Sim City – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2013
Genre: City planning simulator
Platform: PC
developer: Maxis
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Publisher in Russia: Electronic Arts

 

As with previous versions, SimCity’s core mission is city building. The player acts as the mayor: he is determined with a specialization and acts in such a way as to create a successful metropolis with happy residents. The game begins with the construction of infrastructure, zoning and the provision of resources: electricity, water, waste disposal. With the growth of population, capital, construction of certain types of buildings, the player will open up new opportunities.

New features include limited resources and multiplayer, but it doesn’t end there. For example, to ensure maximum realism of processes in SimCity, the GlassBox engine was developed and the concept of agents was introduced. The peculiarity of the engine is that it models the game world, relying on the details and properties of many objects in the game. At the same time, the agents perform a detailing of the sum of all influences from all objects at a specific point on the city map.

The official announcement took place on March 6, 2012. The game was released on March 5, 2013 in the USA and March 7 in Russia.

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Sim City is supported by major Windows operating systems, which include Windows XP. Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers. 

 

The preferred and main graphics API for the multiplayer game Sim City is DirectX 9. The game is distributed through the Origin digital store.

Game engine

The game is based on the Glassbox game engine, which was developed by Maxis for use in its own products, mainly the Sims series.

We did not find any more detailed information about the game engine, except for the data listed above…

Advanced Game Settings

Sim City has a sufficient level of graphical settings, although as a PC exclusive, a little more could be added. We can flexibly manipulate various graphic settings, setting them to low, medium, high and maximum quality levels. 

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium, and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

High quality settings

As we can see, the picture difference between different graphics settings is quite clear; support for a wide range of equipment depends on specific quality settings.

General visual design and game physics

The month of April this year turned out to be quite meager for game releases, so we decided to return to those projects that were missed earlier. And one of these projects turned out to be Sim City, and in the process of working on this game it turned out that we missed it in vain – there is something to see in the game.

 

Let’s say right away that we don’t want to offend Sim City fans, the game looks very decent when you float at a bird’s eye view, but as soon as you get as close to the surface as possible, all the shortcomings of the graphical component will become visible, such as low detail and a very solid blur of the main background.

 

But again, the stated shortcomings of the game are determined by its scale, because in theory, having made the world fully developed, the developers would not be able to fit into the framework of the system requirements provided by modern PCs…

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using an in-game benchmark. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as performance indicators. Below is a video of the test segment:  

Our video cards were tested at separate screen sizes of 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Sim City. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA and AMD did not show any increase in performance, which indicates incomplete optimization for the game. 

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, video cards showed an acceptable level of performance Radeon HD 6850 or GRFORCE GTX 650. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 5850 or GeForce GTX 560.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings an acceptable level of performance was shown by video cards Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 470. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 7870 or GRFORCE GTX 660. The game was released with the support of NVIDIA and is fully optimized for GEFORCE video cards, which showed better results thanks to this optimization.

VRAM test

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 with different anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings 

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for this game is about 768 MB for basic graphics quality settings. For ultra resolutions and maximum settings, you will need about 1024 megabytes of video memory.

CPU test

 

We tested processor dependence on 17 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of video cards for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920×1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. Below is a video of the test segment: 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080

 

Sim City has placed quite impressive demands on modern CPUs; of course, there is a result of the transition from two to four cores, but the performance itself is somewhat uncomfortable, even on high-performance models.

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 Intel%

 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 AMD%

 

As we said above, the game can load and use up to four computing cores. Multithreading optimization for Intel processors is significantly higher than for AMD…

RAM test

Testing of the RAM consumed by the game was carried out by monitoring directly through the Windows task manager. The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 [email protected] GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

As we can see, with various basic quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Sim City is at the same level of 1300-1400 megabytes. Thus, for a comfortable game you need to have minimum 3 GB of RAM installed in your PC. 

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