SimCity Tested, Benchmarked

Great review Steve! Looks like this is top of my "most wanted" game list.

Thorough as always Steve. This game is way more demanding than I thought it would be.

Steve how 560ti medium qyality 1200p that become or are faster 580/670 than iand the same as the 680?

Good question. He's trying to say "How is it that the 560ti performs better than the 580 and 670 and the same as the 680 at 1200p medium quality"

Sorry guys very minor copy and paste error which showed the GTX 560 Ti being 2fps faster than it really was. The 2560x1600 results probably look more like what you would expect as there are less CPU limitations here.

Hahahaha!!

Nice test! Was hoping we would see some sort of benchmark for Simcity 5. I remember 4 killing my comp back when it came out.

Oh and Simoleons is technically the sim currency not simcity citizens iirc

Yeah, the memory lane. I think I saw for the first time SC2000 in the PS of an uncle and then looked for it to play in my PC, short after I sticked a long time with SC3000; tryed SC 4 and didn't like it.

Yeah, those were the days. It looks fine, but I would prefer totally single player as it used to be; but didn't imagine it was quite demanding.

Thanks Steve.

With games like this so reliant on calculation frequency it would be nice to see a CPU chart with all the chips at or near the same clock speed. Personally I would love to see how the 920 at 3.5Ghz stacks up against the 3770k.

I would love to see how my 5 year old Q6600 clocked at 3.7ghz would fair. I am holding out as long as possible until the wheels fall off on this one. the Q6600 has got to be the best investment for CPU ever, clocked at 3.7~4ghz served me for 5+ years and ate every game I threw at it, now it's starting to show its age.

You guys need to start using frame latency testing as that tells a much more accurate story than fps numbers.

We do include frame latency testing in our GPU reviews, just not the game performance articles as there is way too much testing involved and displaying that much data just isn't possible.

This game is almost as unoptimized as the gameplay lol.

It isnt demanding, it is just badly optimised. The frame rates barely nudge from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600.

Wow that's some terrible fps. I wouldn't be surprised if the bottleneck is the server.

You could be waiting on the calculations, bottlenecked by the other players... or even a form of "onLive' streaming wouldn't surprise me.

Yeah why would they all be constant? That seems right.

I play this on my laptop (using intel core i5 2.30GHz, 6 GB ram and nVidia GEFORCE GT540M with 1 GB) and it works fine... my settings are all on high but loading times are a bit slow.

"Meanwhile seriously old GPUs such as the Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce GTX 460 will work as well."

What about us gamers with "seriously even older" cards like the 8800GT 512? I wish your benchmark testing was more inclusive to those with older PCs. We are the ones that need to know whether we can run it, and at what quality.