When Downloading Maps off the Repository...

What does the "K" number with the down arrow under the MB (size) of the file mean? And in terms of whether or not my computer can handle the map when opening it up in BeamNG, should I be equally concerned about the size of the K number, or is the larger MB number always the one of greater concern?



As a point of interest, my computer apparently can't run this map. I was hoping at the very least, it might give me a 1 fps "Power Point demonstration", but nahh... wouldn't even do that-- wouldn't even load. It just froze up with some sort of 1 x 0FFFFFF error... so oh well... so much for that. (Guess it's better to have a rack of lamb than a lack of RAM!) Lol.
Yes I know... it says minimum 8 gb of RAM... my computer is rated for that, though it read it had 7.95 gb available. I can't believe five-hundredths of a lousy gig of RAM makes *THAT* much of a difference, but maybe it does? ( :: insert shoulder-shrug emoji here :: )

But I would have attributed that to the 440.2 mb number. Or could it be the 68K (down-arrow) number that's getting me? Which of the two numbers is freezing up my computer?

And finally, if I were to filter the repository list of maps by descending size... how far down the megabyte ladder do you think I have to step, before I can find a map that's going to run on my computer, if "American Road" at 440.2 is apparently not working? 300's? 200's? etc, etc?

Thank you for your time.

 

I am pretty certain that's the amount of people that has downloaded the mod. K = thousand so 68.000 has downloaded the mod.

I doubt it's the ram that's causing the issue, and could most likely mean other PC specs.
I've got 8 gigs, and I was able to run it.

What's your specs lad?

 

Alright... this is where I get laughed out of the forums I suppose:

1. Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601)

2. System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.

3. Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology 970A-DS3P

4. CPU: AMD FX-8120 Eight-Core Processor (8 CPU's), ~3.6 GHz

5. Memory: 8192 MB of RAM (I guess that's the same as the 8 gigs everyone talks about?)

6. Page File: 3,666 mb used; 12,631 mb available

7. Direct X Version: DirectX 11

8. Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series (XFX R7870 2gb GDDR5)
DEV-6818, SUBSYS-1682, Device ID-6818, Vendor ID-1002, Subsystem ID-3251, Subvendor ID-1682

9. Power Supply Unit: Corsair 600CX (600 watt)

10. RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8 gb 1600

11. Something's water cooled in there-- because I remember having to change out the water cooler, soon after I bought it-- but I can't remember if it was the CPU or GPU that was water cooled. It was one of the two... I do know that.

Let me know if you need anything other than that to go on.

I bought this as a (supposedly) high end gaming computer back in March 2013. And I don't know if back then, these were really good specs or not. I originally got it to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and FSX, and it ran the former smooth as butter. But alas, FS2004 was already a 9 year old program in 2013, and almost 7 years have gone by since the guy who sold it to me built it in summer of 2012... so I guess a lot has changed.

I don't want to admit that it's time to upgrade, because that means money out of my wallet, but I guess.... like it or not.... it's time to upgrade.
--- Post updated ---

Oh okay... I hadn't even thought of that! Yeah... number of people. I don't know what I was thinking. That the file was 440 mb big, and that I had to have a minimum download speed of 68kb/sec to load it into the game? Okay, what you said makes much more sense.

 

Haha I know what you mean, I waited half a year to replace my pretty dying PSU (leaving me unable to play most games) just to save those 75 dollars

I have to admit though, I am not too much of a hardware geek so you might want a second opinion as well other than mine

The CPU seems like it wouldn't hurt to be upgraded, taking as BeamNG is a very CPU heavy game so have your focus on that. I would change the GPU as well, but have that as a lower priority to the CPU.

I am curious though, have you tried to download software that monitors your PC hardware temperatures? If not, then it might be worth to have a look at that.
Could be the PC need a good cleaning, and new CPU paste. When was the last time you did this?

Examples of PC monitoring software:
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
https://www.msi.com/page/afterburner

 

Oh okay... I hadn't even thought of that! Yeah... number of people. I don't know what I was thinking. That the file was 440 mb big, and that I had to have a minimum download speed of 68kb/sec to load it into the game? Okay, what you said makes much more sense.

I have CPUID HW Monitor (the one with the white lightning bolt on a red background icon), as well as CPU-Z (the one with white circuit looking image on a purple background).

Looking at the first one, I can see that direct AMD- FX-8120 temperature is currently 56°C. However a CPU section within the Motherboard (Gigabyte Technology 970-A-DS3P) is indicating a temperature of 66°C. So I'm curious, what's the difference between the two? Does the motherboard have its own onboard CPU, separate from the stand alone CPU? If that's the case, that's a new one on me, and the first time I've noticed it.


The onboard CPU within the motherboard is reading 10 degrees celsius higher, so I don't know if that's a bad thing or not. Which one should I be looking at as the "truer" CPU temperature? The stand alone in the mid-50's? Or the in-motherboard one in the mid-60's?

Thanks,

-- John O. (b3b)

 

I guess it is always safer to assume higher is correct. There can be two temperature sensors, one under the CPU and another inside the CPU, so you can ignore lower reading as that is likely under the CPU and never showing true temperature.

I'm afraid AMD-FX has never been high end, you can see here how it compares, it is one at the bottom:


Your page file can be too small, better to have it at least 16GB, also if something is using RAM it can be causing your free ram to be less than needed, despite your physical amount of ram might be enough.

That map has failed to load on systems with 8GB ram before, but some have had issues with 16GB, not really sure what is causing it, you can see more of that at discussion tab of that map download page.

However bigger issue is your GPU, that has only 2GB or vram and that can become an issue, 4GB might be needed for that map, not sure if lowest details can do away with 2GB, but might not.

If you are looking to upgrade your computer, for this game it is worth to know that to be able to get use of more cores when using several cars, one needs to have very fast core speed, that is column 1, for example my CPU i7-8086K can utilize 8 threads fully, there is 12 threads on CPU, but in practice with this game at least for now, 1 core starts limiting performance so that 8 threads vs 12 threads is hardly any difference. Also GPU limits might start to occur too with slower GPUs so that anything more than 8 threads is not really needed for this game right now if goal is to keep 60fps all the time.

What I would pay for is to have highest possible core performance and 8 threads, more cores/threads tend to limit what single core can do in practice, so in theory faster CPU can be slower.

If one is okay for not to have 60fps, then more threads/cores might be helpful again, that is pretty much shown also in graphs as there is less drop with more cores. It will be interesting to see if upcoming CPUs (at summer) will have more computing power per core as that would allow better utilization of those threads beyond 8, however more than 12 probably will not be usable. Story is different if one does lot of rendering and alike, but this is just for this game and in current state only, future optimizations might allow more cores to work before hitting limits of what one core can do.

 

Thank you for all the information! I'm going to have to read your reply several times til it sinks in. I'm a little confused what threads and cores are. I know my computer has 8 cores, but how the threads tie into it all-- a little confusing to me.

So too many cores/threads slows a CPU down? Hmm... did not know that. Can too fast a CPU bottleneck a GPU, or too fast a GPU bottleneck a CPU? It seems I've read that somewhere before.

 

8 cores can have 16 threads if there is hyper threading or something similar technology, most modern CPUs have such, except there are some models that don't have.

Problem with lot of cores is that it is harder to cool the cpu, so in practice you get for example 5Ghz but only if there is workload only on one thread, which never happens, there is always more, with all cores working you might get only 4.3Ghz which means that is usually what speed you get in practice. There is per core clock speed too, but what I have seen is that it is just a gimmick, in practice clock speed just goes down. That is of course turbo clocks, then there is a base clock, but have never seen that low clock speeds to happen.

Amount of work per thread which causes clock speed to drop was lot more with 6th gen intel than what it is with 8th gen intel, so it kinda lowers practical performance you get bit sooner.

Don't know how it behaves with modern AMD, but at this point it might be wise to wait and see what comes of new AMD that should be available at summer or there abouts.

There is no such thing as a bottleneck, it is overly simplified term that some seem to spread quite easily.

Only thing that can happen is that if your CPU is very fast and your GPU is slow, CPU is waiting for GPU, but if your GPU is faster than what CPU can feed it, then GPU is waiting CPU and that causes big hits to FPS and smoothness.

However it really depends a lot from game if CPU can keep GPU fed, older versions of BeamNG were such that one core of CPU defined pretty much how fast game did run, even mid range GPU could be faster than what CPU could fed it, so it was not possible to keep up 60fps on some maps at all.

Now BeamNG is much better optimized, that situation occurs only when having several different vehicles.

GTX1080 that I have is so fast GPU that most of the time CPU is what limits performance in BeamNG, also one core is hitting limits long before full capacity of CPU is met, only about 70W power usage instead of over 100W in overclocked situation.

So in practice modern i5 might do as well as i7, within same CPU family, fastest clock speed gives best performance as long as it has 8 threads, that is only with this game though and only in it's current state.

AMD and Intel clock speeds don't compare really, so it is bit challenging to figure out things, even thread counts don't really compare, you can see from those graphs how drop off points are bit different with AMD and Intel having 2 cores more Ryzen 2700X is still dropping at 7 vehicles instead of 8, not sure why that is so, but it looks like core count is not quite directly comparable.

For some other games things can be whole lot different, also for some software whole lot different, so when upgrading one needs to do whole lot of research these days and there is much misinformation that it is scary.

For example, VRM is what converts electricity to CPU on motherboard and some people will tell that any motherboard is okay, get the cheapest, sad thing is that quality of VRM varies a lot, even mid priced can be rubbish these days, only way to know is to find out review or other technical article which actually tests out VRM and what kind of temps it runs at. Low cost motherboards cut costs in VRM, those are these days self destructive, so there is a lot one needs to know or then just pay from the top of the line model.