The Joys of a New Computer

Since I began playing, for about 2 weeks now I have had my old Athlon Quad core ~3.1Ghz - 16Gb - Nvidia GTX 1060 w/3Gb - Win7 machine and the game was horribly flaky, stuttery and crashy. Today got the new box setup is i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.6GHz - 16Gb RAM - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 - 8Gb VRAM - Win10.

The difference is mind blowing, the game is smooth and silky and I can run so fast! :stuck_out_tongue:

Finally I am able to combat the machines with some ease but the downside is the day/night cycle is really short! It used to last hours at 15fps and in combat at single figures fps :smiley: Now the days fly byā€¦

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Congrats! Sounds like a nice future proof setup.

Man, I want to get a better PC but my current system doesnā€™t perform bad enough yet that I can justify buying a new one. Alas, Iā€™m still rocking a low-end GTX 1060 so I do know the pain of having only 3 gb VRAM all too well.

The resst of the specs are just as mediocre (i5-8400 and 8 gb ram), but it can run GZ almost maxed out at 60 fps in 1080p. The M.2 SSD boot drive and W10 is probably what keeps it going, tbh. Although Windows 10 is more malware than OS, at least it runs smoother than previous versions. Still, I just wish more games had Linux supportā€¦

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Congrats on the new hardware, sounds sweet! :slight_smile:
Donā€™t understand the bit about the day/night cycle though? Is it a metaphor?

The game actually ran incredibly slowly, so the day/night cycle seemed to be almost real time, or maybe at most a 12h cycle instead of 24h. I found moving crouched was actually really slow and standing up was like walking. Now the game runs at its correct speed and literally time seems to fly by.

Oh, how weird. Thatā€™s how I originally read it, but it seemed weird day/night would be affected by that. TIL! :smile:

My gear isnā€™t quite as fancy, but Iā€™m deliriously happy itā€™s enough to run on ultra. Even after all these hours, Iā€™m stunned at how good the landscape looks. Itā€™s fantastic!

Now if only player characters looked a little better! :smile:

I think visually if there is a weak point its the house interiors. I know this was the age when IKEA became all the rage but the house interiors are a little samey. Still, its something I can live with if the devs spend time improving other things.

Huh. I have the same ā€œissueā€. Maybe not twelve, but I donā€™t think Iā€™m exaggerating when I say that it takes about five hours for the game to complete a 24 hour cycle. Itā€™s hard to give a precise estimate due to the lack of a visible in-game clock. No matter, I quite like long day/night cycle, and Iā€™ve never felt that my character is sluggish. If you play online, were your character(s) often slower than others before you upgraded?

Many older games had certain aspects (in some cases the entire game) tied to the clock speed of the CPU, which can lead to some interesting results on modern computers. With todayā€™s commonality and improvements of multi-core processing, this has largely been abandoned as far as I understand. However, Iā€™ve seen many people mention that their character is either slower or faster than other people they play with online (I only play solo so I wouldnā€™t know), and I get the feeling that there might be something to this.

GenZ uses Avalanceā€™s proprietary Apex game engine in tandem with Havok integration. Being a third-party application, it is not inconceivable that Havok (a dedicated physics engine) is somehow tied to a clock speed parameter that the rest of the framework is not. However, if there was a hard lock to processor clock speed, both movement and time should be proportionately slower on lower spec systems. The discrepancy between game time and movement speed could possibly be due to some clever thread or load averaging since P2P online would be a nightmare if everyoneā€™s game ran at a different speed :stuck_out_tongue:

Iā€™m not a game developer though so I may be way off, this was just the first thought that struck me.

Yes, I did one online session with a mate and he asked ā€œHow are you making your character walk?ā€ !!!

It was horribly choppy and laggy and I crashed out a few times. I got the new PC to basically play this game and plan to have another online session again this evening.

I would say that my old PC ran everything slower equally - game time, AI movement, my character movement, even the gun loading and door opening animations were incredibly slow. A door would take 5 seconds to open! It was actually quite a cool and relaxing pace of play. It seems to me an entirely different game at its proper speed.

Interesting! Your previous specs were very similar to mine and it doesnā€™t sound like an OS issue, so out of curiosity, how old or what specific model was your Athlon CPU?

My i5 has six cores and an advertised 2.8 ghz. Overclocking is not possible, It will however shoot up to ~4 ghz when needed and stay there for as long as the cooling allows. Two cores and a few hundred mhz less shouldnā€™t tank the game that badly.

The PC was built for me by my friendly local PC guy in 2009. The mainboard was from Gigabyte Technology and the BIOS by Award. It was a really good machine and in its lifetime had upgrades of RAM, video card and a new power unit when one failed. It has served me well and played any and all games fine until Generation Zero came along. It ran Metro Exodus very well.