[Megathread] Victoria 3 AVX

[SchwarzKatze]

Intel® Pentium® Gold 6405U 2019​

Well you had me there. I didn't expect anyone seriously expects to run games on a Pentium or Celeron...

But even without AVX it's still massively below the listed minimum requirement, a 9 year old i3:

UserBenchmark: Intel Core i3-3250 vs Pentium 6405U

cpu.userbenchmark.com

 

[Kxmera]

Ну, ты меня там. Я не ожидал, что кто-то серьезно рассчитывает запускать игры на Pentium или Celeron...

Но даже без AVX он все еще намного ниже перечисленных минимальных требований, 9-летнего i3:

UserBenchmark: Intel Core i3-3250 vs Pentium 6405U

cpu.userbenchmark.com

All games from paradoxes work for me. I can run absolutely any game and it will work. I did it. Only very demanding games can run very badly, but even those will work. I don't understand why you are laughing at my processor.

 

[Engram]

All games from paradoxes work for me. I can run absolutely any game and it will work. I did it. Only very demanding games can run very badly, but even those will work. I don't understand why you are laughing at my processor.

Victoria 3 is a very demanding game for the CPU. Your Pentium has less computing power than the listed minimum requirement. What's hard to understand here?

My 8 year old i5-4670K is 50 % more powerful than your Pentium and the game does not run well at all on my PC. What makes you think that your system would?

 

[Kxmera]

Victoria 3 is a very demanding game for the CPU. Your Pentium has less computing power than the listed minimum requirement. What's hard to understand here?

My 8 year old i5-4670K is 50 % more powerful than your Pentium and the game does not run well at all on my PC. What makes you think that your system would?

Yes, I'm sure my system will work better than yours. I have significantly higher memory bandwidth and have "Hyper-Threading" technology. All I need is to optimize the game without AVX. And then, you will see that my system is doing much better than yours. Those things that make you think your old processor is significantly better than mine are actually meaningless and often do not carry productive efficiency in reality.

 

[SchwarzKatze]

I have significantly higher memory bandwidth and have "Hyper-Threading" technology. All I need is to optimize the game without AVX.

Man, do you know what you're talking about? Hyper threading came out in 2002 on Pentium 4. Were you scammed by a computer salesman or something?

 

[CthulhuTactical]

same with my i7 950. No problems for ck3, eu4, hoi4 or any cpu heavy game, even late game

I find it extremely hard to believe you run stuff without problem on a 13 year old CPU. In my older spare PC i have I5 4670 and would had a trouble running new games at anything above 20-30fps, and that's a 4 year newer CPU than yours. Anyway i can't imagine someone having a money for Victoria 3 game which cost like 50USD, while running a 5 dollar CPU.

 

[Engram]

Yes, I'm sure my system will work better than yours. I have significantly higher memory bandwidth and have "Hyper-Threading" technology. All I need is to optimize the game without AVX. And then, you will see that my system is doing much better than yours. Those things that make you think your old processor is significantly better than mine are actually meaningless and often do not carry productive efficiency in reality.

With hyper-threading, we have the same number of threads (4). The higher memory bandwith is not gonna make up for the fact the i5-4670K is 130% faster in quad core workloads.

No amount of optimization will ever make the game run well on a Pentium chip. Even if your CPU had AVX, it would run like shit baecause it is literally below the system requirements.

 

[kawamuratc]

This sounds like a game optimization issue to me.. plus the i5-4670K is more or less on the same boat as the "ancient" CPUs, just happens to have AVX.

Those things that make you think your old processor is significantly better than mine are actually meaningless and often do not carry productive efficiency in reality.

AVX, as far as my tiny, uneducated brain can figure, is an extension to the instructions to the CPU that tells the CPU how to handle even more calculations in parallel.

There are lots of data in Vic3 that would be produced by large arrays being multiplied together (hence the “vector” in AVX). Lacking instructions to do this math in the way Vic3 has been coded to use means …

well, it means they’re not going to change their minds.

 

[mightygaz]

For science, there's always Intel's SDE that can emulate the AVX instruction set:

Intel® Software Development Emulator

Product overview for the Intel® Software Development Emulator (Intel® SDE).

www.intel.com

Not tried it myself (don't own V3), but it looks to be able to emulate all of Intel's ISA extensions.
Hopefully it can be made to emulate only AVX, as if it emulates SSE too it'll be cripplingly slow.

This is useless. emulating a hardware feature in software is so slow it isnt funny. this is in no way a workable solution.

 

[mightygaz]

ntel® Pentium® Gold 6405U 2019

LOL ,its not ancient, but it's inccredibly cheap as it performs like it was. this is NOT a chip for gaming.

All games from paradoxes work for me. I can run absolutely any game and it will work. I did it. Only very demanding games can run very badly, but even those will work. I don't understand why you are laughing at my processor.

cause it deserves it.

Yes, I'm sure my system will work better than yours. I have significantly higher memory bandwidth and have "Hyper-Threading" technology. All I need is to optimize the game without AVX. And then, you will see that my system is doing much better than yours. Those things that make you think your old processor is significantly better than mine are actually meaningless and often do not carry productive efficiency in reality.

Hyper threading you say? do you even know what that means?

the fact is you would need to go back around 8 or 9 years to find a CPU (not counting the ridiculous celeron or pentium ranges) that would be beaten by yours.

This is what happens when you buy cheap.

 

[Torakka]

For reference, I have i7-7700K (that I've even overclocked a bit) with 16 GB RAM and during the 1880s (i.e. mid-game) it takes me about 21 seconds to advance one month at max speed without pauses. That's a bit over four minutes per year and about seven hours for century (if I never paused and the game proceeded at uniform speed through the years).

That was a high-end CPU five years ago and more powerful than the i5-6600K (which is the recommended minimum for Victoria 3). Draw your own conclusions on what sort of performance to expect with older and/or less powerful CPUs that also would need to perform more calculations (due to lacking AVX).

 

[sefakas3]

For reference, I have i7-7700K (that I've even overclocked a bit) with 16 GB RAM and during the 1880s (i.e. mid-game) it takes me about 21 seconds to advance one month at max speed without pauses. That's a bit over four minutes per year and about seven hours for century (if I never paused and the game proceeded at uniform speed through the years).

That's because there are 4 ticks per day.

 

[Torakka]

That's because there are 4 ticks per day.

Amount of ticks is most likely irrelevant. There would still need to be exactly the same amount of calculations regarding, pops, market, etc even if there was only one tick per day. I assume four ticks per day is mostly just cosmetic and way to distribute calculations a bit, i.e. perhaps market calculations happen on morning, population calculations at noon, diplomacy on afternoon, building completion at midnight and no or just a few things are calculated every tick. If there was only one tick per day, all those calculations that now happen once per day would still need to happen once per day

EDIT: I mean, I assume things like updating market prices are relatively performance intensive and doing them every tick instead of every day would quadruple CPU workload for little benefit, so I assume they are already done only once per day.

 

[totalkrieg]

It's funny how so many flock into these threads to just say "go buy a new computer" to people who just want to able to play the game. A new computer starts around at least 700 Euro - assuming you want it to run games in some capacity. That is a huge sum for many. Especially now with huge uptick of costs of everyday life like food, fuel and heating. Maybe we are fine with it if it takes 15 minutes to process a year. Why do you bother to waste hours of your life to tell people useless information "go buy a new computer" while they already would if they could. It's just lost sales from developer standpoint. They should be able to re-analyse the costs of implementing AVX as an optional feature vs lost sales and perhaps even the passion of players who just want to able to play the game.

 

[Dman1791]

It's funny how so many flock into these threads to just say "go buy a new computer" to people who just want to able to play the game. A new computer starts around at least 700 Euro - assuming you want it to run games in some capacity. That is a huge sum for many. Especially now with huge uptick of costs of everyday life like food, fuel and heating. Maybe we are fine with it if it takes 15 minutes to process a year. Why do you bother to waste hours of your life to tell people useless information "go buy a new computer" while they already would if they could. It's just lost sales from developer standpoint. They should be able to re-analyse the costs of implementing AVX as an optional feature vs lost sales and perhaps even the passion of players who just want to able to play the game.

I'd be intensely surprised if even 5% of people trying to play Victoria 3 had a CPU incapable of AVX. It would mean that their CPU is either over a decade old, or was a bottom-tier processor that was already underpowered at the time of purchase. If you're that desperate to play Vic 3, and happen to have a desktop, upgrading the CPU is not difficult, and older used CPUs can be had for very little money. If you have a laptop, that's rather unfortunate, but lack of upgradability is one of the things you know you're getting into when purchasing a laptop. Rather than being upset that your CPU is not being supported, I'd have been happy a computer actually lasted that long for gaming.

 

[kawamuratc]

It's funny how so many flock into these threads to just say "go buy a new computer" to people who just want to able to play the game. A new computer starts around at least 700 Euro - assuming you want it to run games in some capacity. That is a huge sum for many. Especially now with huge uptick of costs of everyday life like food, fuel and heating. Maybe we are fine with it if it takes 15 minutes to process a year. Why do you bother to waste hours of your life to tell people useless information "go buy a new computer" while they already would if they could. It's just lost sales from developer standpoint. They should be able to re-analyse the costs of implementing AVX as an optional feature vs lost sales and perhaps even the passion of players who just want to able to play the game.

They would have already done this analysis. It’s not that the game “implements” AVX. It’s coded with the assumption that any user that plays the game has a CPU capable of performing vector math with the size of matrices that the game requires.

(At least, that’s how I understand it. I did linear algebra in school for a science, but it sure wasn’t computer science. Correct me if I’m wrong. I will even accept tiny, pedantic corrections with minimal sulking.)

Personally, I’m not telling anyone to go out and buy a new computer. I think that’s rude and unreasonable. It sucks when your hardware isn’t powerful enough for what you want it to do, and it sucks that computer parts are expensive.

But it’s also unreasonable to expect a game to be rewritten to increase the overall number of operations your CPU has to do (that’s what removing AVX fundamentally means). I don’t believe it’s a matter of “the game will run poorly so they don’t allow it”. It sounds like your CPU can perform, at once, less operations than the game requires to function at all.

 

[mightygaz]

But it’s also unreasonable to expect a game to be rewritten to increase the overall number of operations your CPU has to do (that’s what removing AVX fundamentally means). I don’t believe it’s a matter of “the game will run poorly so they don’t allow it”. It sounds like your CPU can perform, at once, less operations than the game requires to function at all.

Then you would be wrong. The Mac version does not require AVX, but has far higher minimum specs. in fact the minimum specs on Mac are the same as the recommended specs on PC. so while they technically could do a version without AVX, everyone would see decreased performance, and the people complaining would be playing slide shows.

 

[kawamuratc]

Then you would be wrong. The Mac version does not require AVX, but has far higher minimum specs. in fact the minimum specs on Mac are the same as the recommended specs on PC. so while they technically could do a version without AVX, everyone would see decreased performance, and the people complaining would be playing slide shows.

Wrong on what?

 

[mightygaz]

Wrong on what?

first -

I don’t believe it’s a matter of “the game will run poorly so they don’t allow it”

I suppose it depends how you look at it. the minimum spec would be the same as a mac. an i5-6500. with the people complaining now, it would be so much worse if that was the minimum on PC. sure, they could launch it with less, but it would be unplayable for many.

second -

It sounds like your CPU can perform, at once, less operations than the game requires to function at all.

also wrong. reasons the same as above.

 

[kawamuratc]

first -

I don’t believe it’s a matter of “the game will run poorly so they don’t allow it”

I suppose it depends how you look at it. the minimum spec would be the same as a mac. an i5-6500. with the people complaining now, it would be so much worse if that was the minimum on PC. sure, they could launch it with less, but it would be unplayable for many.

second -

It sounds like your CPU can perform, at once, less operations than the game requires to function at all.

also wrong. reasons the same as above.

I’m talking about their particular CPU, but I may have gotten them confused with the 2019 mobile power-saved CPU user.