I'm a bit worried about the actual playabilty of BeamNG.

I once read somewhere that it took a full one core to simulate one car, and seeing most computers these days have about two, maybe four if you're richer than average, how is a destruction derby ever going to be a feasible game mode?

I may be missing something here, but could someone inform me on this?

 

Ah okay, thanks.

 

I just saved an got a quad i7, but now it half priced. By summer 2013 I wouldn't be surprised if 6 core was a bit better than average, 4 was average and 2 was wimpy. I mean, in summer 2011 dual cores were newish.

 

Dual cores were no where near new in 2011 man, i have a pentium d (for dual core) from 2005, and the xbox 360 was designed in 2005 with a triple core processor.

 

Nope. I had my first quad in 2009.
In 2011 I scored my first i7.

It's 2012, still using the same i7 2600.


To answer the OPs question, it is possible to run more than one car per core by optimizing the engine efficiently.

 

Really? How would you get around the problem of synching the cores' calculations so the vehicle doesn't rip itself apart when it is moving?

 

I'm not very good with hardware and stuff,... but seeing as other games can simulate multiple moving objects at the same time, I assume BeamNG can simulate multiple nodes seperately... Think about it, as long as you can enable and disable controls for 2 vehicles, in theory, you could make 2 cars in Rigs of Rods in one single truckfile without any issues... So then it would have 2 cars on a single core as well. Perhaps I'm really dumb, but I don't see why it would be impossible to store 2 vehicles into one core(if there's enough thinking-power in that single core, I mean, I assume a high-end i7 would easily have enough power in a single core)

 

I would assume the way it works for Rigs of Rods, I don't think it particularly matters. When I spawn a car in RoR it appears to put a load on all six of my cores and my cars don't look like they explode. It shouldn't matter and probably because the time difference is so tiny, even if its significant at all.

 

I don't think RoR uses multiple cores. It may just be your OS' scheduling algorithm which makes the calculations be spread over several cores at a time. If I remember correctly RoR uses one core for physics and one for graphics. Once there was an update which, when several cars were active, each was simulated on a different core so there wouldn't be a performance drop. But, say if you had a flatbed and a car; the calculaions weren't synched properly so if you drove the car onto the flat bed it would jitter around a bit and fall through unless you drove extremely slow. Hopefully the developers have fixed this problem because if they did it would allow for manyfold gains in detail with no performance drop.

 

Whoops, meant 2010, lol. And I don't mean new technology but you could then get them in a crapbox. By late 2013 I expect quads @ 3.4 to be crappy specs.

 

Well, I suppose the ultimate test would be, Get a laptop (core 2 duo) with a huge Graphics card. Take one car (sitting still) and ram it with 4 other cars. like all at once. Then, probably in sequence. Whatever BeamNg Runs on, (Linux?) you may want to adapt it for a specific OS. I would suggest windows because macintosh is PWNING. And will soon lose customer satisfaction. I am in fact, a certified Idiot. Especially at posting in forums, but that would be the true test. Core 2 duo's sell for under $200 on ebay. However, amd APU's wouldn't be bad to test. Very nice idea the APU. ahh the Greatness Power of AMD.

On a side note; I think Gran Turismo 5 got around this issue by not making other cars simulate the same as the original player. It could just be a quick fix but may pay off. Cars tend to jump back and forth making it uber lame. But they did make up the "Ghost the front car if the rear car is trying to intentionally bump lead car off the track."

 

I am using Pentium, (new one), but do you think BeamNG will be laggy if I can't afford i7?

 

i7 isn't necessary, i5 is enough. i7 is only good if you are doing professional editing of videos and similiar. And it will probably lag a lot since it's a Pentium and CryEngine needs a good CPU to run good.

 

That is true. I got a custom laptop for rendering videos and they suggested the i7.

 

This is why you do not go with dell. They'll give you a great CPU *i7 cough* but a low mid range video card. All you would need would be a i5 with maybe a 7770.

 

I could just say "need" doesn't equal "prefer" or "want" in this case, but I'll try to not make this a spam post: BeamNG is obviously rather CPU intensive, so if you can, you'd want a monster of a CPU. Yes, you'd probably minimally need an i5 to run the game with multiple cars without too low of a framerate... But it definitely wouldn't hurt if you did have an i7... Yes, a decent graphics card will help, but at least you can turn down the graphical settings for lower end graphics cards and you'd still have all the great physics. If you have an amazing graphics card and a lower end CPU, you can't(or at least, I don't see how without having multiple n/b constructions for each vehicle) just "turn down the physics" so that you could play with great graphics and hardly any physics, since that's what the game is all about anyway. The only way I think the devs could make it less taxing on CPU is if there was an option to disable inter-vehicle collision or something similar... Or if you could chose to run the physics through the graphics card as well, which I read somewhere might be possible...

In other games you will easily play on high settings with an i5 or even i3 as long as you have a good graphics card, but BeamNG and RoR are just completely different in this regard...

 

what do you think of my AMD APU a8 3850? (2.9 ghz quad core overclocked to 3.3 ghz (which means the gpu is overclocked as wells since its an APU))

also, what about a 2.5 ghz core 2 duo with intel gma x4500mhd? it plays RoR at 20-35 fps most of the time at med settings and filters off.

 

Comparing the AMD APU to the Core 2 duo you listed, the AMD APU would significantly improve the playability of the game compared to the Core 2 duo.

 

I`m using an old Intel Core 2 Quad CPU with 2.4 ghz and an ATI Radeon HD 3600 Series as video card.
It`s still enough to play most new games on medium or low quality.