EVE General Discussion

This has been asked but now that we are in Rubicon 1.1, is the game CPU or GPU intensive?

On the server it's disk / IO and CPU intensive

On the Client it's GPU/CPU/Network/IO intensive

If there were no graphics it would still be slow because of the need to send data to N-1 ships/clients on grid with you (and receive from that many also).

IT = tidi inducing numbers of ships fighting.

The correct answer is: neither

You just gave me an idea -- WHAT IF IT DIDN'T? What if the true answer to fixing server / battle congestion and eliminating TiDi is a mixture of traditional client/server model plus P2P network between clients exchanging info on the bits of data that their client needs to know to affect them, such as proximity, damage, etc.?

Disregarding security (altering network packets can no longer be verified by the server, but we'll consider encrypted communications to secure the P2P side), would that type of network architecture solve the problem of the servers' CPUs spiking at 100% trying to compute all the interactions between thousands of nodes?

This game is IQ intensive

its not intensive in any way so long as you have one client open, but as you stack up clients, the CPU suffers a first. the problem gets out of control the more UI elements are active.

the I/O goes next, since each write/read gets mirrored on all clients.

the GPU, unless its some old piece of crap, will run the game with no problems. just turn off HDR/Bloom/FSAA and lower texture quality to match Vram/RAM. model complexity will have no effect on performance, and you will only notice GPU related FPS drops past the 10th client.

Good reply btw.

CPU
I/O controller
GPU

"lower texture quality to match Vram/RAM" - just how big is the texture pack? Or what would be enough vRAM to not worry about it affecting performance?

You have to turn the details down because the game is GPU intensive. You can run multiple clients by turning graphics details down, because the highest load the game places on your hardware is on the GPU. You can run 10 clients without upgrading the CPU, you'd have to get a monster GPU to run that many instances of the game with anything but minimum graphics options. If you get a GPU that is too low-end, a lot of the effects processing will be offloaded to the CPU. So simply getting a recent card that can handle Shader Model 3 can remove a lot of load from the CPU.

Advice from other threads has been to ignore the upgrade from i5 to i7, for example, instead using that money to upgrade the GPU. Since processor cost tends to increase exponentially relative to processor speed, you can save a lot of money by down-speccing the processor in order to up-spec the GPU.

For RAM, a bare minimum is to have 8GB of RAM, after which you have more than enough RAM for the game (and maybe three copies running at once).

For disk, an SSD will help load the game faster and load grid faster. After loading is done, the disk is barely touched. Unless you are routinely jumping into grids with hundreds of objects present, you will be better off sticking with a spinning-platter drive and spending the money on a better GPU.

So given a limited budget, get 8GB RAM, i5 processor & motherboard in the low-to-middle end of the market, a decent 22" or larger IPS monitor, with all the remaining budget spent on the GPU and supporting power supply.

Wow seriously? I've ran 7 clients with max settings and not filled my GTX 660 2GB card (1920x1200). I didn't mean to run them all at max settings I just forgot to change the settings down before firing everything up. It didn't run that great in space but it ran. When I did massive multiboxing I usually ran low settings on everything but the main client.

CPU doesn't seem to matter too terribly for this game. I regularly run 3-4 clients on low settings on my secondary machine which is an e7200 (3.2ghz OC) with 4GB of ram and a hd6450 1gb card (10 dolla card FTW) OS is XP 32 bit lul. When running that many clients the GPU is clearly the weakpoint.



If you're on a budget it's generally not worth the cost to pony up for an i7 over an i5. You would be better off spending that extra money on a graphics card. Always buy a quality PSU because that's the heart of your system and a cheap one can cost you greatly in the long run (fried components or even a fire).


TLDR :

GPU
I/O
CPU


EDIT : Shader 3.0 is required now so there's no point mentioning that anymore.

Mostly CPU, but GPU issues can become your bottleneck, especially when drawing tons of models or gas clouds on older GPUs.

That said EVE is actually remarkably lightweight for its purdiness, and my 7 year old PC can run multiple clients with no issue.