Oolite 1.90 system survey / hardware requirements

[alvaro84]

As you may know I have a hobby of building older systems - which started as 'simple' CPU collecting, whatever... And lately I made a few test builds that I felt to be worth to try with oolite.

My usual oolite rig is an AMD A4-6300 with 8 GiB of DDR3-1600 and it can play oolite at ~30W or so. Yes, sometimes I measure power consumption and include IGP systems because I have a (heavy) streak of environmentalist in me. There will be system in the list though that we can say about measuring its current draw that they're horrible in that respect.

So, let's start with what I tried so far - more may come in new posts in the future. FM1 is a probable candidate for testing in the near future.

[alvaro84]

Socket FM2: AMD A4-6300, 2-core/2-thread Richland, built-in Radeon graphics: Though it's arguably 2 independent cores (the court has approved to this nomenclature btw) and it's famously AMD's low IPC design (so slowed clock-2-clock than Intel offerings or AMD's own earlier designs) it has no CPU problems with Oolite. Of course if we look back to the origins and see that a 20MHz 286 could flawlessly trace Elite Plus' (much simpler) world and even fluently do its complete rendering - it's not a big deal. But we know that oolite - unlike Elite - does follow the whole system instead of a radar-range-sized chunk of space so it may be a bottleneck later. Spoiler, it will be. But it isn't in this case. The A4 would hardly break a sweat during the long hours of playing, what's more, it hardly ever left its base clock of perhaps 1.6GHz.
Graphic performance is pretty decent, it can do 60fps in 1080p almost all the time, except for planet closeups, rock hermit dockings facing the planet and nearby exploding ships or asteroids. Reducing the graphic setting won't help much, so you can just leave it on extra detail. But you can lower the APU's graphic performance by simply giving it slower or - which conspicuously hurts - single channel memory. With dual channel DDR3-1600 (and enabled vsync) planet closeups are locked at 30fps and the rest of the game is basically silky smooth. And the system pulls it all off out of a ~30-watt thermal envelope which is remarkable for a system most definitely not famous for its energy efficiency. Thankfully this CPU is idle most of the playtime. And the 80+ Gold PSU and that single SSD helps too.

Socket 775: Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad (any), P35 chipset with dual channel DDR2-800 memory and a dedicated VGA, a Radeon 6670 with 1GiB of GDDR5 memory. Despite being quite a bit older this system plays the game very well, the same or better than the FM2 rig. Of course Core 2 CPUs don't have any built-in graphics, nor does the chipset which I can only be thankful for. With the help of the DVGA any Core 2 Duo/Quad processor I tried was plenty fast for the game, load times and system transitions were still quite snappy. In the planet closeup test the DVGA did perhaps even better than the IGP of the Richland APU. Which is expected with its dedicated GDDR5 memory.

Socket AM2/AM3, any Phenom/II/Athlon II/64 CPU, dual channel DDR2-1066 RAM. This one worked just as well as the LGA-775 system, even the Brisbane Athlon 64 at 2.5 GHz (model 4850E, 45W TDP) and both had much higher power consumption, partly due to the DVGA. I have no exact data here, though.

Socket 775 recap, Pentium D 945: I just couldn't stop looking for trouble. I suspected that the Pentium D will exhibit some poor performance in the same system compared to its Core 2 successors but I got more than I bargained for. Oolite seemed to hit a massive CPU bottleneck as even the empty sky moved jerky as I turned around. Having some ships around just made things worse. Probably keeping track of the entities in the whole planetary system around the ship was just too much for the old Netburst processor, or, to be more precise, one core of it.

LGA-1207, AMD Opteron 4170 HE: This CPU has many (6) cores and low clock rate which doesn't make it ideal for Oolite - but it has enough oomph in each of its cores to make it a moot point. It worked flawlessly though I had to work a bit on the immensely noisy cooling which this particular 6-core (but 65-watt, at least by TDP figure) CPU didn't really need, especially not for Oolite.

LGA-1150, Core i3 4130, Pentium G1840: This time I didn't go overboard with the cores, both tested models stop at two. This system provided two surprises: a pleasant and an unpleasant. The pleasant part was the IGP itself. In the case of the i3 which could even run the pair of ddr3 sticks at 1600 MHz it seemed to almost as able to run Oolite as AMD's integrated Radeon. And this was HD4400, not HD4600. It could present 30-fps planet close-ups and while the Pentium (HD Graphics 1.5) was somewhat slower (20-fps close-ups) it was still smooth most of the time. I had heard that lately it's not the hardware that's wrong with Intel's integrated graphics solutions. It's - the unpleasant surprise. The driver just crashed and reset itself several times, taking oolite with itself, mostly when I dared to touch alt+tab to change music in the concurrently running player. Trying to switch tasks when one is a fullscreen (or even windowed, I tried that too!) game, I did something scandalous, really. The driver was right to not withstand such an unprecedented insult.

Socket FS1, Sempron 2650: It's supposedly a small footprint, limited platform and unfortunately the only CPU I have for the board is a Sempron, which is the most neutered model of the family. It's a very modern piece in this comparison though, and is kind of capable of running Oolite. Not very well, but at least much better than the ancient Pentium D, while the whole system consumes ~20 Watts(!) doing so. Game experience is not really good, though. Loads take unpleasantly long for the 1.45GHz Kabini core(s), and entering the hyperspace tunnel is another seconds or two. Should anything be around, the whole world moves in a jerky manner, with occassional hiccups. For example, explosions tend to skip a few frames. Once I was completely spared from the image of a disintegrating enemy ship, the game stood stuck for a good fraction of a second and when it resumed there was nothing but a drifting metal plate where the assassin ship had been. So it's not great by any means but somewhat playable. Definitely much better than Elite had been on the majority of 8-bit micros back in the day. It never goes slide show, for example. I'd really like to see better models from this lineup.

[Cody]

That's some hobby you've got there! Building a new machine once every five or six years is more than enough for me.
In my most recent build (last year), I used new (but mostly older-spec) components (i5-4690K/DDR3).

The driver was right to not withstand such an unprecedented insult.

<chuckles>

[Cholmondely]

As you may know I have a hobby of building older systems - which started as 'simple' CPU collecting, whatever... And lately I made a few test builds that I felt to be worth to try with oolite.

My usual oolite rig is an AMD A4-6300 with 8 GiB of DDR3-1600 and it can play oolite at ~30W or so. Yes, sometimes I measure power consumption and include IGP systems because I have a (heavy) streak of environmentalist in me. There will be system in the list though that we can say about measuring its current draw that they're horrible in that respect.

So, let's start with what I tried so far - more may come in new posts in the future. FM1 is a probable candidate for testing in the near future.

So, just out of curiosity, are you just running the newest version of Oolite, or have you also been experimenting with any of the earlier versions too?

[Cholmondely]

... we have electricity and 'net and it's all that matters, we can get drinking water with an electric pump after all

... I figured out a flying pattern that helps me survive indefinitely after hopelessly crowded arrivals in a dreaded isolated anarchy. Okay, I've heard about 'spiraling' but I needed to learn how to stabilize my direction to actually get somewhere. I haven't reached the station yet, btw, my patience got in the way At least I killed a few assassins of the 24 or so before I got shot (I know I can do better!) before I died...

How was coping with covid out there in the wilderness - could you get everything that you needed?

As regards spiralling patterns -what do you make of Dybal's Barrel Roll oxp?

[alvaro84]

So, just out of curiosity, are you just running the newest version of Oolite, or have you also been experimenting with any of the earlier versions too?

Is 1.90 the last stable release? It is, isn't it?

Are there major changes in the beta builds since then? If so, I may try some. As long as I muster enough time to do so.

I've tried FM1 in the meantime, btw.

So...

Socket FM1, various CPUs, DDR3-1333:

The A4 variants played pretty much like their FM2 counterparts, though in terms of energy efficiency it was another (not that big) step back. IIRC even the biggest one I tried (A8-3870) was better than a system with a dedicated Radeon 6670. In Oolite, at least. And, it could even provide playable 720p/medium frame rate in the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider. Not a dedicated VGA level but respectable nevertheless. Could have been even a bit better if I had 4 identical sticks of DDR3-1600. Or I took the trouble to fish out at least two sticks of any 1600-MHz memories from my DDR3 box and put them back when I finished with the system

Socket775 recap, again: Pentium 4 3.6GHz (Prescott-2M): It played definitely better than Pentium D did last time and I have no idea why. Surely not because of the 200-MHz surplus. With empty sky it could touch 60fps or hovered just a tad below. Planet views were down at 20fps - I suspected it's a burden on the VGA part but I didn't know it taxes the CPU too. Btw this processor introduced itself with an emergency shutdown on oolite's first start. Okay, I just placed (and pressed) a cooler on it with some generic thermal paste but so I did with everything in this socket... It was just hot. Celeron Dual Core, Conroe-L, 2.4GHz: Similar or a bit better performance, with less heat of course. And one more processor in the same ballpark - Core 2 Duo E6300, 1.86GHz, 2MiB of cache. A very modest piece in the lineup yet it did quite well, despite the low clock rate. None of these were the "full 60fps all the time" experience but all playable, after all.

How was coping with covid out there in the wilderness - could you get everything that you needed?

As regards spiralling patterns -what do you make of Dybal's Barrel Roll oxp?

COVID was an interesting subject to watch from the news - and of course being limited when visited the civilization, like on shopping trips. Everything was just as accessible, except for a short time when idiots bought up everything they could just to throw out the spoiled food later (by then they realized that the necessary stores stayed open). Curfews don't count too much out here and I could even get away with not wearing a mask when there was no other human being in half a kilometer or so. Work was just the same. I work with complete bogans who didn't even care about masks. It's a miracle that the majority of them took the vaccine when they were offered.

Ummm... what could that OXP do...? I'll look into it.

[alvaro84]

In the meantime I looked up the Barrell Roll OXP and I think that a.) It makes perfect sense b.) The situations when it makes the most sense are not sensible anyway I don't know if it's playing on a keyboard or just my abilities but when there's a big fleet of hostiles I usually just don't enjoy playing. And when it becomes a chore, why would I do it...? I have more than enough chores anyway. But, the OXP can help.

The reason I looked back is two new APUs I found and tried with Oolite. Still 1.90, still Dangerous HUD in glass mode (it's the name of the clear, cockpit-less mode, right?). So...

Socket FS1, Athlon 5150, DC DDR3-1600: This APU supports a higher memory clock so I could go with DDR3-1600. It has 4 cores instead of the Sempron's 2, but a similar low clock speed (okay, it's 1.6GHz instead of the Sempron's 1.45). Its IGP is 1.5 times higher clocked than the Sempron's. Overall, it seems to be closer to an ideal Oolite system than the Sempron in the same socket. The system still lags when enters/exits witch space tunnels, it hiccups time to time but when there's nothing big in the view it can more or less reach 60fps. Not a perfect experience by far, but I deem it playable. The system's power consumption mostly hovers in the 20-25W range, can be even less on text screens and rarely a bit more on, like a planet view.

Socket FM2, A10-7890K, still DDR3-1600: Isn't much better than the "little" A4 was. Its IGP is a vastly superior GCN based one, its CPU cores are improved too but honestly it still can't make it a "constant 60fps" system like basically any modern desktop CPU and dedicated VGA can be together. Its power consumption exceeded the Richland A4 too, though not by very much during such a low spec game. Perfectly playable though, with no hiccups, it's just 30fps on planet close-ups.

It seems that with these two platforms Oolite performance was quite closely related to power consumption. And the Richland A4 still feels like a sweet spot for this game.

And then something very different, a relatively old laptop.

Socket 478 mobile, Core 2 Duo T7250 and a Geforce 8400 called a Quadro: Horrible. The DVGA definitely feels too weak, the frame rate is in the single digits, even at lower resolutions. IIRC it wasn't even smooth in 640x480. Unplayable. But it's definitely not the CPU's fault, I've seen a lower clocked C2D run the game very well with a competent DVGA. I'm typing on this very laptop now and it's okay to write the book I'm working on but to play Oolite -it just won't cut it.

[alvaro84]

In the meantime I could try a few new things and some platforms/families could redeem themselves, partly.

First, it was the Socket 775 incarnation of the Prescott Pentium 4 that, unlike last time, could deliver and run the game in a completely playable manner. It was a 3.8GHz piece, though. I don't understand why the 3.0GHz Pentium D was so much worse, though...

Second, I could try a Core i3 piece of the Socket 1150 Haswell family and oolite was playable AND stable on it. I don't know if the driver has a completely different code path for the i3's different IGP but it forgot to die when I switched tasks. Hooray!

A very new platform arrived too, the very first DDR4 based system in my possession. It's a very humble Celeron 3900 which is a 2-core Socket 1151 Skylake, still no AVX but at least an apparently semi-decent IGP (for oolite, I mean). Strange phenomenon though that it's IMMENSELY worse if I turn on vsync. It seems to very slightly dip under 30 fps on planet close-ups, which immediately turns into straight 20 with vsync. So it's potentially closing on the Richland A4 but still falls short in certain situations. I'm curious if it's memory bandwidth limited, though as I only have one DDR4-2400 module that runs at 2133MHz, limited by the Celeron's IMC. And its power consumption seems somewhat lower than that of the Richland so its perf-per-watt may be similar.

Another "new" thing that brings the same perf-per-watt thing was Celeron J1900 which is a Silvermont Atom-based celery. Even lower frame rate, power needs often under 20 Watts, I found it borderline playable. Not very good, but if it's the only system, it may do. Don't look at planets, avert your eyes when docking Dogfight close-ups... dunno.