Would Stellaris run faster on new setup?

[uleslaw]

I have a technical question, hope someone could help me make a decision regarding buying new PC.

I currently play Stellaris on Lenovo laptop, with i7 4700QM, 8 GB RAM, GeForce GT 755M. The game runs nicely (medium graphics settings, medium galaxy with avarage number of AIs) at the begining, but noticably slow down after 100-150 years or so. So I am thinikg about buying a desktop PC (just to play Stellaris and other PDS games and CIV6) with i5 7600k (I hope for around 5GHz after OC), 16 GB RAM and GeForce 1060, but the question is: would I really notice a difference in performance? As far as I know, Stellaris (like other PDS games) is mostly "CPU game", but I wonder wether the difference between I7 4700QM and i5 7600k in this game would justify spending money.

I hope this is a proper forum for this thread.

 

[Aed]

I'm not sure the recieved wisdom of the cpu being the bottleneck for PDX games is based on much evidence to be honest. It just tends to be the go to excuse for games when upgrading to new graphics cards doesn't give the expected boost in performance. Mostly i think its just a creaky old engine thats the problem.

That said a 5 GHz processor wouldn't exactly be a bad thing to have either.

 

[shimiku]

but the problem here is the engine being a 32bit have it limits

 

[Cannes]

You will definitely notice a big improvement, but maybe not proportionally as big as you might expect, given your upgrade.

 

[The Founder]

Memorywise it is a x32 application. So if you got more then 4 GiB, that is how good it will get on that front.
CPU wise, a single strong core is always better for gaming then lot's of weak cores. There are hard limits to how much you can multithread. And for games it is usually very low, unless designed from the ground up (down to game principles).
GPU wise: Should not realy be a big issue here. Indeed most of the bottlenecks appear to be CPU side. Running it on a GTX 765M personally

I'm not sure the recieved wisdom of the cpu being the bottleneck for PDX games is based on much evidence to be honest. It just tends to be the go to excuse for games when upgrading to new graphics cards doesn't give the expected boost in performance. Mostly i think its just a creaky old engine thats the problem.

They got a simple approach to balance the game against that "Creaky Old Engine": Limit the Galaxy size and AI amount.

If you mean "not enough Multithreading", I would have a rant for you on how Multithreading is not the magic bullet CPU designers made it up to be. Especially for Computergames.

 

[uleslaw]

thanks guys, i think i am going to wait a bit longer, and decide after 1.5 patch is released.

 

[Aed]

They got a simple approach to balance the game against that "Creaky Old Engine": Limit the Galaxy size and AI amount.

If you mean "not enough Multithreading", I would have a rant for you on how Multithreading is not the magic bullet CPU designers made it up to be. Especially for Computergames.

What I meant by 'creaky old engine' was that the it just doesn't seem to be up to what they are asking it to do, remember the base of this engine is 10 years old now. No game should be suffering the kind of lag Stellaris does towards the late game.

Large improvements to CPU speeds are not going to happen anytime soon, so a game like Stellaris either needs an engine built from
The ground up to be very clever in it's management of processor resources, or scale back on its ambitions.

 

[DriveBy]

I've noticed very substantial performance improvement in EU4 after overclocking my old i5 from 3.4 to 4.5 GHz. Processing were much more fluent and there were less slowdowns.

So changing laptop CPU for overclocked desktop CPU should provide quite noticable performance increase.

 

[DredMorte]

I have a technical question, hope someone could help me make a decision regarding buying new PC.

I currently play Stellaris on Lenovo laptop, with i7 4700QM, 8 GB RAM, GeForce GT 755M. The game runs nicely (medium graphics settings, medium galaxy with avarage number of AIs) at the begining, but noticably slow down after 100-150 years or so. So I am thinikg about buying a desktop PC (just to play Stellaris and other PDS games and CIV6) with i5 7600k (I hope for around 5GHz after OC), 16 GB RAM and GeForce 1060, but the question is: would I really notice a difference in performance? As far as I know, Stellaris (like other PDS games) is mostly "CPU game", but I wonder wether the difference between I7 4700QM and i5 7600k in this game would justify spending money.

I hope this is a proper forum for this thread.

Hello. My desktop CPU is an i5 4670K and GPU is a Geforce 970GT. I too suffer from terrible slowdown, starting somewhere around year 2300.

I'm making a "prototype" small mod with the goal of playing the game with a smaller amount of planets and mining stations, but greater amount produced by each. I am hopeful to see substantial performance increases. I'm going to test it today when I come to work. If you're intrested, I can share it with steamworks or something.

 

[draxil]

Hello. My desktop CPU is an i5 4670K and GPU is a Geforce 970GT. I too suffer from terrible slowdown, starting somewhere around year 2300.

And I have an identical setup and I've never really had any lag in this game, aside from when I had too much running in the background. I do think RAM is also a factor, although I only have 8G. I do run the linux version though so that may also be a factor.

 

[Dauth]

Going from the laptop which can in theory run at 3.4 GHz (for one core) but under load for a long time I would expect it to clock back to 2.4 GHz (all cores running). To a desktop capable of 5GHz across all cores will make a difference, that is based on the assumption that you'll properly cool the OC'd CPU.

The people complaining about 32bit engine architecture aren't providing any useful information, there are enough threads pointing it out that I'm not going to waste my time repeating it.

Having an engine with code from 10 years ago is not necessarily a bad thing. The game is built using a programming language that is 30 years old. I regularly use FORTRAN for work and some of that is pushing 60. This means that people have had a lot of time to optimise it. If you want to see the difference that optimising can make to a system, check out the graphics difference between a d1 game for the XBOX and one that came out for the original XBOX a month before the release of the XBOX 360.

 

[DredMorte]

And I have an identical setup and I've never really had any lag in this game, aside from when I had too much running in the background. I do think RAM is also a factor, although I only have 8G. I do run the linux version though so that may also be a factor.

Just to avoid missunderstanding, I use the word lag like "delay". There are moments when the action seems to stop and and only resumes later. That's quite rare. When I say slow, I mean that in the early game a month might take something like 4 seconds, but later 20 seconds. Not exact numbers but the game certainly becomes unbearly boring. If you do not experience that, I'm very curious.

 

[uleslaw]

Hello. My desktop CPU is an i5 4670K and GPU is a Geforce 970GT. I too suffer from terrible slowdown, starting somewhere around year 2300.

I'm making a "prototype" small mod with the goal of playing the game with a smaller amount of planets and mining stations, but greater amount produced by each. I am hopeful to see substantial performance increases. I'm going to test it today when I come to work. If you're intrested, I can share it with steamworks or something.

Thanks, I can defenitly try your mod. You can send me a PM with a link to the mod (or post it here - I do not think it would be against forum rules)

 

[Diezy]

My i5-4460 @ 3.20 ghz, with 8 GB RAM and 64-bit is powerful enough! In super late-game on the 1000 star galaxy, it has a little trouble fast-forwarding.

With the stats you have should handle the Stellaris number-crunching really well

As for my opinion on low performance culprits, I believe it's the fleets. Unbidden, Awakened Empires and my empire's snowballing slow it down visibly. It would check out too, as every individual ship has plenty of things going on. 2000+ ships in the entire galaxy are certainly a huge burden. Especially with many wars happening at once.
EDIT: Also turrets and strike craft are counted individually, as well as certain missiles. It is very script-heavy there!