The International Simutrans Forum

Simutrans Extended => Simutrans-Extended gameplay discussion => Topic started by: AP on December 03, 2016, 02:46:25 PM

Title: Min system requirements?
Post by: AP on December 03, 2016, 02:46:25 PM
What are the minimum system requirements to run Expermental, well - a decent sized map, server game, etc. ?

Am aware it's computationally more demanding than standard, and as the time has come to upgrade my PC, thought I should make sure I'm covered for Simutrans for the future. 

Not sure if it's more demanding on CPU or RAM, these days...

Title: Re: Min system requirements?
Post by: jamespetts on December 03, 2016, 04:11:44 PM
Simutrans (both Experimental and Standard) still runs with code designed for 32-bit use (even when compiled into a 64-bit executable), so cannot make use of more than 4Gb of RAM. I have never seen a game, even a huge one, run out of memory yet.

As far as the CPU is concerned, I run an i7950 from 2010 overclocked to a little over 4Ghz, and that runs large maps fine. I have recently been working on improving the multi-threading support, so having more cores would be a useful thing.

Simutrans-Experimental is definitely more demanding on CPU power (and memory bandwidth) than memory quantity, however.

As to the exact minimum specifications, I have not done the sort of testing necessary to establish that: it depends very much on the size and complexity of the game world.
Title: Re: Min system requirements?
Post by: AP on December 03, 2016, 04:15:48 PM
Thanks James.
Title: Re: Min system requirements?
Post by: zook2 on December 13, 2016, 09:16:10 AM
I ran a long-time game, max. map size with thousands of vehicles on an old single-core 1.8 Ghz laptop, 2 GB RAM, with no performance problems.
Title: Re: Min system requirements?
Post by: jamespetts on December 13, 2016, 11:06:34 AM
Thank you very much for that feedback: that is most helpful. I should note that the maximum map size has increased since some time ago, so this may well no longer be the maximum map size, but it is useful to know that it performs acceptably.

I should be interested in others' experiences of performance with the latest executables so that I can give others an idea of system requirements.