Want to buy a CPU for games like ONI, ANNO, Rimwold etc. Can you help me pick between the two?

[Ellilea]

Hey. So it's finally time. I am getting ready to upgrade my PC and I might be able to play ONI all the way to space without having 15 FPS at 8 dupe colony :P

But I'm a little torn when it comes to CPU. I'm thinking either AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Ryzen 7 3700x. On the benchmarks the difference isn't that huge, but I failed to find a "ONI but you have a lot of dupes and 2039479756 pipes" benchmark. Or a "ANNO 1800 but you have all sectors opened and 298436932 trade routes active" one.

My current setup can run ONI at 60fps too.

For the first few cycles.

So I come here for the wisdom of the crowd, if you guys have some actual data/experience with these CPUs. How much difference would the better one make? Is it worth it? Is there some specific RAM memory/motherboard I should be looking at or are the general recommendations fine?

Thank you!
 

 

[Nedix]

As a rule of thumb I would go with the more powerful one for a simple reason - in time I WILL need more computing power. I understand that this may mean a more expensive purchase but depending how often you do upgrades this can actually save you some money (and headaches and frustrations).

[SkunkMaster]

no need to get the x thou, 3700 and 3700x is the same essentially.. 

unless you ofc don't wanna touch any cpu settings, then x is better obviously.. but only then..

[Angpaur]

For ONI you need a RAM with low latency. Even if you buy the most powerful CPU then any of its cores won't be utilized at 100% because RAM is too slow. So I guess you can save money on CPU and buy faster RAM and better motherboard that both can achieve low timing settings for RAM.

[Gurgel]

Both are good CPUs. I have the 3700x, but only because the price that part of my new gaming PC did not matter much. For ONI, the 3700x (and very likely the 3600 as well) has the smoother execution that is observable with AMD CPUs in contrast to Intel. That means with the 3700x, ONI will run smoothly with 25 FPS or so, while the Intel users seem to want at least 50 FPS for smooth execution. (The reason is that AMD has superior multitasking and a better memory interface, once you look beyond the raw, averaged numbers.)

My advice is that if money is a factor, get the 3600 and invest the rest into more/better RAM and/or a larger or faster NVME SSD. Due to Intel's past unwillingness or inability to deliver desktop CPUs with more than 4 cores, it will take a while for games to even really use 6 CPUs. 

[Ellilea]

:O

I had no idea there's a difference between AMD FPS and Intel FPS. What the heck Now I feel even dumber.

Do you think Intel's Comet Lake might be a proper competition to Ryzen's? Or will they be the same-old same-old?

I've heard Intel is better with single-threaded games but I've no idea if it's true or not. No clue whether it's worth to wait for those benchmarks or if they stand no chance to dethrone Ryzens for now.

The only releases that interest me are in the next, say, 2 months, so Ryzen 4000 coming out in October (if even) is way too long to wait for.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Angpaur said:

For ONI you need a RAM with low latency. Even if you buy the most powerful CPU then any of its cores won't be utilized at 100% because RAM is too slow. So I guess you can save money on CPU and buy faster RAM and better motherboard that both can achieve low timing settings for RAM.

That's not true.  The time the CPU spends waiting for ram is counted as busy, not idle.  In other words, the CPU will show 100% load even if it is spending half of that time waiting on the RAM.  You just get lower performance.

[Angpaur]

If time waiting for memory is actually included in CPU load % then this would be very misleading - this was my first thought. So I read some more about it and this seems to be indeed true. But if my CPU never goes above 80% on any core when playing ONI, then seems like problem with memory is even worse. Not only CPU is not working at full capacity, but also its performance can be even more hindered by waiting for memory. This can mean that there wont be much gain in investing in faster CPU if it wont be working at full potential.

 

Why I think memory latency is important, this post explains:

It provides a good case for that hypothesis. Seems like lower latency can give big performance improvements.

[SamLogan]

4 hours ago, Angpaur said:

For ONI you need a RAM with low latency. Even if you buy the most powerful CPU then any of its cores won't be utilized at 100% because RAM is too slow. So I guess you can save money on CPU and buy faster RAM and better motherboard that both can achieve low timing settings for RAM.

or you buy a CPU which have a good mono core performance like the Intel i9.

[Ellilea]

So uh, better buy worse CPU and faster RAM? That's the bottleneck for ONI?

[daffodilistic]

My opinion is to get the Ryzen 5 3600 and put the few extra dollars for an SSD, lower latency RAM or a better graphics card, as I assume you won't be playing more "intensive" games, based on your games list.

I'm actually playing ONI on a rather old PC from 2014 (Intel Core i7 3770, 512GB SSD, 16 GB RAM and NVIDIA GTX 970). Load times for my 6 dupe game on cycle 957 is 27 seconds. You can watch how a similar setup performs on YouTube - search for a video titled "This is a GAMING PC!?!?!" by Linus Tech Tips, though it's more of a guided video on how a "sleeper" PC can be upgraded to a decent gaming one. Nevertheless, its still a decent experience.

Hope this helps.

[SharraShimada]

2 hours ago, Ellilea said:

So uh, better buy worse CPU and faster RAM? That's the bottleneck for ONI?

Its the CPU, but the game wont gain more performance from more cores. So 6 cores would be the same as 8, because the game wont scale well over more cores, if i´m not mistaken here. If you on a fixed budget, i would go for the 6-core, invest in faster (and/or more) RAM (at least 16GB). 6 Cores are really enough for today. And you can upgrade in 1 or 2 years to a (maybe used) bigger AM4 Ryzen without changing the mainboard. 

[r4tch3t]

Most physics based games end up being heavily single thread bound.  This is due to having to have the results from the previous calculation before doing the next one so multi threading isn't very easy to achieve.

Knowing this I would go for the highest clock speed over anything else.  AMD systems love faster RAM whereas Intel systems have better memory caching and can achieve the same speeds with lower memory bandwidth. Intel still has the edge in single threaded performance, but that comes at a price premium. Comet lake will definitely be able to out perform AMD with ONI, but it will come at a decent extra cost and the difference wont be massive.

 

Personally I'd go for the 3700x as games are starting to become more and more threaded. And it should last a while.  'm on a 4 core 3570K overclocked to 4.4GHz and late game I'm at 20fps

[GrindThisGame]

I'm using a Ryzen 9 3950x in my 100 dupe base. I still only get about 15-20 fps on full speed. Only 4 of my 16 cores are used and the others sit almost idle. Using 32Gb of fast ram so no bottleneck there. So I would suggest a cpu with 4+ cores with a high clock. It runs faster than my old 2012 cpu though.

[Oni Noob]

I think just buy a pc with a gtx 1660 ti video card and atleast i5 processor. I think most of the pc in the market is already 16 gb in memory so your good on that

[angrybovine]

Using a 6-core i5-9600KF with a modest overclock and 16GB.  Video is a Radeon RX 580 with 8GB. ONI runs great with OC or stock speeds while playing at 4K res.  The Radeon is fine but their drivers sorta suck.  I prefer Nvidia but the RX 580 was priced pretty low when I got it.

[thewreckedangle]

On 5/7/2020 at 12:43 AM, daffodilistic said:

'm actually playing ONI on a rather old PC

yo, here's me:

    CPU Brand:  Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4460  CPU @ 3.20GHz

    Driver:  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti   

16GB RAM, 1TB HDD

i have played like 7k hours.. never built a rocket or any complex machines, normally 12 dupes. lag not usually a problem (except when eg.watching netflix et.al on second screen at same time as playing ONI) i usually get to cycle 1.5k-2k before i restart (i LOVE the beginning 250~cycles of the game)

want to upgrade PC, no idea what any of it means. also keep accidentally buying more snakes >_<

[Blodo]

I recently upgraded from a Core i5 to a Ryzen 3700X coupled with RAM specifically sold as tuned for Ryzen and the performance difference in ONI has been very noticable. On the i5 around cycle 1000 the game would start chugging when played on very fast speed, this is now completely gone even with very large bases and unoptimised dupe pathing (no locking doors and locking out areas for dupes so they run around the entirety of the base). I've not reached a point yet where the game will start chugging and my longest running map is up to cycle 1500 or so with 24 dupes and all tech unlocked and utilised, incl. rockets.

I think that dupe pathing has probably the highest impact on the game performance, so the more dupes and the longer the paths, the slower the game.

[storm6436]

On 5/7/2020 at 8:18 PM, GrindThisGame said:

I'm using a Ryzen 9 3950x in my 100 dupe base. I still only get about 15-20 fps on full speed. Only 4 of my 16 cores are used and the others sit almost idle. Using 32Gb of fast ram so no bottleneck there. So I would suggest a cpu with 4+ cores with a high clock. It runs faster than my old 2012 cpu though.

 This largely fits with my experience.  I went from a liquid cooled  FX-9590 with 32 GB of relatively low latency (for the era) RAM and a SATA drive just a notch below the Cheetah 15Ks in terms of performance to a liguid cooled 3950x with 32 GB of CL14 PC3600 RAM + a Samsung NVMe SSD geared for performance....

 You *will* end up at 15-20 fps again, it's just a matter how how many cycles it takes to get there.  Basically, I went from taking 100-200 cycles (largely dependent on how aggressive I was in expansion) and more or less tripled the time before things lurched to a crawl.  Maybe a Threadripper running all four channels with low latency might last longer, but I wasn't willing to double the price of my build to find out.  I'd expect we won't see more serious ONI performance gains until folks shift to DDR5 next year, depending on the the clock to latency ratios that show up with DDR5.  I haven't looked, so I don't know,  Faster clocks don't necessarily mean better performance, unfortunately.

Edit to add:

Keep in mind, by the lurch, I mean the drop from 60 fps to 20.  It's still perfectly playable at that framerate.  My old CPU would get me to around cycle 800-900 before I got terribly annoyed by the frame stutters, etc.  I expect the new one will last me quite a bit beyond that, I just haven't gotten that far since I got the new box due to real life concerns. 

For folks who might want my GPU info for reference, I went from a R9 NANO to the 5700XT, both Asus cards.

On 5/9/2020 at 11:22 AM, thewreckedangle said:

yo, here's me:

    CPU Brand:  Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4460  CPU @ 3.20GHz

    Driver:  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti   

16GB RAM, 1TB HDD

i have played like 7k hours.. never built a rocket or any complex machines, normally 12 dupes. lag not usually a problem (except when eg.watching netflix et.al on second screen at same time as playing ONI) i usually get to cycle 1.5k-2k before i restart (i LOVE the beginning 250~cycles of the game)

want to upgrade PC, no idea what any of it means. also keep accidentally buying more snakes >_<

Yeah, the first 250ish cycles is largely my favorite as well... finding out where all the geysers are, discovering the degree the RNG has screwed me for output volume, and figuring out what structures to put where make for a fair amount of fun in its own right. 

As far as the overall arc goes, I've gotten to the point of having researched rockets.  I've even starting building one, but never got to launching it.  Between trying to optimize my structures and their layouts and the patch cycle leading up to release, I generally started a new game by the time I got that far because they dropped a new patch that altered a ton of things.  Well, that, and my masochism, er, penchant for trying to prove to myself I can build certain things with pre-space materials even if they're less efficient.  Volcano harvesting is one thing, pre-space oil boilers for nat gas production and LOX/LH2 are another set of frustration altogether. :P