom building my system as i stated before the bulk of pc games are not even optimized and utilized for this type of architecture....hence my choice for dual core.....might i add, i'm pretty much only going to be using the new rig for gaming, i am aware that people who have quad cores are not only gamers, being graphics developers, architects, multi media designers and the like, which quad core technology is much better suited to........

Quad core architecture is utilized game-wise at the present mainly by Flight Simulator, GTA4, Rise of Flight....to name a few
Quad core gaming operates best in sli.....


Here's something to consider:

Choosing Dual or Quad Core (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/09/choosing-dual-or-quad-core.html)

I'm a big fan of dual-core systems (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000285.html). I think there's a clear and substantial benefit for all computer users when there are two CPUs waiting to service requests, instead of just one. If nothing else, it lets you gracefully terminate an application that has gone haywire, consuming all available CPU time. It's like having a backup CPU in reserve, waiting to jump in and assist as necessary. But for most software, you hit a point of diminishing returns very rapidly after two cores. In Quad-Core Desktops and Diminishing Returns (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000655.html), I questioned how effectively today's software can really use even four CPU cores, much less the inevitable eight and sixteen CPU cores we'll see a few years from now.
To get a sense of what kind of performance improvement we can expect going from 2 to 4 CPU cores, let's focus on the Core 2 Duo E6600 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 processors. These 2.4 GHz CPUs are identical in every respect, except for the number of cores they bring to the table. In a recent review (http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/12737/1), Scott Wasson at the always-thorough Tech Report (http://www.techreport.com/) presented a slew of benchmarks that included both of these processors. Here's a quick visual summary of how much you can expect performance to improve when upgrading from 2 to 4 CPU cores:



improvement
2 to 4 cores
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion) none
Rainbow 6:Vegas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy%27s_Rainbow_Six:_Vegas) none
Supreme Commander (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander) none
Valve Source engine particle simulation (http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2868&p=9) 1.8 x
Valve VRAD map compilation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Hammer_Editor) 1.9 x
3DMark06 (http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/): Return to Proxycon none
3DMark06: Canyon Flight none
3DMark06: Deep Freeze none
3DMark06: CPU test 1 1.7 x
3DMark06: CPU test 2 1.6 x
The Panorama Factory (http://www.panoramafactory.com/) 1.6 x
picCOLOR (http://www.fibus.org/fibusimg.htm) 1.4 x
Windows Media Encoder (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx) x64 1.6 x
Lame MT (http://softlab.technion.ac.il/project/LAME/html/lame.html) MP3 encoder none
Cinebench (http://www.maxon.net/pages/download/cinebench_e.html) 1.7 x
POV-Ray (http://www.povray.org/) 2.0 x
Myrimatch (http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/msrc/bioinformatics/Bumber.php) 1.8 x
STARS Euler3D (http://www.caselab.okstate.edu/research/euler3dbenchmark.html) 1.5 x
SiSoft Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.net/) Mandelbrot 2.0 x The results seem encouraging, until you take a look at the applications that benefit from quad-core-- the ones that aren't purely synthetic benchmarks are rendering, encoding, or scientific applications . It's the same old story. Beyond encoding and rendering tasks which are naturally amenable to parallelization, the task manager CPU graphs tell the sad tale of software that simply isn't written to exploit more than two CPUs.
Unfortunately, CPU parallelism is inevitable. Clock speed can't increase forever; the physics don't work. Mindlessly ramping clock speed to 10 GHz isn't an option. CPU vendors are forced to deliver more CPU cores running at nearly the same clock speed, or at very small speed bumps. Increasing the number of CPU cores on a die should defeat raw clock speed increases, at least in theory. In the short term, we have to choose between faster dual-core systems, or slower quad-core systems. Today, a quad-core 2.4 GHz CPU costs about the same as a dual-core 3.0 GHz CPU. But which one will provide superior performance? A recent Xbit Labs review (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-q6600.html) performed exactly this comparison:


3.0 GHz
Dual Core 2.4 GHz
Quad Core improvement
2 to 4 cores PCMark05 9091 8853 -3% SysMark 2007, E-Learning 167 140 -16% SysMark 2007, Video Creation 131 151 15% SysMark 2007, Productivity 152 138 -9% SysMark 2007, 3D 160 148 -8% Quake 4 136 117 -15% F.E.A.R. 123 110 -10% Company of Heroes 173 161 -7% Lost Planet 62 54 -12% Lost Planet "Concurrent Operations" 62 81 30% DivX 6.6 65 64 0% Xvid 1.2 43 45 5% H.264 QuickTime Pro 7.2 189 188 0% iTunes 7.3 MP3 encoding 110 131 -16% 3ds Max 9 SP2 4.95 6.61 33% Cinebench 10 5861 8744 49% Excel 2007 39.9 24.4 63% WinRAR 3.7 188 180 5% Photoshop CS3 70 73 -4% Microsoft Movie Maker 6.0 73 80 -9% It's mostly what I would expect-- only rendering and encoding tasks exploit parallelism enough to overcome the 25% speed deficit between the dual and quad core CPUs. Outside of that specific niche, performance will actually suffer for most general purpose software if you choose a slower quad-core over a faster dual-core.
However, there were some surprises in here, such as Excel 2007, and the Lost Planet "concurrent operations" setting. It's possible software engineering will eventually advance to the point that clock speed matters less than parallelism. Or eventually it might be irrelevant, if we don't get to make the choice between faster clock speeds and more CPU cores. But in the meantime, clock speed wins most of the time. More CPU cores isn't automatically better. Typical users will be better off with the fastest possible dual-core CPU they can afford.

[Schunken]

Wow, you put much work in it, well done...

...maybe I call of quads so much because

GTAV - Yes
FSX - yes (I have over 1200h logged (Atlantic Sun Airways)
Rise of flight - yes

but how much more expansive is a Quad 2.4 against a Dual 2.4, is so much?

(By the way my quad 2.4 runs stable at 3.6 at 34C watercooled)

Andreas

[Darkhat]

Wow! You guys should check out Core i7 980X Extreme Edition. It has six cores! :yep:

[jazman]

Patience, grasshopper. Wait until enough people have the game in their hands, and they can tell you how it does, in fact, run on their hardware. Then you can judge rightly.

[utops]

Hm..
ODD.
I have amd x2 3600 2,5gb ram ati 4670 and Sh4 work ~40fps on max ~25 in harbors
Sh5 have support for dual and more cores (sh4 not?) devs said they do some optimaization and overall Sh5 will not have much more req. compare to 4
so what the big idea?

chill out.

[Sailor Steve]

Don't be so damn concerned about the new DRM, after all, it is WAY
better than for example SecuRom ! :damn:
Are you sure? I could complain about the old ones (which gave me no trouble), but I can't even play with this one, so how can I tell?

[Steeltrap]

[/CENTER]
Are you sure? I could complain about the old ones (which gave me no trouble), but I can't even play with this one, so how can I tell?

Yes, it's a bit like saying DRM is an entirely better version of syphilis. :o

Thanks, but no thanks.....

[Schunken]

I think I can even open a thread of my grandmothers feet and it will still ends in a DRM Discussion :D

Whats the problem about siphillis? :haha:


Andreas

[Factor]

Hey, it's me, the OP, well, my 7900gtx decided to take a dump on me last night. As luck would have it before SH5 is released. :damn: Guess it was time for it to go to digital heaven, it has been in my rig for 3 years now.

So, anyway, i just ordered a 9800gtx for $109.00 dollars. So, hopefully, it will work out. My processor is only a Amd Athlon 3800+ single core, so hopefully it won't bottleneck the game too much.

Next purchase will be a http://www.compuvest.com/Desc.jsp?iid=1069085

[jwilliams]

Time will tell..... my athlon 64 3500+ single core runs GTA4 fine (slows a little during data intensive scenes) and the min specs for GTA4 is Athlon X2 64 2.4ghz