Lowering graphical bling

[vector1]

Having seen some discussions about minimum graphics requirements, I'm a little concerned about graphical options in game. The minimum requirement of a GTX460 is rather alarming as it pretty much excludes all integrated graphics options and almost all non gaming laptops (anything lower than a 750m isn't going to make that cut). Most games tend to claim a certain minimum requirement to run, but generally most people get by via lowering everything to the bare minimum to get higher FPS, or running at a lower resolution. It's disappointing to not see the game in all it's maximum glory, but I'll take gameplay over graphics any day.

I'd like to check if these such options exist in the game. I understand we can turn off a number of graphical options like day/night cycle and other overlays, but does it go deeper like removing pretty shading, anti-aliasing, 3D model detail etc, in order to run the game smoothly?

Any clarification would be much appreciated. @podcat

 

[Kourgath223]

Having seen some discussions about minimum graphics requirements, I'm a little concerned about graphical options in game. The minimum requirement of a GTX460 is rather alarming as it pretty much excludes all integrated graphics options and almost all non gaming laptops (anything lower than a 750m isn't going to make that cut). Most games tend to claim a certain minimum requirement to run, but generally most people get by via lowering everything to the bare minimum to get higher FPS, or running at a lower resolution. It's disappointing to not see the game in all it's maximum glory, but I'll take gameplay over graphics any day.

I'd like to check if these such options exist in the game. I understand we can turn off a number of graphical options like day/night cycle and other overlays, but does it go deeper like removing pretty shading, anti-aliasing, 3D model detail etc, in order to run the game smoothly?

Any clarification would be much appreciated. @podcat

I see that you own CK2. You can check what options you have there because at the very least you should have those settings plus 1 or 2 others.

 

[vector1]

Given that CK2 does not have anywhere close to the number of 3D units (fully rendered planes, ships, and sprites) moving around on map, it's safe to say that whatever engine HOI4 is based on, it's going to be their most GPU intensive game yet. Textures, unit details are something that need to be baked into the game right from the start and options to lower details require more work from the art department to generate the new assets.

I was just throwing out some common options, but I guess my real question is what is the range of graphical settings supported, and whether that extends the minimum graphics requirements. If GTX460 is the true minimum then we'll all be upgrading older laptops into some sweet new desktop/laptop rigs (great excuse to upgrade my 5 year old laptop, thinkpads just don't die without some encouragement...)

That said, I have played CK2 and experienced no real problems with graphics, ditto for EU4.

 

[TheRomanRuler]

I understand if many people don`t have CPUs to run grand strategy games.... but i don`t understand why many are struggling with graphic cards... Maybe it might be great idea to buy CPU with integrated graphics card on it? It would run the game faster and graphics card should be good enough to run grand strategy games without issues.
There is so little load on graphics card in grand strategy games that if you only play grand strategy, you really should first try to upgrade your system rather than try to lower settings in game.
Laptops etc are of course different matter, but even many laptops have good enough graphics cards to run grand strategy games without problems. Most of the load in any grand strategy will be on CPU, not GPU.

 

[Daddl]

I understand if many people don`t have CPUs to run grand strategy games.... but i don`t understand why many are struggling with graphic cards... Maybe it might be great idea to buy CPU with integrated graphics card on it? It would run the game faster and graphics card should be good enough to run grand strategy games without issues.

Thats exactly the opposite of the point OP is trying to make.

Until now, a CPU with integrated graphics and no extra graphic card was enough for any Paradox game, but judging by the miniumum requirements for Stellaris and HoI4, it won't be in the future.

The requirements can still be matched by PCs older than 5 years, but the thing is there are a lot of people here with really bad setups who just didn't need to upgrade anything if all they play is EU4 and CK2, like me. I meet the minimum requirements, but not much more, so if Paradox moves forward hardware wise, that brings a lot of people in the need to do so as well.

 

[vector1]

Generally CPUs have not seen the same tremendous improvements per refresh since the Sandy Bridge (gen 2 of intel I series) as GPUs have. For instance, the latest 6700HQ is barely 30-40% faster than my 2720qm, and this is after 5 years and 4 cycles later.

On the other hand, a 940m is about 250% faster than my Q1000m (somewhat equal to the 540m), not to mention the other much more powerful graphics cards out there. So there has been much more improvement in this area, and equally increased demands as games take advantage of the latest hardware.

Paradox has lagged behind this curve in terms of GPU requirements simply because of the nature of the games published. 2D maps with minimal 3D models, heavy shading or antialiasing reduce the demands on GPUs. What's been really important is a good CPU because of the behind the scenes calculations that a grand strategy game requires. I can easily run 4-6 instances of HOI3 without lagging, and more if I'm going on a slow speed for MP testing simply because the demand is almost all on my CPU and RAM. I highly doubt this is the case with the new 3D additions to HOI4 so having the option to go back to a less taxing interface would be really welcome to keep older platforms in use.

An early demo showed a fully riggable camera that could rotate around the map as well though I don't think it's been shown in the WWW. It's something exciting that I've never seen in paradox games since if we can move around freely, more unique screenshots from a front's perspective could be shown. Things like that show off the 3D map/sprites really well, but if this isn't enabled in the release then fixing the camera to a single angle generally means it's more or less isometric and you could remove the shadows/models without losing too much detail in the game.

@Da9L Is the camera fully interactive in tilt/rotation + translation/zoom?

Either way, I'm 100% on board the HOI4 hype train so it might be time for a new computer if this is what it takes.

 

[aruon]

the good thing about PDS games is that they harness the GPU for CPU processes as well.

 

[vector1]

That's an interesting statement, but do you have any specific examples? I don't recall anything of the sort especially with the older titles.

 

[psstt]

I don't think a game coming out today should be concerned over the few people still running on 10 year old potatoes or TI-83 calculators. A game coming out in 2016 should look and feel like a game from 2016, running on hardware available in 2016 (or at the very least 2013).

 

[CharlieFox]

My laptop with integrated graphic card could run fine both EUIV and CKII but I am worried it might not be enough to run Stellaris or HoiIV. If I cannot lower graphical quality enough for running the game at least I am hoping that given how these new games are supposed to be so modable there will be some mods that lower the GPU requirements.

 

[aruon]

That's an interesting statement, but do you have any specific examples? I don't recall anything of the sort especially with the older titles.

i don't know the specifics behind it the the gist of it is that since functionally, there's no real fundamental difference between a CPU and a GPU (the GPU is just much better at doing a billion tiny things at once), so a GPU can be used in tandem to boost CPU performance a bit. though if your CPU is just not up for the challenge you can still see lag from the shortcomings. so in a nutshell, a sub-par CPU has a less extreme performance drop than a crappy GPU.

and AFAIK paradox has always done this. you'll have to ask podcat or johan or another dev for a much better explanation though.

 

[Paladino]

There was this trend some years ago to only buy laptops for their convenience, retailers and manufacturers knowing that most of their sales went towards persons without much IT knowledge, started promoting completely unbalanced builds with mediocre parts rocking big numbers. What I mean is every i7 is an i7, only RAM size matters (who knows about clock speed and latency), same for VRAM since you could be served with the crapiest entry card there is but it has 2GB so it should be a good thing right?
People were getting by on games like LoL since it's not very intensive, probably on other MMOs because they want to biggest playerbase, obviously on grand strategy 2D maps. But it had to catch up and gaming laptops are expensive.

So now there's the struggle, the devs have set the minimum bar to the equivalent of a medium-end 09' PC and alot of the community have their hands tied, when any guy with a mediocre desktop just has to find a 30€ used card and start playing.

Laptops are evil.

 

[vector1]

i don't know the specifics behind it the the gist of it is that since functionally, there's no real fundamental difference between a CPU and a GPU (the GPU is just much better at doing a billion tiny things at once), so a GPU can be used in tandem to boost CPU performance a bit. though if your CPU is just not up for the challenge you can still see lag from the shortcomings. so in a nutshell, a sub-par CPU has a less extreme performance drop than a crappy GPU.

and AFAIK paradox has always done this. you'll have to ask podcat or johan or another dev for a much better explanation though.

As it happens, I do know a little more about the specifics behind this as I've done some work in a lab using CUDA for fluid simulations and unless you do have a concrete example I'm afraid the odds are high that you are wrong (though I'd be happy to be told otherwise by the devs).

Desktop/Laptop CPUs execute code generally on the x86/x64 instruction set (exclusively now since the demise of PowerPC on MAC). Almost all programs compile their code to run specifically on CPUs on this platform, which is why programs for phones using the ARM platform will not run without an emulator/recompiling on PCs and vice-versa. While GPUs have been promoted as GPGPUs (General Purpose GPUs), the fact remains that the underlying architecture is fundamentally different and in generally only specialized programs with specific requirements can take advantage of GPGPUs to speed-up/use for calculations. Look up CUDA (Nvidia) and OpenGL (open-source/AMD) as an example of how different programs are when compiled/written, even if written in the same programming language (eg C++). One of the major headline feature of DX12 is the enabling of multi-threaded operations by reducing the threading inefficiencies of single threaded behavior, which in turns allows for far more complex AI in some of the new games being developed with the additional power unlocked. Till we've fully enabled the effectiveness of our quad-core CPUs, there isn't much point porting code to run on the far more parallel architecture of GPUs. Parallelism is a real problem in computing (outside of graphics rendering) that needs a lot of work to use fully, and computing for games generally needs sequential processing due to the way it's programmed. For example, you spawn only one thread acting for AI which runs all the calculations, but in fluid simulations I can allocate N number of threads to simultaneously calculate the collisions at different zones instead of processing one by one. Also, GPUs can only handle more simple work like FP32/64 calcuations quickly, but not so much in other complex stuff that a CPU is able to do. Lastly, the reason why a sub-par CPU has less of an extreme drop in performance simply comes because games don't actually need/use more than 2 cores on a CPU in general, but it can easily take up more graphics power to boost frame-rates. It'll take a really terrible CPU to bottleneck the GPU since it tends to be the other way around.

In short, most games don't rely on GPUs for computing purposes simply because it's a lot more work to translate code to run smoothly on the GPU due to the way the architecture is designed. If Paradox does this, I have not seen any indication from my experience with their games so I presume against it as GPGPU work is relatively new and limited to the scientific field or specialized rendering programs instead of the gaming industry. If it's in HOI4 I assume it'll be a pretty trumpeted feature since it'll be among the first in the world to do such things but given that development started way before DX12 was released, it's reasonably safe to assume that incorporating such new features should not have happened*.

*HOI4 can "support" DX12 but not actually utilize the new features in DX12

There was this trend some years ago to only buy laptops for their convenience, retailers and manufacturers knowing that most of their sales went towards persons without much IT knowledge, they started promoting completely unbalanced builds with mediocre parts rocking big numbers. What I mean is every i7 is an i7, only RAM size matters (who knows about clock speed and latency), same for VRAM since you could be served with the crapiest entry card there is but it has 2GB so it should be a good thing right?
People were getting by on games like LoL since it's not very intensive, probably on other MMOs because they want to biggest playerbase, obviously on grand strategy 2D maps. But it had to catch up and gaming laptops are expensive.

So now there's the struggle, the devs have set the minimum bar to the equivalent of a medium-end 09' PC and allot of the community have their hands tied, when any guy with a mediocre desktop just has to find like a 30€ used card and start playing.

Laptops are evil.

Sad but true that we have to pay so much more for the engineering that goes into a laptop. I've always considered a desktop but having a unified platform in a portable but powerful laptop seemed like the best compromise. Gamers should almost always just go for a DIY desktop for the best value for money, but sometimes other considerations come into play (school/work requires mobility)

 

[vector1]

I don't think a game coming out today should be concerned over the few people still running on 10 year old potatoes or TI-83 calculators. A game coming out in 2016 should look and feel like a game from 2016, running on hardware available in 2016 (or at the very least 2013).

You might wish to examine the market of graphics solutions a little more in detail.

A GTX460 as a cutoff point excludes a lot of cards. Take for example the 3Dmark score of 3530

sauce: http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460/review

Comparing to the other cards on the site, only the GTX desktop/laptop series of cards are actually going to make the cut, with basically all laptop graphics at/under a nvidia 940m scoring 2440, completely missing the bar. Lets not even consider any form of integrated graphics from intel. One of the best Intel integrated solutions Iris Pro 6200 scores a measly 2380 so there's not much hope that any solution is going to be as good as a GTX460 within the next 2-3 years. These are cards released in 2015/2016 FYI.

I'm sure paradox isn't going to ignore the vast majority of the market running lower-end graphics solutions if they want to bring HOI4 into the mainstream.

*As a note, I'm not calling for games to deliberately compromise their artistic/production values, but instead offer options to turn off these effects to allow a wider audience to enjoy the core gameplay that Paradox are famous for, especially in their grand strategy portfolio. Everyone have an opinion on how the game should look, but this is no different than me playing games on ultra-low settings and still having as much fun as others playing on full Ultra + 4K.