Quick question for any SOASE players, its really stressing my puny GPU and I was looking for an upgrade. I'm playing at 1080 with an amd 955 and 8gb ram. Current GPU is a GTX 440. I was looking at the 660 but seeing as I'm not the world's biggest gamer I think this would be overkill. Is there a cheaper option that would still let me max out the settings with no slowdown on large maps? Must be nvidia since 99% of the time I'm a Linux user. Thanks, Jack
A GTX 650 Boost would be fine. Cheaper than a 660, arguably not by much, but oh well. Alternatively look for second hand cards. A 560Ti would probably do the job.
Its the CPU thats holding you back noticed this myself when i played the orginal game on my old pc the other day. (580gpu but old amd quadcore at 3.8ghz cpu. was doing a lan thing with my m8) As you expand the maps to the 5 star ones the game starts to lag hugely. If you keep it under 50 planets the game runs pretty smooth but to get it going on the higher map sizes 120 planets and above you need a very good overclocked pc. 4ghz + cpu helps. Also the gpu settings make next to no difference as ive ran the game on minimum to maximum with no difference in frame rates. ( we tried everything to get above 10-15fps) Game can not use more than 2gb of ram unless you download a mod to remove the limitations which you should not hit unless your playing a mod of the game. The killer is the Fighter and bomber strike craft that you can build in cap ships and carriers as they increase they are each rendered then given intructions from your CPU. so with 4 + AI players thats over 1000 Calculations just in Strike Craft. ( starbases, hangers, cap ships, Carriers. in sins reb 40 planets is 40 starbases minimum with at least 16 x 6 strike craft. 1 strike craft unit is 3-4 fighters minimum 6-8 depending on race) Its why mods like sins of the fallen require a mod to remove the memory cap so that the game can expand into more memory as without it the game will crash due to out of memory errors in the standard 32bit exe.
As rollo said, the game is limited by design! Large Address Aware can help and is better explained here... http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556
rollo , from reading around the web , you can hit that 2GB limit on large maps pretty frequently , which can then cause the game to crash, so using a LargeAddressAware `mod` can actually stabilise systems . but ofc your right , the game loves fast cpu` with a ton of cores. wonder how it would play on a BD/PD? http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1757891
Requires all player slots filled to hit in a normal game of sins. And it happens 2-3 hrs into the game.
Sins runs fine on my 6870, a 6850 would be fine too I imagine if you're looking for a budget option. Might be some left around somewhere. As has been mentioned, it's the CPU strain that kills it. Make sure you turn off trade ship icons!
Thank you all very much for your help guys. Wondering how much difference it would make 660 from 650ti boost. Oh well, I might give it a while to see if sins is a fad or something I really want to play before a throw money at it. Please excuse typos, if you can see this message it means I wrote that post on a phone. - Jack
There are some great deals on the 660 around at the moment, id consider that a "proper" graphics card and should last a bit longer than the 650ti
