Best PC specs for Map editing?

[Lumituisku]

So i have tried some map editing but right now it is really slow. Especially if i want to level roads. I also am starting to have other problems with my current PC so i am thinking for a new one and naturally my biggest consideration is Steelbeast.

 

From past i have understood that SB uses only one core? Is that something to pay attention to? 

 

I have almost no understanding of PCs so i need some clear descriptions guidelines that other my friends can understand when they help me to get my next rig in future. 

Edited June 19, 2022 by Lumituisku

[Ssnake]

Well. Steel Beasts will use multiple cores in certain circumstances. For example, they will dramatically improve map and scenario loading times. And Steel Beasts 5.x will be designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores whenever possible. So, at this point going for multiple CPUs is a no-brainer.

 

The first question is, what's your budget - be it for the computer as a whole, or for individual components. 

 

Graphics card: The biggest challenge will be, what's actually available at non-inflated prices. I would have loved buying an RTX 3070 two years ago, but not at 1800 to 2500 Euros apiece. If you want to buy a preconfigured PC from some computer chain rather than a bespoke model from a local computer dealer, I suspect that everything below won't matter much because you will probably accept whatever the computer's specs are if only it comes with a decent graphics card at a reasonable price, simply because they are hard to get (the situation is becoming better, some youtube bloggers assure me).

With NVidia cards, the naming scheme is pretty simple: the first two digits are 10, 20, 30, 40... That is the generation of graphics cards (I still have a 1080, three years ago the 20xx series was new, then came the 30xxs, and now the 40xxs are the ones that you can also not buy. The last two digits denote the class of graphics card within each generation, ..90 being the highest, ..80, ..70, ... As a rule of thumb, if you can afford a ..70, go for it. Given the choice (availability!) and a similar price, I'd prefer a 2070 over a 3050. ..80s are also fine but are going up in price and energy consumption (see below), the ..90s are even worse.

..60s are tolerable, take a ..50 if you must, don't bother with anything below that. I'd rather try my luck with a used 1070 from eBay than a brand new 3030.

If it's an AMD card, check the internet for performance comparisons with an NVidia card, and then use the rule of thumb laid out above as your guideline what to expect from it. AMD cards are also fine. Deservedly or not, the reputation of the quality of their driver software isn't quite as high, but i would not let that deter me from buying one if I could get a decent model at close to the recommended retail price that is equivalent to a 3070 or so.

 

Third, choice of CPU. Personally, I like the AMD Ryzen 5000 family a lot. You get 12...16 CPU cores at moderate prices and with moderate thermal budget. Intel still offers the absolute top in single thread performance, but either at a hefty premium for the processor price, or at the expense of a (much) higher thermal design power. TDP sounds like an abstract technical term. But think of it as the waste that the CPU produces (in the form of heat). The higher the TDP, the more heat you need to cool away from the CPU. More heat means bigger cooling systems with faster rotating fans. I don't know about you, but I like my PCs not to be heard if possible. So, my Ryzen has a TDP of 65 watts which is my threshold beyond which waste begins. Other people mioght draw the line differently, and if we're talking about a notebook computer then 35 watt TDP are already a serious challenge. So, it depends a bit on what computer it shall be.

 

Memory: You can have decent Steel Beasts performance with 16 GByte. There may be (rare) occasions where 32 GByte are better, but we will design SB Pro 5.x to perform well with 16 GByte if possible. If you must save, 8 GByte will still be tolerable for the next few years, hopefully even longer. More than 32 GByte seems like waste to me.

 

If you buy a preconfigured PC with a decent graphics card, everything below would not help you to make a decision unless you love analysis paralysis. But of course you'd want a decent sized SSD (there are very few real stinkers out there), in which case you might no longer need a classic HDD. If you want your PC powerful and still somewhat silent, look for a decent casing with a sufficiently powerful (but not overpowered) power supply unit that has power factor correction and a good efficiency rating. Note that the efficiency is highest close to the nominal peak power, but most of the time your PC will spent idling, and whenever the PC idles the PSU becomes more wasteful. Watercooling is nice, but for a 65W CPU not yet a must if the rest of the casing is designed for noise reduction.

[Lumituisku]

What would be biggest factor for speeding up map editing? Currently i need to wait atleast 10 minutes.. even an hour to level couple of roads.

 

I think i recently upgraded graphics card to 2070 super. And i have 32 gigabytes of ram on current. So that's what I'll stick to. Sadly that's about as far as my PC knowledge gets.   

 

based on packaging i probably have 

Asus prime Z270-A  motherboard 

 

as for other stuff... I have little idea of what i got. 

 

I just dream of creating my own versions of Finnish Maps to update those to be more playable and immersive. (Within SB limits and artistic freedom)  and I'd like to have small roads and such leveled as well. Especially near multitude of bodies of waters found from Finnish Maps. 

 

Last time my bugged was capped to 1500€... This time i could potentially double that if it would offer significant boost in performance. 

 

one of my biggest grief is running out if hard drive space for recorded videos and game installations. So that is something I need to address as well. I think i have like 3x 500gb flash drives that are almost full due to games getting too big. Especially flight simulators and Arma. Hence I have prioritized to most important and that is Steelbeast. 

 

[Ssnake]

First off, I think 4.3 is going to speed up some of these operations, if I remember some remarks by our programmers in the weekly meetings from the last six months.

 

Second, hard to say what hardware is going to speed up things for you without knowing the baseline (the specs of your current PC).

Third, "more is more"; if you currently have a rather meagre amount of RAM, then more is going to help. If you have just two CPU cores from ten years ago at 2.2 GHz, well, 16 cores at 3.5 GHz will not just get certain things done faster by a factor of 12 as the naive multiplication might suggest, but rather by factor 20 as each year CPUs, on average, tend to get 5% faster per cycle. On the other hand, single-thread performance will grow from that 2.2GHz machine only by factor 2.5 in this given example.

 

Semi-coherent rant with a skewed car analogy:

The by far biggest improvement you will see with the version 5 engine because Steel Beasts is not very efficient with certain tasks at the moment. Since 2016 we have invested a fair bit of effort into improving the overall performance. But that has limits.

Let's say, you're preparing a 1960s clunker car for racing. It's made of thick steel sheets, it has a gearbox with three gears forward. Sure, you can put in new shock absorbers, put on new tires, remove seats from the interior to save weight ... but the car still has only three gears forward, the engine won't deliver more than 3,000 RPM, and the 2.5 tons of steel, even if rusty, can't easily be replaced. So there is a limit of what potential this car has. Not saying that Steel Beasts is a rusty 1960s clunker car, just pointing out that what could be improved in performance since 2016, we largely did with version 4.1 and 4.2; so 4.3 and subsequent 4.xs will not suddenly crush old performance records. So, to stay in the car analogy, let's say you find an engine from another car that you can fit into the clunker, and that engine will go up to 4,500 RPM. Then with this change and everything else you can maybe reduce the lap time by 15%. That's a huge improvement in some sense - until you realize that a new car built from ground up could reduce lap times by 40% without optimizations, and then later maybe by 95% compared to the original baseline.

 

 

What I'm trying to say with this is, faster hardware today is going to improve things a bit for you, but maybe not dramatically so, depending on your starting point and what the specific bottleneck is. But if you buy a new PC these days, then you should factor in what's going to be beneficial with version 5 once that it's ready for you because it's going to be ready faster than a PC bought today is going to become obsolete.

[Scrapper_511]

I found that switching to SSD greatly improved load times. I now have all SB files installed on an M.2 drive. I still use a traditional mechanical disk drive but it's 7200rpm and stores mostly wargames.