multi-core support.

[Buzz]

Good to know. Upgrading to 16GB RAM tomorrow. Of course it's a Mac...

More than ready for (work) and my Sicilian my "tin box"

[Doug Williams]

Interesting thread.

Does BFC make any effort to keep track of the hardware their customers are using to run their products? I imagine this would be very useful information for a gaming company.

I build my own PCs, and tend to upgrade every two or three years, so I tend to stay fairly current on hardware. My current system is getting a bit "long in the tooth" (2.8 GHz core 2 quad, 8 gig of ram), so I predict a motherboard/cpu/ram swap possibly before the end of this year.

CMBN runs great on my current system, once the map loads. That is the only minor annoyance I have....long load times, even with an SSD (which didn't seem to make much difference in load times). Once the scenario is loaded and the game starts, everything is very smooth.

[Blazing 88's]

Overkill, I should think. Even very large scenarios run fine on my 4GB RAM laptop. Of course it's a Mac...

Steve

Good to know. Upgrading to 16GB RAM tomorrow. Of course it's a Mac...

More than ready for (work) and my Sicilian my "tin box"

I have Cyberpower 3.60 GHz workstation, with 16GB RAM, 8 core's and GTS 550 Ti card... Of course it's a PC.

I work with Mac's, being a graphic artist, at work. Didn't stop me from buying that beauty of a PC I mentioned above... Just saying. :cool:

[Redwolf]

Interesting thread.

Does BFC make any effort to keep track of the hardware their customers are using to run their products? I imagine this would be very useful information for a gaming company.

I build my own PCs, and tend to upgrade every two or three years, so I tend to stay fairly current on hardware. My current system is getting a bit "long in the tooth" (2.8 GHz core 2 quad, 8 gig of ram), so I predict a motherboard/cpu/ram swap possibly before the end of this year.

CMBN runs great on my current system, once the map loads. That is the only minor annoyance I have....long load times, even with an SSD (which didn't seem to make much difference in load times). Once the scenario is loaded and the game starts, everything is very smooth.

We really need to find a way to communicate better what kind of thing improves CMBN. People keep spending money on things that are of no use.

Apart from the obvious (you need one fast core and it doesn't matter how many cores we have):

• More RAM does not help against the out-of-memory conditions we experience in the windows build of CMx2 (which runs out of virtual address space), and neither does more swapspace.
  
• SSDs do not help loading times in CMx2 since it is CPU bound. The same is true for many other games.

[Battlefront.com]

Does BFC make any effort to keep track of the hardware their customers are using to run their products? I imagine this would be very useful information for a gaming company.

Yes, but it's too difficult to get at in a meaningful way. Self selected data samples are inherently unreliable. And the smaller the data sets are, the more unreliable they become. The only very reliable info we have is roughly how many of our customers are using PCs vs. Macs. That's because the customer must make a choice at purchase time.

Instead we keep an eye on industry wide figures, length of time since major innovations, our own tech support experiences, and discussions here to get a sense of where things are at. That and the tradition that wargamers tend to keep their hardware and software a lot longer than other gaming segments. For example, I am presently using a 3 year old laptop as my primary computer with an OS that is about to become 2 releases out of date. I suspect this is fairly common for our customer base.

I work with Mac's' date=' being a graphic artist, at work. Didn't stop me from buying that beauty of a PC I mentioned above... Just saying. :cool:[/quote']

If I was a hardcore gaming freak, there's NO QUESTION I would have a PC capable of dimming the power in my neighborhood. There's just no other way to go. So I definitely understand, and endorse, your decision to do just that

The reason I mentioned the Mac thing is the MacOS it is easier for us to support than the PC side, what with the never ending flavors of hardware and even OS versions. I don't understand why Microsoft didn't just do what Apple did long ago... have a clear transition period from 32bit to 64bit and then drop 32bit support. In fact, 10.8 (Mountain Lion) is going to drop the older Intel based Mac systems because it's better optimized for 64bit than the older 'puters are capable of.

Then again Microsoft just posted their first quarterly loss (as a public company) EVER. So maybe now isn't the time to ruffle customer feathers

Steve

[Doug Williams]

We really need to find a way to communicate better what kind of thing improves CMBN. People keep spending money on things that are of no use.

If by "people" you mean myself, I beg to differ sir. I bought my SSD because I wanted an SSD, not because I thought it would speed up CMBN load times, although that would have been nice. Shullencraft had already informed me, prior to my purchase, that it probably would not. When I purchased my current MB/CPU/Ram combo, it was because I felt, at that time, it would provide the best bang-for-the-buck, not because I was hoping CMBN would run on all four cores. CMBN wasn't even released yet, and it was replacing my aging Prescott single core system which had a hardware limit of 4 gig. Some of us don't make all our hardware decisions on whether or not it will make CMBN run better. :-P

[Redwolf]

If by "people" you mean myself, I beg to differ sir. I bought my SSD because I wanted an SSD, not because I thought it would speed up CMBN load times, although that would have been nice. Shullencraft had already informed me, prior to my purchase, that it probably would not. When I purchased my current MB/CPU/Ram combo, it was because I felt, at that time, it would provide the best bang-for-the-buck, not because I was hoping CMBN would run on all four cores. CMBN wasn't even released yet, and it was replacing my aging Prescott single core system which had a hardware limit of 4 gig. Some of us don't make all our hardware decisions on whether or not it will make CMBN run better. :-P

I didn't mean to address people in your situation at all. As you say you want a SSD anyway.

That doesn't change the fact that there are people who play a very limited set of games and would benefit from a "this helps, this doesn't" table.

There are also people who build a dedicated secondary gaming PC specially for older games or games with low tech approach (no multithreading, doesn't like Vista, doesn't like 64 bit OSes etc) while they have a main gaming PC.

Money-wise that makes perfect sense because with the exception of the graphics card optimal hardware for CMx2 and other lower tech games like LOTRO is dirt cheap. All you need is a high-clocked dual-core Core2 or some cheap high-clocked Phenom, 4 GB RAM in a 32 bit OS and you are all set. While these lower tech games still like good graphics cards many of these powergamers exchange the graphics card in their main gaming PC often, so they can always give the old clothes to the little brother.

[Doug Williams]

That makes perfect sense. I usually keep two PCs going. The primary one receives all the latest upgrades. The secondary one gets hand-me-downs when the primary is upgraded.

Heck, I used to keep a 386 DOS system built, just for playing really old games, until I discovered DOSBOX.

I didn't mean to address people in your situation at all. As you say you want a SSD anyway.

That doesn't change the fact that there are people who play a very limited set of games and would benefit from a "this helps, this doesn't" table.

There are also people who build a dedicated secondary gaming PC specially for older games or games with low tech approach (no multithreading, doesn't like Vista, doesn't like 64 bit OSes etc) while they have a main gaming PC.

Money-wise that makes perfect sense because with the exception of the graphics card optimal hardware for CMx2 and other lower tech games like LOTRO is dirt cheap. All you need is a high-clocked dual-core Core2 or some cheap high-clocked Phenom, 4 GB RAM in a 32 bit OS and you are all set. While these lower tech games still like good graphics cards many of these powergamers exchange the graphics card in their main gaming PC often, so they can always give the old clothes to the little brother.

[Buzz]

Having a 2nd PC for gaming would be a shrewd path. I have to boot camp into XP now for CMSF pretty much the only reason I need XP on the Mac. Won't need XP after CMSF for MAC is avaialble.

I actually went a different route and purchased a PS3 for sports games (MLB, etc.) for the the nephews and myslef. I can easily run the HDMI cable to the 52" LED-TV for the BIG CM experience as well.

Tips sheets like CMXX Performance Guide are helpful to avoid throwing money at tiny performance improvements.

16GB RAM installed in the did improve the smoothenss of everything on my MAC including the CMBN demo. I did not stopwatch compare but it sure feels like the game loads faster and runs smoother. Should know in a week how it impacts my Sicilian my "tin box" CMFI.

[Redwolf]

Can we stone the heretic?

[Battlefront.com]

One place extra RAM *does* help is when CM is competing with other programs. During testing I found out that leaving Safari open for a few days took up almost every MB of RAM I had. So yeah, CMBN ran like utter crap. If someone isn't aware of what other apps are open and chewing up resources, as many of our CMTouch customers aren't, then problems are bound to happen. More RAM can help by making the problem of RAM usage less likely to happen.

Steve

[SlowMotion]

Nice to hear that Firefox isn't the only web browser that does that - use more and more RAM when you leave it open for a long time.

[Redwolf]

Need to be careful what tabs you leave open. The browsers aren't stupid but a web page that is currently loaded can do a lot of things, contiguously, in Javascript. While it can't modify your system (without a browser bug at least) it can take CPU and RAM. A lot of pages are written by people who simply don't take into account that somebody might leave the tab open.

[Doug Williams]

During testing I found out that leaving Safari open for a few days took up almost every MB of RAM I had. So yeah, CMBN ran like utter crap.

Steve

I had to Google "Safari" to even know what you were talking about.

Since I put my hands on my first computer (the Apple IIe) in 1983 I have wanted to be cool enough to own an Apple product. After all, Ultima 1 was originally programmed on an Apple by Lord British. Ultima 1 - 4 are the Genesis of CRPGs, IMO.

Alas, I failed. I never managed to purchase anything Apple related.

These days, the only people I know who own Apple products are a few girls at work who have i-phones.

[Michael Emrys]

These days, the only people I know who own Apple products are a few girls at work who have i-phones.

Wow, do you live on Grinder Switch?

Michael

[Battlefront.com]

Alas, I failed. I never managed to purchase anything Apple related.

First you have to admit there is a problem, and you have done that

These days, the only people I know who own Apple products are a few girls at work who have i-phones.

You don't get out much, do you? Seriously, Apple products are EVERYWHERE. It's why Apple is earning gobs of cash and Microsoft just posted it's first ever (half Billion) quarterly loss. Last time I checked Apple had $100B in cash. But I digress...

Since you are on this Forum you "know" lots of people who own Macs, at least. I haven't checked to see what percentage of CMBN customers are Mac based, but it's definitely over 10% and under 20%. That tracks pretty closely to where Macs are headed in terms of overall market share. They've been slowly increasing over the last few years, thanks in part to the various i devices.

Steve

[ZPB II]

Apple had a visionary innovator in charge. Microsoft is a bloated, stale monster stumbling in it's own byrocratical inefficiency.

When's the last time Microsoft came up with something truly innovative? They can't, because every idea has to filter through 30 middle managers before turning bland.

I was laughing at their last press conference where they touted "groundbreaking and visionary" stuff that turned out to be, hey guys, let's make tablet versions of existing software and create a cloud service. That's only 2 years behind the competition.

[Vanir Ausf B]

I am far from being a Microsoft fanboy, but before the bashing gets out of hand it should be pointed out that the first ever quarterly loss was due to a one-time write-off on a company they bought in 2007 that didn't work out for them. Not counting the write-off Microsoft made a 5.7 billion profit.

[Battlefront.com]

Yeah, I don't want this to be a MS bashing contest either. But the loss is an indication of greater problems within the company. It hasn't been able to define it's future for some time now. They made that "bad bet" because of those larger problems. When a company previously known for self made innovations starts trying to "innovate through acquisition" there should be a lot of people concerned. Facebook is getting a lot of negative attention for this, at least.

For sure Microsoft is going to be around and strong for a LONG time. I'm not the sort of idiot that predicted Apple's demise every time they had a hiccup. I am the sort of idiot that sold all my Apple stock at 27 points and was happy with a 140% profit instead of the 5500% profit I could have today. Damn

Steve

P.S. I know Apple fans will say Microsoft hasn't innovated anything. Ever. But let's not go there

[Buzz]

"One place extra RAM *does* help is when CM is competing with other programs."

Correct. I often have multiple programs open. I did check Activity Monitor before and after. The 16GB Ram install eliminated all page outs and give me plenty of headroom for the CMBN demo.

If I did hardcore PC gaming I would have a dedicated game PC. Macs are easy to use. CM on Macs lets me play and work = multitask

[Baneman]

It can depend on where and what you work on.

Eg. I work in software development, but primarily database stuff, Cobol, Unix, Sql etc. Nary an Apple product in sight.

But in graphic design for example, it's a whole other world where the converse is true.

[Barleyman]

With regards to ram and multithreading. Multithreading helps, can't be real discussion about it. What's interesting is that the more punishing the game is for CPU, the less likely it appears to have multithreading support. This is generally the AI-intensive number crunching strategy titles as well as simulator LOS stuff. Single threading is most obnoxious if the GUI runs in the same thread, some paradox titles were bad about this.

New CPUs are even re-optimized for single threading performance, which is a bit silly in the 21st century but there you are. WRT PPC, you gotta bear in mind intel has burned enormous amounts of resources to keep x86 compatible cpus competitive. Given the same resources, a brand new RISC cpu would have eaten it alive. Then again, PPC and Itanium would have sunk parent companies for sure if money had been thrown at them like there was no tomorrow. Modern intel/amd CPU runs kind of hardware translation layer between the ancient x86 code and the internal RISC hardware.

For RAM, you get best performance out of the 32bit code only with 64bit windows. A 32bit app running in 64bit windows can get the full 4GB of memory, assuming the box has at least 6GB of RAM.

32bit app running on 32bit windows will get no more than 3GB and that's with an ugly hack. Your video card ram actually deducts from that amount. So if you have 1GB video card, you're looking at about 2.5GB theoretical max.

..

All that being said, don't make us wait six years for graphic, onscreen C2 relationship indication like you did for moveable waypoints.

[Redwolf]

With regards to ram and multithreading. Multithreading helps, can't be real discussion about it. What's interesting is that the more punishing the game is for CPU, the less likely it appears to have multithreading support. This is generally the AI-intensive number crunching strategy titles as well as simulator LOS stuff.

That's what I mentioned earlier. Using multiple CPUs is a lot easier if you have a lot of different CPU intensive things to do and you distribute them. It is much harder to take one single thing you want to do and multithread that, and it can be even harder if you want it to perform well.

Unfortunately this also presents a problem for games that do different things on different CPUs. If you are in a game situation where one of those is the bottleneck you will wait. That is why the minimum framerate sometimes doesn't improve with more cores although the rest of the game does for a certain multithreaded game.

I want BFC to spend their resources elsewhere. If people have a CPU that is lame for single-core performance that was their own choice. I don't want to have to pay in game features for their mistake.

[Doug Williams]

Redwolf, can you give an example or two of what type of CPUs you think would be suboptimal for single core performance?

My current CPU is a 2.8 GHz core two quad (four cores running at 2.8 GHz). Now I have an old single core Prescott system with a 3.4 GHz CPU that I never bothered to install CMBN on. Do you believe CMBN will run better on the older computer? I personally doubt it very much, because the older system has a 32 bit OS with 4 gig of ram, and the newer one has a 64 bit OS with 8 gig of ram. Of course, there is a big difference in the video cards also.

[Redwolf]

Redwolf, can you give an example or two of what type of CPUs you think would be suboptimal for single core performance?

My current CPU is a 2.8 GHz core two quad (four cores running at 2.8 GHz). Now I have an old single core Prescott system with a 3.4 GHz CPU that I never bothered to install CMBN on. Do you believe CMBN will run better on the older computer? I personally doubt it very much, because the older system has a 32 bit OS with 4 gig of ram, and the newer one has a 64 bit OS with 8 gig of ram. Of course, there is a big difference in the video cards also.

Unfortunately the old Netburst architecture sucked for anything but multimedia workloads, including the Prescott. Your Core2 at 2.8 GHz will probably beat it easily even at single core performance.