HI Will my pc play X4

[Scoob]

Not quite, no.

As with X Rebirth, X4 will use two cores pretty heavily for its primary activities (simulation and rendering) and as many other cores as are available for other peripheral tasks (such as path-finding and asset loading). Drivers and APIs used by the game, such as Vulkan, may also be able to make use of more than one core. Overall, the game is likely to work best on a system with at least 4 cores, and the benefits of more than that will probably tail off fairly rapidly.

As csaba pointed out, though, the Intel on-board graphics isn't going to help matters, not only in performance terms but also because their driver support tends to lag behind NVidia and AMD.

In my own observations, X Rebirth generally spreads its self very evenly over all 8 of my threads - 4 Cores with HT. Some of those 8 threads were slightly busier than the others, but not hugely so.

My system specs are as follows:

2600k @ 4.4ghz
32gb DDR3 1600
GTX 1070
RAID0 SSD's (System and Steam, quite speedy!)
W10 Pro

I run at 1920x1200 with all settings maxed. I also run my main game quite heavily modded, so it's a little heavier than vanilla.

Note: there has been a lot of articles about DX12 and Vulcan allowing for better multi-threading CPU-side. It used to be that older DX11 and below titles would see one thread very heavily loaded vs. the others - this was the Direct X thread, responsible for all the stuff sent to the GPU.

Now, while DX11 and below stuff doesn't naturally multi-thread, hence the heavy load on one Core/Thread we'd see in the prior X games, XR shows a pretty even CPU load for me. Why? Well, NVidia put some "clever stuff" in their drivers allowing DX11 titles to multi-thread better - it's a driver open, enabled by default (Auto) and it can help a lot. This doesn't help with DX10 and below titles as far as I'm aware, but it does help DX11 titles make much better use of multiple CPU cores/threads.

I did some comparisons vs. a friend with an AMD card a while back, while he was seeing issues with one thread being heavily loaded - leading to a CPU bottleneck in essence, I was seeing a nice, even load over all my Cores and getting a MUCH smoother gaming experience in several newer (at the time) titles.

I've observed this both with Rebirth, as well as other titles such as Fallout 4. These observations and tests were undertaken a while ago now, so I assume AMD have now caught up nicely regarding multi-threading for the CPU-side DX workload. I'm not sure which families of GPU's can take advantage of this driver feature, my old 680's certainly did, so perhaps the 400 and 500 series can too, I don't know.

Scoob.

[Skeeter]

If ur computer can run x rebirth ok then it should run x4 equally as good if not better due to the faster vulkan api. So my i5 3570k at 4.5ghz and 8gb ram and a gtx 670 will probably max out x4 easy enough as it runs rebirth at a solid 60fps at 1080p maxed out.

[elexis]

If ur computer can run x rebirth ok then it should run x4 equally as good if not better due to the faster vulkan api. So my i5 3570k at 4.5ghz and 8gb ram and a gtx 670 will probably max out x4 easy enough as it runs rebirth at a solid 60fps at 1080p maxed out.

I wouldnt be so sure:

...there is no official information from Intel stating that a new driver will be release that supports OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan, so in order not to provide false expectations there is no confirmation that the driver will be available for sure in the future.

The current Plan Of Record is that Intel® is not supporting Vulkan on Windows drivers. You might find drivers that were made available on Developer.com but those are intended for Vulkan developers.

That is for a more recent, more powerful gpu than the one in OP's pentium.

[Skeeter]

I was saying based off players who runs rebirth fine will probably be fine with x4. And used my rig as my example.

People with onboard GPUs will struggle of course but if there's a demo out at least people can try it which egosoft sometimes do as in a separate benchmark, tho that doesn't usually push the CPU as much due to it not running a normal simulated game..

Worst comes to worse he can save 50 quid and get a 2nd hand decent GPU to put in like a 670 then it should run ok if CPU is strong enough too.

But the op said he can play rebirth except for a few gfx intense systems so can't see why he couldn't play x4 unless the onboard GPU doesn't work with x4 due to vulkan tho. But that's specific to him but my general reply in this topic was for the general forum users who are asking themselves if their computers can run x4.

[Scoob]

It's interesting you say your 670 ran XR so well. My 680 was totally unable to maintain a playable frame rate unless I turned a lot of settings down. This was at 1920x1200. When I popped a 1070 in there, everything became butter-smooth. Until that is the late-game issues kicked in and my FPS dropped along with both CPU and GPU load.

I'm hoping the switch to the Vulcan Engine will help - however doesn't XR VR actually reduce the amount of objects (stations, ships etc.) in Zones to help with performance too?

Of course, the change to Vulcan aside, Egosoft must address this issues with long-term games. This is NOT a case of the game using progressively more resources as time goes by, no, it's about the game using progressively less resources as time goes by and performance suffering hugely. It's almost like there's some sort of "wait" going as as something bottlenecks / glitches in the code, so PC resources remain untapped.

I've observed this situation in several long-term games - both vanilla and modded - and it very much breaks the late-game for me. Plus it's frustrating to my PC barely taxed when this occurs.

Scoob.

[Skeeter]

Not sure why ur 680 had issues. Myself i didnt play xr long enough to have a empire like others, i stopped after i got my butt handed to me protecting a convoy shortly after the build ur first station mission. What was ur cpu and was it overclocked like mine? Did you use nvidia things like adaptive vsync or use nvidia inspector to tweak more things etc? Did you use a ssd for ur computer? Many things might have made the difference between me and you.

I also wonder how they test long term games, do they cheat and make loads of large complexes around the universe to simulate a endgame enviroment do they setup a few hundread or thousand ships each with given commands like traders or fleet support. As testers wont have the time to generate late game enviroments imo without cheats. Might be a idea for egosoft to maybe ask for players save games of players of very long games to see how the universe can expand and fill and see if theres optimization tricks they can do during those times.

I know what u mean tho about games feeling sluggish after time and ur checking if ur cpu and gpu is being utilized 100% which some dont for some reason, it can get annoying if u have a uber rig with say a titan x and ur gpu is just been used 50% and ur struggling with performance ingame and u know its ur gfx cos if u lower the settings it might help but with a titan x u should be maxed with no performance issues.

One thing that could help there tho, in nvidia panel theres a setting based on power usage, with some games i have to use max perf mode and not the default as that then seems to force the game to use more of the gpu and the game improves and ur usage percent raises. Uses more electric etc i think but worth it if game has trouble utilizing ur full gpu potential.

[nemesis1982]

my old 570TI ran XR just fine on 1080P with most of the settings set to medium/high. So I would assume a 670/680 should do fine.

Haven't had ANY issues with my new rig (i7-7700k and 1080TI).

Vulkan will probably not solve any slow downs related to universe simulation though.

How long-term are these game plays scoob? Are you talking about 100 hours or 1000 hours before slow downs happen?

[AC_Black]

I know that after 300+ hrs of game play in XR, I start to get a little overheat on my CPU, while in my home base sector. This would be about 40 ships (30 of those are mine) and 4 finished stations. To keep things moving to 400+ hrs, I have now got 2 station per sector, 10 stations MAX in game with all stations finished. 2 ships per station 1 guarding, 1 shopping. Then 4 miners with 15 drones each, 2 max in any sector. Anything over that and the CPU starts to get overworked on #s 1 and 2 core with heat rising.

17 4770K @ 3.5 water cooled 1070 GTX 32gb ram SSD running os Settings at max with 1920x1080 60FPS steady

I run 4 mods with XR none are for graphics.

So heres hoping that I can run X4 with no major problems.

[radcapricorn]

You've also acquired some necroposting powers along the way somewhere

[LameFox]

I don't know why this was resurrected, but now that sys reqs are out, I sure hope OP got a new computer...

[CBJ]

Indeed. With an active thread on system requirements, there is no need to resurrect year-old questions on the same topic.