What computer specs do I need to run the CMx2 games well?

[nathan1776]

I currently only have a non-gaming laptop.  I'm considering buying a gaming PC specifically so I can play CMx2 and the Graviteam Tactics games, because neither series will run nicely on my laptop (I tried).  I don't want to buy a larger and more-expensive PC than I need, though, so I'm hoping someone can guide me to understand what I need to get.  I'd like to be able to run both games at their highest(?) detail settings at a good framerate.

[chuckdyke]

38 minutes ago, nathan1776 said:

I don't want to buy a larger and more-expensive PC than I need,

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz   3.60 GHz 16 GB Ram it is an HP and everything runs flawlessly. 

Edited May 15, 2022 by chuckdyke

[Probus]

RAM seems to be pretty important. I think it can cause errors in savegames if you have a large game. 

[Artkin]

Yeah I had an alienware with a i7 6700hq and a gtx 980m.. it was awful, even for cm. It felt half as fast as my i5 2500k + gtx 670 at the time. 

If you can skip a few generations of cpu I think that is your best bet. I havent kept up with laptop chips but anything new seems pretty good. Since everyone is competitively pushing for less watts used on their mobile chips. It's their talking point every year. 

A company called Sager sells laptops with desktop components. On a laptop you cant swap the cpu or the gpu. On these sager notebooks you can. I havent bought one yet but ive heard and seen mixed reviews I think. They gotta be pretty sweet though. The desktop chips will run wayyy faster. Just keep them cool and they will push faster. Floor tiles work pretty good I've found  

Anything 11 generation intel, 5th generation AMD processor will do you good. 

Not too sure on the graphics chips nowadays honestly. 

[Artkin]

A good processor is essential, and having a more powerful videocard with more vram will have you load larger maps. 

also ive seen g skill ddr4 ram kits significantly increase performance in games. Whereas I have never seen pricy OFF THE SHELF ram increase fps. It was always possible for overclockers to do it, but I never wanted to mess around with that.

I want to try a fancy ram kit but they are pricy. Last I checked 6 months ago (and before that 15 years ago) g skill was on top.

Edited May 15, 2022 by Artkin

[Codreanu]

12 hours ago, nathan1776 said:

I currently only have a non-gaming laptop.  I'm considering buying a gaming PC specifically so I can play CMx2 and the Graviteam Tactics games, because neither series will run nicely on my laptop (I tried).  I don't want to buy a larger and more-expensive PC than I need, though, so I'm hoping someone can guide me to understand what I need to get.  I'd like to be able to run both games at their highest(?) detail settings at a good framerate.

Not sure if any system out there will run the games well at max settings simply due to lack of optimization and multithreading support, but if anyone out there has an i9-12900K or similar I'd love to know how well CM runs for them 
My Ryzen 5 3600 and RX 6700XT runs the game at about 20-35 fps with Improved model quality and Best 3D texture quality on the biggest maps and 25-40 on medium sized maps which is okay for a slow game like CM. I noticed very little improvement moving from a 1060 6GB to a 6700XT so putting most of your budget towards a good CPU is what would help the most, I think.

[nathan1776]

Thank you all for your advice!

I'm being offered the following gaming PC by my local wargaming buddy, who is moving to Europe for a new job and isn't going to take his computer with him.  Does it seem like a good purchase?  (Meaning, not far beyond the specs I need, and a good price for the specs and age of the machine.)

• Device name    ASUSDESKTOP2020
• Processor    AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor               3.79 GHz
• Installed RAM    32.0 GB
• System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
• Geforce RTX 2070S 8 Gig

He says he paid $2,000 for it (new) 18 months ago, and is offering it to me for $1,300.

I told him it sounded like overkill but that I'd look into it.

Also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but it'd also be nice to be able to play the Scourge of War games at a higher framerate, and maybe Arma 3 (I played so much OFP in high school that I feel like I've fully explored that game system).

Edited May 15, 2022 by nathan1776

[Schrullenhaft]

That system (Ryzen 9 3900X, GeForce RTX 2070S, 32GB) should be fine for both CM and Scourge of War or Arma 3. $1,300 sounds like a fair price, but don't quote me on the exact prices of used computers. Videocards tend to cost quite a bit now and that's been the case for the last 2+ years (thank you crypto-miners); so that 2070S makes up almost half or more of the price for what your friend is asking for the system.

The CM series is mostly single-threaded (with a few exceptions) and are 32-bit programs, meaning it won't address more than 4GB of RAM directly itself. Systems can and should have more than 4GB of RAM, so the 32GB isn't absolutely overkill, but your games typically won't use it all. I believe the Scourge of War series is similar too (single-threaded, 32-bit programs). Arma 3 I don't know the details on and it may use more cores, though I don't think it would be 64-bit (meaning it could address more than 4GB of RAM). The Ryzen series helped AMD really improve their single-core performance and the 3000 series is just fine. The games typically won't use anything beyond one core, so i that case the 3900X's 12 cores do appear overkill. Future generations of CM games however MIGHT use more than one core (but possibly not for a lot of tasks/functions in the game).

[Probus]

17 hours ago, Codreanu said:

but if anyone out there has an i9-12900K or similar I'd love to know how well CM runs for them 

I have an i7-12700K with a GTX-3070 and it runs at 4K with max settings very smoothly. I couldn't ask for better. Don't think it is using many cores.

I can load up two CM games simultaneously and not notice the difference. Same on an i7-11700K with a GTX-3060. 

I've also tested it on an i9-9900K and it works great on it also.

[Artkin]

That pc for $1300 is a steal lol take it.

For 32gb ram - my arma 3 will max my 16gb kit out right now. CM won't.

On Arma 3 - it's nothing special unless you find your way to a good community like Global Operations, or 15th MEU if you prefer a more hardcore approach.

If you don't find your way into a community - Arma 3 is a dead game.

Edited May 16, 2022 by Artkin

[landser]

4 minutes ago, Artkin said:

That pc for $1300 is a steal lol take it.

 

+1

Good specs and will run anything you throw at it, even Combat Mission!

[Artkin]

For sure, but the one minor inconvenience of running a laptop and playing CM is that CM loves high frequency CPUs. That AMD comes at 3.7Ghz. All of my chips are always ran somewhere around 5Ghz... It makes a substantial difference in fps. You don't buy a laptop intending to overclock it in the first place though. It will be very fast either way.

[landser]

I don't think this is a laptop?

[nathan1776]

It's a big desktop PC, not a laptop.  But does the point about high-frequency CPUs still apply?

Edited May 16, 2022 by nathan1776

[Schrullenhaft]

CM is single-threaded in its execution with a few exceptions in the code that do utilize more than one core (loading scenarios and possibly some other things). So more cores in a CPU doesn't benefit CM a majority of the time. For CM's purposes single-core performance will be the feature that has the biggest impact. Within the same brand and generation of CPUs, clock-speed would be the most noticeable difference, though you can have differences in cache sizes, cache-efficiency and sometimes multi-core arrangements all within the same family that can have significant impact on performance. In general, CM does like higher clock speed CPUs, but a difference of only 100MHz might be almost undetectable in a majority of situations. 

Artkin's 5GHz CPUs require overclocking to reach those frequencies (which can potentially shorten the life of them if higher voltages are used). The 3.7GHz of the 3900X should be fine, in fact a single core on that CPU can boost up to 4.6GHz (without manual overclocking). There are some performance improvements with newer AMD Ryzen and Intel CPUs, but you're going to pay A LOT more for them and the performance difference may only be 20% in some cases - so a mildly noticeable improvement, but possibly not worth the price difference.

[nathan1776]

Thank you for all that information!

[Artkin]

Sorry I thought it was a laptop. Good news, the amd 3000 series chips are really, really fast even by todays ridiculous standards. You can overclock it since it's a desktop. It comes with a desktop motherboard which comes with a bios that probably has an overclocking utility.

 

[Thewood1]

I have two laptops.  One is an MSI GT76 with an i9-10900K and a 2080.  Both are desktop processors.  I also have a Asus Z13 Flow with an i9-12900H with a 150W 3080.  Believe it or not, they both run Barkman's Corner, my typical benchmark, about 45-50 fps at max settings for CM.  Thats only a couple fps faster than my old i7 Surface Book.  CM does not benefit a whole lot from modern architectures.

[Probus]

Like @Thewood1 I have an ASUS laptop, ZM16 with an i7-11800H but only a 3050Ti graphics processor. CM works just fine on it also. 

Unfortunately I don't know the AMD CPUs like I should but like they say, a fast CPU plus a decent amount of memory and you're all set.

[A Canadian Cat]

For CM play my recommendations are:

• to favour higher clocked CPUs over more cores - most game processes use only one core
• adding more than 8Gb of memory is not really necessary unless you have other needs or really want to run other programs at the same time - the game can only use 4Gb
• stick to nVidia graphics cards - they handle Open GL better

[nathan1776]

Thank you all for your help!  I just bought the CM pack on Steam (CMBS, CMSF2, CMCW) and installed CMSF2, put all the settings as low as they could go, and used the turn-based mode, and it's running pretty smoothly.  It doesn't look as pretty as in the Usually Hapless / Jeffrey Paulding videos, but it works well enough (even when running the biggest scenario in the game) to make me think twice about spending $1300 on a gaming PC (although I do want to play Graviteam Tactics, which IIRC is only real-time and was unplayably laggy when I tried installing it before; but I'll try it again, and I don't think it's worth buying a gaming PC just to play that game when I have a lot of other great games that run on my laptop that I haven't gotten to yet, like Command Ops 2).  I'm not sure why I had a bad experience the last time I tried playing one of the CMx2 games (CMRT demo), but I'm thinking it was maybe that I was playing it real-time instead of turn-based.

Here's my laptop's specs:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6600U CPU @ 2.60GHz   2.81 GHz

RAM: 16.0 GB

Edited May 18, 2022 by nathan1776