Forged Alliance Forever

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-12-10T04:43:05+02:00

D4E_Omit wrote:
SpoCk0nd0pe wrote:Regarding GPUs:

When on a budget, stay away from NVidia. Their high end cards deliver amazing gaming performance but only if you stay on the newest high end cards to go with the driver updates.

AMD has much more longlivety because you get the good architecture features even with low end cards. The benchmarks are not very driver dependent because AMD cannot effort to do that.

Regarding CPUs:

You might be better off buying a used part. There hasn't been happening much in the CPU marked over the past 10 years or so regarding desktop performance. I would try to go with 8 mb L3 cache as that is probably the bottleneck for supcom. DDR3 might even be faster then DDR4 because of lower latencies.

No, L3 cache doesnt make much of a difference. The game runs just as well on a G3248 as a 4790k. Neither does RAM make a noticeable difference. The only big factor is the single core speed for the SIM thread of the game.

I'd go for the budget build IceDreamer posted. Like he says you need a semi-decent GPU to play this game maxed out, and an SSD is a must have if you ask me. You could do with 8GB ram instead of 16GB, because you shouldnt really need more than 8GB for a budget build for now, and you can always buy a second stick of ram later.

Little update:
https://hardforum.com/threads/the-rts-t ... 7.1709516/
There could be a myriad of other reasons for this to occur and I cannot verify the results. If memory latency like in these tests does make a difference, it hints to cache misses.

If Intel brings a well clocking quadcore with edram I will definitely buy it and post replay speeds

Statistics: Posted by SpoCk0nd0pe — 10 Dec 2016, 04:43

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-28T21:20:13+02:00

Get a Pentium G4400 or an i3-6100 (depending on the other stuff you want to do) paired with a decent H110 or B150 board and a low-end GPU, like the RX 460 or the 1050. I honestly wouldn't invest in older hardware anymore. Yes, FAF probably needs neither the 2 extra threads of the i3 nor the increased performance of the 460/1050 compared to the older 950 for example, but building up your PC based on the requirements of a 9 year old game won't give you much room to breath if you want to play anything newer on the PC and will make it much, much less future proof.

Statistics: Posted by Yakmann — 28 Oct 2016, 21:20

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-28T12:42:45+02:00

I'm pretty surprised SupCom doesn't really produce cache misses if the simulation grows.

The g3258 is definitely a good choice. There are very few games actually utilizing more then one core for time sensitive tasks. As long as you don't install crapware on your operating system you should be fine.

Some games do produce a lot of cache misses though, in which case an i5 or i7 will be faster. Price/Performance will be worse ofc.

I would definitely wait for Zen. It might become a good budget alternative or just drop the prices. Cpus are too expensive atm due to the lack of competition. Kaby Lake is on the corner as well, there are even rumors that it clocks to 5gh on air. But I would take that with a grain of salt.

I'm personally hoping for the Kaby Lake-x to come with 4 cores, good clock speeds and eDram. Plus the enthusiast pci-e lanes and memory channels.

Statistics: Posted by SpoCk0nd0pe — 28 Oct 2016, 12:42

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-28T11:42:18+02:00

I can speak out of experience. The G3258 is the best budget cpu to get if you only want to play FAF and use your PC for normal surfing and usage. I have upgraded it to an I7-4790 and regarding performance on setons my i7 is not better. Same goes for the daily usage, i dont feel any difference. Also its not true that you cant have anything run in the background while playing faf.
650W PSU, 8GB Ram or SSD is all not really needed for faf. You can have same experience for lower costs. Same goes for the GPU. HD 5850 is already enough for fully maxed out settings (no shadows).
I think without some kind of price limit we cant really give good suitable advices.
I would always recommend to get an SSD and 8GB Ram for new build pc's tho.

D4E_Omit wrote:
The game runs just as well on a G3248 as a 4790k. Neither does RAM make a noticeable difference. The only big factor is the single core speed for the SIM thread of the game.

Statistics: Posted by Hzale — 28 Oct 2016, 11:42

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-27T22:16:01+02:00

SpoCk0nd0pe wrote:
D4E_Omit wrote:No, L3 cache doesnt make much of a difference. The game runs just as well on a G3248 as a 4790k. Neither does RAM make a noticeable difference. The only big factor is the single core speed for the SIM thread of the game.

Interesting! Thanks for the clarification.

Has anyone tested a G2358 vs a Haswell-e or Broadwell-e?

Yeah. Don't get it. Assuming that the only thing on your PC is FA, and that's the only thing you ever use it for, yes it's a great overclocker (Therein lies the value). However, it's only a dual core, it chokes very quickly on non-FA games, as well as in FA when you have like... anything running in the background.

Clock for clock it loses to anything newer. The only reason anyone ever took notice is it's really cheap, and you can OC it for impressive numbers. Not recommended.

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 27 Oct 2016, 22:16

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-27T21:23:32+02:00

I am going to have to concur with Ice Dreamer's recommended build.

It's more balanced and will provide a much better overall experience to include being able to play newer games than FAF.

I also have to concur with having an SSD for a boot drive as it makes the experience so much more pleasant.

To me its a lot like getting broadband internet as you find it difficult going back to dial up afterwards.

Statistics: Posted by Armed_&_Overclocked — 27 Oct 2016, 21:23

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-27T14:15:25+02:00

In many cases yes.

There are some exceptions with the test of course, some people have bugged cpu score but their fa runs at +0 or higher till min 45, others have too good cpu score

Statistics: Posted by TheKoopa — 27 Oct 2016, 14:15

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-27T03:31:41+02:00

Hzale wrote:
Read the posts above.....

You are the one with the lack of reading skills. There is no mention of broadwell/haswell-e performance.

Besides: is the cpu score really representative? Does it correlate with replay length of taxing replays?

Statistics: Posted by SpoCk0nd0pe — 27 Oct 2016, 03:31

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-26T17:37:11+02:00

Read the posts above.....

Statistics: Posted by Hzale — 26 Oct 2016, 17:37

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-26T16:37:25+02:00

D4E_Omit wrote:
No, L3 cache doesnt make much of a difference. The game runs just as well on a G3248 as a 4790k. Neither does RAM make a noticeable difference. The only big factor is the single core speed for the SIM thread of the game.

Interesting! Thanks for the clarification.

Has anyone tested a G2358 vs a Haswell-e or Broadwell-e?

Statistics: Posted by SpoCk0nd0pe — 26 Oct 2016, 16:37

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-26T05:30:49+02:00

TheKoopa wrote:
DO NOT BUY 1 8GB RAM STICK, GET 2 4GB STICKS ALWAYS

Or get 2 :p

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 26 Oct 2016, 05:30

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-26T05:11:43+02:00

I'd like to second the i3-6100. I'm currently running one for a cpu score of 160 and it's pretty damn cheap. But the best thing about it is that being skylake the motherboard you need to get with it is essentially future proofed if you want to upgrade further down the line. And you probably don't even need to buy a dedicated gpu because integrated graphics have moved on quite some. I've not test that much but i can run skyrim on medium with just playable fps using the i3 integrated gpu. I haven't tested it on faf with the integrated gpu but i'd like to bet that you're unlikely to get terrible fps or be the bottleneck in many games with such a chip.

Of course if you are doing any professional level of multi tasking that all goes out the window as you'll probably want 4+ cores and dedicated gpu, but for just general usage and fa it's quite aright.

Statistics: Posted by Mel_Gibson — 26 Oct 2016, 05:11

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-25T15:21:11+02:00

8gb or ram is quite at lot, or at least it was for 2 years ago, i wouldn't recommend 16 for anything rather then large scale rendering or high end and unoptimised gaming (or having 400 gif's loaded at the dsame time)

but yes gently is right, use multiple sticks

Statistics: Posted by biass — 25 Oct 2016, 15:21

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-25T15:16:46+02:00

DO NOT BUY 1 8GB RAM STICK, GET 2 4GB STICKS ALWAYS

Statistics: Posted by TheKoopa — 25 Oct 2016, 15:16

Re: low budget rig for FAF

2016-10-25T14:03:48+02:00

SpoCk0nd0pe wrote:
Regarding GPUs:

When on a budget, stay away from NVidia. Their high end cards deliver amazing gaming performance but only if you stay on the newest high end cards to go with the driver updates.

AMD has much more longlivety because you get the good architecture features even with low end cards. The benchmarks are not very driver dependent because AMD cannot effort to do that.

Regarding CPUs:

You might be better off buying a used part. There hasn't been happening much in the CPU marked over the past 10 years or so regarding desktop performance. I would try to go with 8 mb L3 cache as that is probably the bottleneck for supcom. DDR3 might even be faster then DDR4 because of lower latencies.

No, L3 cache doesnt make much of a difference. The game runs just as well on a G3248 as a 4790k. Neither does RAM make a noticeable difference. The only big factor is the single core speed for the SIM thread of the game.

I'd go for the budget build IceDreamer posted. Like he says you need a semi-decent GPU to play this game maxed out, and an SSD is a must have if you ask me. You could do with 8GB ram instead of 16GB, because you shouldnt really need more than 8GB for a budget build for now, and you can always buy a second stick of ram later.

Statistics: Posted by D4E_Omit — 25 Oct 2016, 14:03