SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was released 20 years ago

Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by izacus on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @09:45AM (#36044206)

Because that's not how games work - they don't run "at minimum capabilities" and they run their game loop constantly, rendering graphics. This means that it will almost certanly saturate at least M1s GPU and probably at least one of P cores. At that stage, even the M1 starts drawing a lot of power which needs disspiation.

Also Civ 6s target GPU is much faster than any of the M1s (which, despite the marketing, are still mobile CPU/GPU SoCs, not high clocked 100W+ TDP desktop CPUs with a separate 100W+ TDP GPU) so you won't see it use less than maximum what GPU (and CPU) can handle.

Don't mix performance profiles of games with performance profiles of bursty desktop browser software running Electron.

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Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by harha on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @10:22AM (#36044756)

Curious to learn more here: everyone was praising the M1 so much, but here’s a case that based on this wouldn’t fit the bill.

also how high do you think the penalty for running an intel binary is?

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Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by aeonik on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @12:16PM (#36046446)

Not the GP, but Civ is CPU bottlenecked. I don't know how their code is written under the hood, but games slow down as you get farther in the game. If you play too many turns the game can take minutes to process a single turn.

I can saturate all my 16 cores, on my workstation, the only result is that the turns are processed faster. When you play multiplayer, everyone is going to be pinned to the slowest person in the lobby.

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Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by badpun on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @12:09PM (#36046357)

> Because that's not how games work - they don't run "at minimum capabilities" and they run their game loop constantly,

Unless you VSync?

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Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by afavour on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @12:17PM (#36046452)

> they run their game loop constantly, rendering graphics

Eh? Civ 6 is a turn-based game with really very little in the way of animation. It's not a first person shooter rendering whole screens at 30fps.

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Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by mrguyorama on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @02:15PM (#36048497)

Civ 6 graphics rendering is just really really poorly optimized. It's comparable to Flight Simulator in how hard it pushes my system.

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Re:SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was rele... by bleep_bloop on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @12:52PM (#36047051)

I've played plenty of games on M1 that are graphically more impressive and have higher base requirements than Civ 6.

Seems that others have pointed out that Civ is more CPU bound than GPU so I don't know if that's something that could be optimised without completely changing the mechanics of the game or if Civ is just an unoptimised beast but then again the M1 is way above the minimum required spec for Civ 6 so i don't think it's some unfeasible concept.

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