SimCity Performance, Benchmarked

Going down the memory lane, I tin can remember 2 figurer games being responsible for getting me so interested in PCs. The original Command & Conquer was the first around 1995. Running on the venerable MS-DOS, I spent quite a bit of time playing that game at the ripe old historic period of 9 on our pokey HP powered i486.

Presently after that I discovered SimCity 2000. The first SimCity title, which was released back in 1989, was before my time and then I never played or laid optics on the original. At the fourth dimension SimCity 2000 was incredible, information technology was extremely detailed and offered what seemed like endless hours of gameplay. Some five years subsequently SimCity 3000 was released (1999) and again much of my babyhood was spent playing it.

For reasons that I cannot recall I never got into SimCity four (2003). I know I played information technology simply for some reason it only didn't speak to me like the previous ii titles. So along came SimCity Societies and at that bespeak I thought my days of enjoying the SimCity games were over and for the better part of a decade they were.

But when Maxis announced final year that a 6th installment in the SimCity franchise was coming the pilus on the back of my neck stood on terminate. From the announcement, it looked to be a dramatic overhaul from previous titles featuring full 3d graphics, online multiplayer gameplay, a new engine every bit well as several new features and gameplay changes.

1 yr of waiting later, like so many others I pre-ordered the game and sabbatum waiting for it to become available for download. Unfortunately like everyone else, in one case the game became available and I finally managed to download it, I wasn't really able to play.

As y'all've probably heard for the past couple of weeks, the game requires an cyberspace connection to play, meaning there is no offline style. That in itself is extremely annoying only it'south much worse when the servers y'all are meant to play on cannot cope with demand and close y'all out.

It took me several days of trying, as did the thousands of outraged fans. Since we planned to test SimCity I really needed to get in and work out how we were going to test the game. Thankfully by Sunday things improved and for the next three days I set about building our exam environment.

Testing Methodology

Ordinarily when nosotros benchmark a first person shooter, finding a good portion of the game to examination with is simply a matter of playing through the game until we find a department that is rather demanding. This generally requires an hour or two of gameplay and then we get to test in full. It's a similar process when nosotros exam real-time strategy games such every bit StarCraft 2, for example. In that example nosotros chose to play a 4v4 game, tape the replay and utilize that for benchmarking.

But with SimCity things were considerably more complex and fourth dimension consuming. Considering the game's progress is stored on EA servers it'south not possible to just download and use someone else's saved game of a massive metropolis. While it is possible to load up the leaderboard inside SimCity, see who has the biggest city, and bank check it out, we couldn't use that for testing either since it's a live city being played, thus forever changing and hardly a controlled-enough examination environment.

There are a few pre-congenital cities, such as the ane used in the tutorial "Summer Shoals" but with a population of less than 4000 it doesn't exactly brand for the most demanding test surroundings. Therefore we created a metropolis that has a population of half a one thousand thousand sims with iii more cities just like it on the map.

When testing StarCraft Two some readers were upset that we tested using a big 8-player map, challenge that they just play 1v1 and therefore get better performance. That is fine, but we wanted to show what it took to play the game in its about demanding state so that yous'd never meet performance bug.

Getting back to SimCity, it's a slightly unlike situation as all the regions are the same size. Some maps take more regions than others, but they are all 2x2 kilometers (comparable to SimCity iv'southward medium size). For testing we loaded 1 of our custom created cities (the same ane each time) and increased the game speed to maximum, equally this is how I always play anyway. Once that was done, we started a lx second test using Fraps and in that time zoomed in and out multiple times while scrolling around the city.

As usual we tested at three different resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The game was tested using ii quality configurations, which nosotros are calling maximum and medium. Usually we would test three different quality settings, merely there was virtually no divergence between 'max' and 'loftier' and then we scrapped the latter.