System requirements

[wrmiller]

I saw no mention of my 'puter in doing a search, so I'm wondering how well my system will run X4? TIA.

(currently running Elite: Dangerous at max resolutions)

Computer:
Alienware Area-51 i7-5930K
32GB memory
ROG GTX 1080Ti
Alienware 34" monitor

Misc Stuff:
TrackIR
Warthog HOTAS
VKB pedals

[Tharaphita]

Im really looking into AMD Ryzen 2700X since i want to support them for stepping up in CPU arena and forcing Intel to raise their bar as well. Before ryzen intel last 5 year progress was depressing. Is there any info how OC-d Ryzen 2700X will work compared to Intel latest series?

[ballti]

It is crime, inte & new CPUs will not competed whit ryzen, chek prices, you are safe to buy any ryzen CPU. Intel 8+8 will be almost dubble price.

[Miniding]

I saw no mention of my 'puter in doing a search, so I'm wondering how well my system will run X4? TIA.

(currently running Elite: Dangerous at max resolutions)

Computer:
Alienware Area-51 i7-5930K
32GB memory
ROG GTX 1080Ti
Alienware 34" monitor

Misc Stuff:
TrackIR
Warthog HOTAS
VKB pedals

You can assume you'll be great with this…

[Retrox]

I saw no mention of my 'puter in doing a search, so I'm wondering how well my system will run X4? TIA.

(currently running Elite: Dangerous at max resolutions)

Computer:
Alienware Area-51 i7-5930K
32GB memory
ROG GTX 1080Ti
Alienware 34" monitor

Misc Stuff:
TrackIR
Warthog HOTAS
VKB pedals

You can assume you'll be great with this…

Well, he can still improve it. With a titan, maybe?
But to be honest, i think your system will run well with x4. If your pc cant do it, which one can it, then?

[Scoob]

I have an older 2600k running at 4.4ghz - it's over 7 years old now but still going strong.

Rebirth never really taxed it at all, plus I'd always see very even load over all eight threads, no particular core / thread was ever significantly higher than the others, I'd say about 20% more tops. It was encouraging to see the engine appear to be using the available resources so well.

My CPU is paired with a GTX 1070, which seems a very good match for this CPU as it's always kept well-fed. If I remove the FPS limit (vSync) in games, I can always get the GPU to 100% load or there about, without the CPU breaking into a sweat, suggesting, once again, that they are a good match.

So, from a pure hardware spec perspective, I'm fairly confident my ageing rig should still do a decent job with X4, though I do plan an upgrade at some future point of course.

Once thing that does concern me though, and I've voiced this in a number of threads since X4 was announced, is the long-game. I play for a long time on one save in the X series, always have. The older games were realistically limited to two threads (core game and the spawned DX process) and I'd always see two very busy threads. So, a fast Core2Duo (back in the day) would be every bit as good as a Core2Quad at similar clock speeds, assuming no excessive background task activity. The performance boost in the various X3 titles, assuming at least two cores, were totally clock-speed related from a CPU perspective.

Moving forward to Rebirth and its heavy use of multi-threading should really leverage modern CPU's very well, and it does, up to a point. A decent CPU - as my 2600k remains - barely breaks a sweat in Rebirth as the CPU load is nice and even over all (overclocked) cores. However, as my games get more mature - especially if modded, but true of vanilla too - resource utilisation drops quite heavily over time. It initially goes up a little as my game time increases, but ultimately it seems to hit a point and start to decline. Never has rebirth slowed down due to one or more cores being heavily loaded. Nor has it ever been the GPU that's slowed things down, though GPU is stressed a lot more in Rebirth at high game settings. No, what ultimately slows my games down in Rebirth to unplayable levels is resource utilisation dropping massively along with the frame rate. This suggest some internal bottleneck within the engine where it cannot leverage the resources available to run the game at a decent sim speed.

Now this happened in vanilla as I said, but a modded game would see it happen more quickly as modded games traditionally run more scripts, have more ships in the universe and more activity. X4 looks like it's MUCH bigger than even modded Rebirth has ever been, with all those flyable ships, NPC crew and a much more powerful system for interacting with things. My slight concern is that it's unlikely that Egosoft have run a game where the player is busy building multiple stations and having hundreds of ships working for them for many many hours. I'm not talking just letting the game run and "play its self", though that is very valid with the new dynamic universe. Plus Egosoft could tweak things for exponential faction growth and hostility as a great test. No, I'm talking about a total addict (like myself) obsessively playing the game for hundreds of hours, and what effect that's going to have on performance vs. letting the game play its self, even in an extreme form as I mentioned.

If I play the game for a long time, see slow-downs, and those slow-downs are totally down to my PC not being up to the job, then that's the perfect excuse for me to upgrade... X games have cost me many hundreds of pounds in the past for that very reason. Rebirth however never actually pushed my CPU much at all, so there's no upgrade path there, due to this strange internal bottleneck that appeared to be occurring in a mature game.

Don't get me wrong, I did benefit from upgrades such as SSD's - much faster loading times - plus I went from twin GTX 680's to a GTX 1070. Rebirth's lack of SLI support sorta killed those GPU's dead. My point is that my CPU was never pushed, yet it appeared to be things that should be done by the CPU that ultimately slowed the game down to unplayable. As CPU utilisation dropped, so did GPU utilisation - the engine could not keep the GPU fed, so to speak - and performance degraded hugely irrespective of what was going on in the game. For example, I could witness a huge battle going on early-game at a silky-smooth vSync-limited 60fps. The same battle in the same Zone late in the game would be a slide-show, the same slide-show that Zone was with no battle going on.

I know I've rambled on a lot here, but long-term game performance is a huge deal for me as I've always put many many hours into my very long-term play-throughs. I'm even in the middle of a long-term modded X3AP game currently, having abandoned Rebirth last year due to how the game always ended before I wanted it to due to performance issues.

So, in essence there are likely spec's that'll let you run the game initially - likely more GPU-limited than CPU. There are specs that'll let you run a more mature game, once the universe is busier with player activity and all that lovely dynamicness (it's a word, honest ) and I hope there are specs that allow you to run a mature, and even modded, game long-term, while fully utilising system resources.

Note: this weird engine bottleneck issue isn't an Egosoft exclusive by any means. To give a AAA title example, Fallout 4 was like it when it launched. There were plenty of genuine performance issue due to hardware limitations, but many of us observed our worse slowdowns in-game occurred not when CPU or GPU load were max'd out, but rather when utilisation dropped suddenly. Thankfully this was resolved and Fallout 4 - even heavily modified - is now a perfectly smooth experience these days.

Scoob.

[wrmiller]

I saw no mention of my 'puter in doing a search, so I'm wondering how well my system will run X4? TIA.

(currently running Elite: Dangerous at max resolutions)

Computer:
Alienware Area-51 i7-5930K
32GB memory
ROG GTX 1080Ti
Alienware 34" monitor

Misc Stuff:
TrackIR
Warthog HOTAS
VKB pedals

You can assume you'll be great with this…

Well, he can still improve it. With a titan, maybe?
But to be honest, i think your system will run well with x4. If your pc cant do it, which one can it, then?

Thanks guys. The system is 4-5 years old (video upgraded last year), and I am just checking.

Just joined, and am still reading a bunch of threads, but did I see somewhere where this game will take advantage of multi-core systems?

[Cubuzz]

Hey there, fellow X-Fans and X-Devs!

I just read through the requirements and noticed that my laptop is a tiny bit lower than minimum. Now, I still want to try to play atleast. Will there be any system that would prevent me from doing so?

BR, Cubuzz.

[Tamina]

We can't tell what you saw but I saw CBJ writing X4 uses 2 threads heavily and more for other minor tasks with no maximum count. It probably not uses more then 4 or 6 cores.

[sd_jasper]

Hey there, fellow X-Fans and X-Devs!

I just read through the requirements and noticed that my laptop is a tiny bit lower than minimum. Now, I still want to try to play atleast. Will there be any system that would prevent me from doing so?

The one thing I would guess is that if your video card does not support Vulkan, then your not going to be able to play at all. Other than that? I'll probably run... but I wouldn't know how well.

[wrmiller]

We can't tell what you saw but I saw CBJ writing X4 uses 2 threads heavily and more for other minor tasks with no maximum count. It probably not uses more then 4 or 6 cores.

Just something about multi-core task distribution, or something like that. Curious is all, as my sys has 6 cores running @ 4GHz, and I thought it would be cool to relegate background tasks to other cores so as not to bog down the main code thread execution.

Just thinking out loud.

[Cubuzz]

Hey there, fellow X-Fans and X-Devs!

I just read through the requirements and noticed that my laptop is a tiny bit lower than minimum. Now, I still want to try to play atleast. Will there be any system that would prevent me from doing so?

The one thing I would guess is that if your video card does not support Vulkan, then your not going to be able to play at all. Other than that? I'll probably run... but I wouldn't know how well.

My GPU supports Vulkan without any trouble. Heck, it can even run the just now released Forza Horizon 4 without trouble (not pretty, but runs ). So I guess it should work...

[radcapricorn]

We can't tell what you saw but I saw CBJ writing X4 uses 2 threads heavily and more for other minor tasks with no maximum count. It probably not uses more then 4 or 6 cores.

Just something about multi-core task distribution, or something like that. Curious is all, as my sys has 6 cores running @ 4GHz, and I thought it would be cool to relegate background tasks to other cores so as not to bog down the main code thread execution.

Just thinking out loud.

That's typically how it's done. If I were to theorize, I would say that the 2 "heavy" cores CBJ mentioned are dedicated to graphics and audio respectively. The rest you can limit to miscellaneous things like streaming in assets from disk (or writing out a savegame), updating remote regions of the universe, etc. There's no particular reason to limit these background tasks to any particular number of cores, but you don't scale your performance linearly either, and eventually there comes stagnation.

[CBJ]

That's typically how it's done. If I were to theorize, I would say that the 2 "heavy" cores CBJ mentioned are dedicated to graphics and audio respectively. The rest you can limit to miscellaneous things like streaming in assets from disk (or writing out a savegame), updating remote regions of the universe, etc. There's no particular reason to limit these background tasks to any particular number of cores, but you don't scale your performance linearly either, and eventually there comes stagnation.

Audio? Hardly! The second main thread is the game universe simulation, including both local and far away objects. I explained why you can't just carve up the universe simulation into separate chunks in another thread:

You might also think you could magically speed things up by running the simulation on multiple threads, but this is a lot harder than you might imagine. The objects in the game are very heavily inter-connected (consider a ship, trying to dock at another ship, which in turn is flying to a station but has been interrupted by an attack from a group of enemy ships that are all coordinating among themselves) which makes it next-to-impossible to divide it into discrete units which can be processed independently. Quite apart from the complexity, you can quickly run into threading overheads, and that's without even considering the high chance of it all grinding to a halt with one object waiting for a lock on another to be freed, which in turn is waiting for a lock on another object, which itself is waiting for a lock on the first one!

[Miniding]

I love you CBJ!!!

[radcapricorn]

Audio? Hardly!

Hah! Good on you then

The second main thread is the game universe simulation, including both local and far away objects. I explained why you can't just carve up the universe simulation into separate chunks in another thread...

I didn't mean quite literal division into "chunks" like that. More like:
- per-frame updates for some region around the player.
- less-frequent updates for all other regions.

Obviously, like I said I was theorizing, I've no clue exactly how the game world is represented in X4, and thank you for an insight!

[wrmiller]

Some of this stuff is quite complex, and a bit much for most normal people to absorb. Programmers are an odd bunch, or at least the ones I hung out with were.

I spent over 35 years designing/coding deterministic real-time operating systems (RTOS), 6-DOF motion control systems, and digital data storage systems. And even with that background I wouldn't touch game design with a 10' cattle prod.

While I'm far from normal, game design is a part of the multi-verse I am not familiar with.

[ballti]

On search r5 1600 vs i7 6700k YT first popup this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTt-S9DaO6g
r5 1600 is on 3400 MHz, i7 6700k is on 4.1GHz, both CPU can be OC for 400-700 MHz, This mean eny OC 4+4 Ryezen is more then enought for X4?
Unknown is 8gb vs 16gb. I hope 8gb will not do too big penalty on FPS, ram is wey to expenisve ATM.

[nemesis1982]

On search r5 1600 vs i7 6700k YT first popup this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTt-S9DaO6g
r5 1600 is on 3400 MHz, i7 6700k is on 4.1GHz, both CPU can be OC for 400-700 MHz, This mean eny OC 4+4 Ryezen is more then enought for X4?
Unknown is 8gb vs 16gb. I hope 8gb will not do too big penalty on FPS, ram is wey to expenisve ATM.

8GB is on the low side for just about anything now a days. What I remember from previous x games is that they're quite RAM hungry. I could be wrong though.

[ballti]

Funny thing is that im not choose games based on hardwere, and ATM 8gb is more then enought (Factorio, Frostpunkt... etc). Looks like X4 will force me on 2x8gb.