Arcania - Updated System Requirements?

[Grandor Dragon]

Don't forget that we are talking about Jowood here. Their QA can't be more notorious.

 

[DArtagnan]

Don't forget that we are talking about Jowood here. Their QA can't be more notorious.

I always assumed their tech department consisted of fantasy personas

 

[KnightPT]

Having high CPU requirements and low GPu requirements is realy odd in games nowadays.


The game engine could be heavy on the CPU if it has loads of physics effects and extremely high AI calculations but other than that i dont see why you realy need more than 2 Cores-CPU for this type of game. Perhaps the "streaming" of information to the GPU rendering is realy heavy on the CPU calcs?

The only game of this type I remember was realy heavy on the CPU was oblivion where a lot of NPCs were walking around and mods made them more "active".


Even though i have no problems with that requirement as i'm lucky to have a quad, i'm realy curious to see what kind of engine realy needs more than 2 cores to work.

 

[tolknaz]

I don't give a fuck about the street cred of the guy who reported this. Unless jowood changes the official specs on the website i refuse to believe such nonsense. More than half of the new games that come out have yet to support threading properly (regardless of the platform by the way) and you're saying that the game needs a 2,6 ghz quadcore minimum?

 

[GothicGothicness]

That's not really how it works at all…if you want to support 3 cores, you program your software to use at least 3 threads. The OS's kernel chooses how to schedule those threads onto the CPUs (cores). If you have 3 threads all needing as much CPU time as they can get, and you happen to have 3 cores, then chances are 1 thread will just run on each core. On the other hand, if you have 2 cores, then (barring any special priority or affinity settings), your 3 threads will end up getting scheduled such that each thread gets to use 1 of your 2 cores, 2/3rds of the time.

The 3 cores on the Xbox 360 are so slow compared to any modern PC CPU that 2/3rds of a PC core would be many times faster than an entire Xbox 360 core.

That's how a multi-threaded program COULD work. For games you often want to have more control than that. If you have 3 really CPU heavy threads which are constanly working, you're going to want each of them to run dedicated to a core. Thread swapping doesn't come for free, especially not on CPU-heavy realtime applications. I imagine that's exactly what happens when you run it on a dual core. For example you throw a fire ball which has lots of physics and graphics computations, the CPU keeps switching between the threads for graphics and physics, while the other one is running AI, causing slow downs.

Could they have optimized it more for PC and avoided these slowdowns, yes probably, but it would probably have taken a lot of time too.

To compare PC specs and consoles straight off is not a good idea. The consoles have different arhitecture and a power PC core doesn't even have the same instruction sets as a x86 one they are also dedicated only for gaming no "Windows 7' running in the background. You can see this for emulation the most powerful PC's are barely able to run PS2 games in decent FPS's.

 

[Grandor Dragon]

I don't give a fuck about the street cred of the guy who reported this. Unless jowood changes the official specs on the website i refuse to believe such nonsense.

Yeah, but Desslock's street cred is MEGA-INSANELY HIGH I just wonder why he should lie about this? If he says JoWood told him they tested the game on 150 configurations, I guess that's what they did.

 

[DArtagnan]

I trust Desslock's word, but definitely not his technical competence.

That said, I really have no clue - it just seems VERY odd.

 

[Arkose]

What's really strange about this is that almost every other recent game has needed a good GPU far more than the CPU, with many still citing the now-humble Pentium 4 as the minimum, and the exceptions (e.g. Supreme Commander and Red Faction: Guerilla) were understandably CPU-hungry because of the huge number of calculations going on in the background. It also makes me wonder how good Arcania's performance will actually be on a quad core if a dual core is so greatly overwhelmed.

The consoles have different arhitecture … they are also dedicated only for gaming no "Windows 7' running in the background. You can see this for emulation the most powerful PC's are barely able to run PS2 games in decent FPS's.

The performance overhead isn't due to Windows, it's because the emulator has to emulate all of the console's hardware (including its CPU) and do so accurately enough for at least some games to run correctly. Unfortunately this is very resource intensive, which is why a high-end CPU is needed to achieve playable performance.

 

[BearishSun]

Having high CPU requirements and low GPu requirements is realy odd in games nowadays.


The game engine could be heavy on the CPU if it has loads of physics effects and extremely high AI calculations but other than that i dont see why you realy need more than 2 Cores-CPU for this type of game. Perhaps the "streaming" of information to the GPU rendering is realy heavy on the CPU calcs?

The only game of this type I remember was realy heavy on the CPU was oblivion where a lot of NPCs were walking around and mods made them more "active".


Even though i have no problems with that requirement as i'm lucky to have a quad, i'm realy curious to see what kind of engine realy needs more than 2 cores to work.

Graphics actually still take most of CPU time. Each object rendered requires a so-called draw call that takes a large toll on the CPU. Advanced shaders require multiple draw-calls per object per frame. Top notch CPU can maybe handle 1500-2000 draw-calls per core at 50fps. With DX9 you have to render all objects from a single thread. So thats 1 core running 100% if they have a lot of objects to draw(which is often the case in open-world games). This is why multiple-cores were not as important as raw power when it comes to games.
AI+Gameplay can run on another thread, but they generally don't take up large amount of CPU.
Physics can also run on another thread, and unless they're using something special they don't need too much CPU either.
Loading & decompression generally needs its own thread. This is also very important with open worlds.
Various fluff like cloth or hair simulation can go on yet another thread.

So if it was me I'd split it:
1. thread - Graphics rendering
2. thread - AI, gameplay, Physics, fluff
3. thread - Loading & decompression

 

[DArtagnan]

To compare PC specs and consoles straight off is not a good idea. The consoles have different arhitecture and a power PC core doesn't even have the same instruction sets as a x86 one they are also dedicated only for gaming no "Windows 7' running in the background. You can see this for emulation the most powerful PC's are barely able to run PS2 games in decent FPS's.

Emulating hardware through software is generally hard work

Windows 7 has little or nothing to do with slow emulation.

Modern PC hardware is FAR more powerful than an Xbox 360 or a PS3. The primary reason console games run well, is because the developers can develop for A SINGLE specific setup with a SINGLE level of detail. They have direct access to what the end-user will be playing, so they can finetune it without any kind of hassle, and they don't need to worry about scaling anything.

Developing for the ridiculous range of OS/hardware combinations on the PC is a complete nightmare in comparison, and often an afterthought - as in a bad port.

 

[BearishSun]

That's how a multi-threaded program COULD work. For games you often want to have more control than that. If you have 3 really CPU heavy threads which are constanly working, you're going to want each of them to run dedicated to a core. Thread swapping doesn't come for free, especially not on CPU-heavy realtime applications. I imagine that's exactly what happens when you run it on a dual core. For example you throw a fire ball which has lots of physics and graphics computations, the CPU keeps switching between the threads for graphics and physics, while the other one is running AI, causing slow downs.

Could they have optimized it more for PC and avoided these slowdowns, yes probably, but it would probably have taken a lot of time too.

To compare PC specs and consoles straight off is not a good idea. The consoles have different arhitecture and a power PC core doesn't even have the same instruction sets as a x86 one they are also dedicated only for gaming no "Windows 7' running in the background. You can see this for emulation the most powerful PC's are barely able to run PS2 games in decent FPS's.

Actually thread switching is pretty cheap and happens all the time. It's a problem if thread gets switched between different cores, but that happens really rarely as todays CPUs and OSes are pretty smart about this.

As a programmer you really can't even tell the thread on which core to run. Only thing you can do is set a core affinity, but the OS only takes that as a suggestion and can override it any time.

So in short, both CPU and OSes are pretty smart about organizing their threads. As a programmer you just gotta worry that there are multiple threads, and not on which cores they run.

And emulation is slow only because there isn't a good enough programmer and knowledge to make it better. Running a PS2 game on windows 7 with massive FPS is entirely possible. The main problem is that you would have to reprogram you graphics card drivers if you wanted maximum performance. And programming drivers is extremely difficult without the right documentation (which is of course a secret). And even without that it would be possible if someone with serious skill took his time.

 

[guenthar]

I won't have any problems with Arcania even if the specs were higher then those but I am expecting maybe those are recommended specs rather then minimum requirements and there was a communication error somewhere.

PS. I don't have any problems with the PS2 games I have emulated on my computer and they run at very good speed and I just have a Phenom II 920.

 

[BillSeurer]

Same - the fact they sent three guys round to check seems to suggest the performance came as a surprise to them.

That it was a surprise to them isn't a surprise to me. I've seen this sort of thing before.

Way back when my company was evaluating several different sets of software. It boiled down to two of them which I'll call A and B. A was much more elegant and powerful than B *but* required cutting edge hardware (which at the time was REALLY expensive) to run at all. I tried to explain this to the guys who were developing A but they just kept saying "It works fine for us." You see, *they* all had the cutting edge stuff and were blind that most (like 99% of everyone) didn't.

And so B won (and not just with us) and A has completely vanished. Sigh.

 

[kalniel]

Strange. All the development work I've been involved in has always used quite out of date computers. From what I remember of most studios game development it's the same there.

 

[Gokyabgu]

I think it's because the engine was developed according to Xbox 360 specs. Since X360 has 3 core processor and a video card that is between 7000 and 8000. But it's really a joke, I bought my computer 1 year ago (Core2duo 2,92 ghz) and not a single game has been brought it to its knees so far.

Seems like they developed the game for the Xbox 360 and then develop an emulation program for PC. And these are the emulator's specs.

Anyway, no matter what I can't resist and I am going to buy the game eventually. (I know myself) A Gothic game without PB or not, is still a Gothic game.

 

[Desslock]

I've had a further exchange with Dreamcatcher and JoWood, and believe a representative may directly address this matter in this thread to address any uncertainty.

Regards,
Desslock

 

[Greymane]

Thanks Desslock, many of us here are quite interested in this game, and appreciate your time.

 

[Stingray]

As far as games that require a lot more CPU power than GPU...probably the premier examples are WoW and SC2 which are now the two biggest PC games, I believe. Wouldn't think that the huge need for CPU from those two games would really carry over that much to a single-player RPG like Arcania, though.

 

[fragonard]

On the other hand, there's this from the RPG Codex forums:


I have the beta installed on my computer (I'm a localization tester).

It runs perfectly on 1920x1200, with everything maxed out. My specs: Gigabyte EP35-DS3R, 3 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, ATI 4870 512M.

 

[toltec7]

this is getting interesting...
my rig (3 years old) is just about below all of those specs. At the time I was running Crysis on max without a hickup so this is some seriously shitty news.

hoping the latest poster is on to something though.