Sid Meier’s Civilization VII Unveils PC Requirements Ahead of February 2025 Release

[Tsing]

Sid Meier's Civilization VII, a new installment of the award-winning strategy game franchise that is said to be a revolutionary chapter of the series, bringing about key features that include three distinct ages, multi-Age multiplayer matches, and more, will require an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070, AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, or better GPU for the Ultra experience (i.e., 4K/60 FPS under the High graphics preset), according to a list of PC requirements that developer Firaxis Games and publisher 2K shared today.

See full article...

 

[Grimlakin]

Ok that AMD cpu requirement for ultra 4k is... surprising. you want 16 cores of compute for this game?? I'd love to see if that's real.

 

[Zarathustra]

Ok that AMD cpu requirement for ultra 4k is... surprising. you want 16 cores of compute for this game?? I'd love to see if that's real.

In both Civ 5 and 6 they claimed awesome threaded scaling prior to launch, but once the game launched, it turned out to not be that awesome after all.

After I picked up my Threadripper 3960x in 2019 (24C/48T) I decided to test how Civ VI was loaded up. This was the result:



It seems to be avoiding SMT all together, and only running anything at all on one thread per physical core.

If we count the threads that have any load I count about 22 (depending on what your threshold for noise at the bottom is) but if we are talking threads hat are doing any real work, 16 seems to be the magic number (maybe 18 if you are generous)

I also did not note any significant end of round or framerate performance increase (as measured in the internal benchmark) by adding more cores.

Would be really cool if Civ 7 is able to really distribute the CPU actions at round end and speed that up, as it can bog things down a little late game on really large maps.

 

[Zarathustra]

Overall, these requirements are a little confusing.

But that is maybe to be expected, as most of our norms are not based on turn based strategy games.

In typical games, you'd expect cranking up resolution to 4k to maybe even reduce the demand on the CPU, but in a game like this maybe showing a larger zoomed out map with many moving things that need CPU threads that would not be the case.

Ever since Civ 5 I've found that Sid Meiers Civilization games had surprisingly high system requirements for what they did. I used to be really surprised when Civ5 was actually used in CPU/GPU reviews, because in theory displaying a god mode map shouldn't be that resource intense.

Civ 7 seems like an improvement in that regard. For a 2025 game to list a GTX 1050 as minimum specs, that is pretty system friendly.

And Ultra4K recommending a 4070 also doesn't seem too bad.

The CPU requirements are - as previously mentioned - a little confusing Minimum and recommended requirements seem surprisingly friendly, but the high specs look quite demanding. If they are truly taking advantage of all those cores and clocks, that could be awesome. Time will tell.

 

[LazyGamer]

I've played Civ 5 at 1080p on a Skylake IGP, and at 4k on a 5700G...

Realistically the GPU is just there for fidelity.

But as Z questions above... we wonder how 'threaded' the game will be. Would be nice to be able to throw threads at it and see a noticeable difference!

 

[Zarathustra]

I've played Civ 5 at 1080p on a Skylake IGP, and at 4k on a 5700G...

Realistically the GPU is just there for fidelity.

But as Z questions above... we wonder how 'threaded' the game will be. Would be nice to be able to throw threads at it and see a noticeable difference!

Well, keep in mind Civ5 came out 14 years ago now.

LOTS of people were complaining how resource intensive it was when it was first launched.

Then a whole bunch of people complained that it "killed" their GeForce 9800 series GPU's. There were also lots of complaints about how DX11 was required for good looking graphics.

 

[Brian_B]

There were also lots of complaints about how DX11 was required for good looking graphics.

Ooo yah that’s when tesselation was the latest buzz word

 

[Zarathustra]

Ooo yah that’s when tesselation was the latest buzz word

Yep.

Even the [H] used Civilization V as part of its bnechmark suite at that time.

As an example, here is a chart from an overclocking review of the Galaxy GTX560Ti from February 2011:



"Civilization V received the smallest improvement with a 12.4% improvement in performance with the overclocked Galaxy GTX 560 Ti GC. This was enough though to bring performance above the Radeon HD 6950 slightly at this setting."

I've played Civ 5 at 1080p on a Skylake IGP, and at 4k on a 5700G...

But yeah, time passes. Which Skylake IGP are we talking? Skylake came out 5 years after Civ5 was launched. The "Iris pro 580" IGP performance at ~68% of the 560 Ti tested above.

...and the Vega8 IGPU in the 5700G when it launched over a decade after Civ 5, was actually ever so slightly faster than the 560Ti above.

The passage of time tends to do that. A good IGP from the last few years is faster than a midrange discrete GPU's from 2011. After all, 2011 was 13 years ago now.

I was semi-active on the 2k Forums Civ5 subforum about the time that Civ5 launched and everyone was complaining.

So many people were outraged at the "insane" system requirements of Civ5 and how poorly it ran on their GeForce 9800 GT's, so in a few of those threads I speced out a few sample PC builds that would be able to handle Civ5 on a budget.

From memory (because the forum has been shut down, and the content no longer exists for me to review, unless it was randomly captured on the Internet Archive) I recommended K10 Athlon X2's with GTX 460's.

If I recall, these wound up being full systems at just about $500 (excluding monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers/headphones as I assumed people would already have those)

It was a pretty nice and inexpensive combo for 1080p on Civ 5. You can't build a decent modern system for that little money anymore.

I actually built one of these for a kid where I bought an Athlon X2, unlocked two cores and the extra cache and turned it into a Phenom II x4, and then overclocked it up to 4.2Ghz. That CPU was a budget screamer. Then I paired it with a GTX460 OC model (can't remember which) Cost next to nothing, but performed pretty **** well for the time.

I mean, an intel CPU would have done better at that time, but it would also have been WAY more expensive.

 

[LazyGamer]

But yeah, time passes. Which Skylake IGP are we talking? Skylake came out 5 years after Civ5 was launched. The "Iris pro 580" IGP performance at ~68% of the 560 Ti tested above.

Mobile Kaby Lake with UHD 620, slowly but surely. Laptop is my wife's now, definitely at the 5-year mark itself.

At the time of Civ 5 though... I was generally pushing the edge regardless, so such games didn't really impress on me much from the performance perspective. I know I didn't try them till much later, though.

 

[Burticus]

LOL I didn't think Civ 5 even used that many threads. The end game on big maps gets brutal between turns.

I still play Civ 5 with the Vox Populi mod. If you haven't tried it you really should. It changes/fixes SO many things.

I have buyer's remorse for Beyond Earth and Civ 6..... I bought BOTH at full launch price, bc how could a Civ game be bad. Well...... BE is just plain bad, and Civ 6 just rubs me the wrong way on too many levels. I won't be buying Civ 7 at launch that is for sure, it always takes them a couple years of patches and expansions to fine tune the things.

It would be nice if Firaxis would release the Civ 6 SDK when 7 comes out, then maybe the Vox team could port it over the 6 engine. But since there is no money in it for them, I doubt Firaxis will do it.

 

[Zarathustra]

LOL I didn't think Civ 5 even used that many threads. The end game on big maps gets brutal between turns.

I still play Civ 5 with the Vox Populi mod. If you haven't tried it you really should. It changes/fixes SO many things.

I hadn't heard of Vox Populi until a few days ago. I might give it a try.

I have buyer's remorse for Beyond Earth and Civ 6..... I bought BOTH at full launch price, bc how could a Civ game be bad. Well...... BE is just plain bad, and Civ 6 just rubs me the wrong way on too many levels.

I never got into Beyond earth. The basis in history has always been a large part of what appealed to me about the Civ series. The concept of Beyond Earth just didn't interest me as much, so I never bought it.

I've been getting my Civ fix from Civ 6 since launch, but I have been playing a hell of a lot less of it than I ever played Civ 5 or (Civ 4 for that matter).

Something about it just didn't speak to me in the same way.

I won't be buying Civ 7 at launch that is for sure, it always takes them a couple years of patches and expansions to fine tune the things.

I am cautiously avoiding passing judgment on what I have heard from Civ 7. I want to like it, but I am nervous about many of the changes they are making. I am going to reserve judgment until I actually get to play it.

But yeah, since Civ4, new Civ games have launched boring and unfulfilling, only to get better with the first expansion, and excellent with the second.

I have no doubt 7 will follow this same track. It almost seems inevitable.

I'll probably still buy the vanilla game though.

 

[Burticus]

I hadn't heard of Vox Populi until a few days ago. I might give it a try.



I never got into Beyond earth. The basis in history has always been a large part of what appealed to me about the Civ series. The concept of Beyond Earth just didn't interest me as much, so I never bought it.

I've been getting my Civ fix from Civ 6 since launch, but I have been playing a hell of a lot less of it than I ever played Civ 5 or (Civ 4 for that matter).

Something about it just didn't speak to me in the same way.

Community Patch Project

The expanded UI takes some getting used to, it throws a TON of info on the screen. On a big honkin' monitor, it's fine. On a laptop it makes for a cramped experience. Parts of it can be turned off. The AI is SO much harder than vanilla. And navies REALLY matter. I never gave a crap about navies in vanilla.

So for me when BE was announced, I immediately thought of Alpha Centuari which was great back in the day. Not even in the same ballpark.

And yeah I'm sure I'll end up buying 7 eventually but I'll let it get cheaper and get patched up a bit first.

 

[Zarathustra]

Community Patch Project

The expanded UI takes some getting used to, it throws a TON of info on the screen. On a big honkin' monitor, it's fine. On a laptop it makes for a cramped experience. Parts of it can be turned off.

Should be fun at 4k

The AI is SO much harder than vanilla.

I'd welcome that.

While I love Civ, the one thing I hate about it is that difficulty is based simply based on production, money, etc. penalty points. Back when I played Civ 5 all the time, I could reliably win most games at King, and sometimes at Emperor, but I found it more fun to play at Prince as thats when the penalty points are even.

I'd much rather have even penalty points and face a more difficult AI than the other way around.

And navies REALLY matter. I never gave a crap about navies in vanilla.

I'm a little different. Navies have often been a huge part of my strategy, at least mid to late game.

I usually start the largest maps with the most civs and marathon speeds.

I tend to have this "my starting continent is mine and mine alone" mentality early game, so lots of land battles to secure my home continent in early game. Once I've conquered my continent I slow down. The m,ilitary units used in th eland war get upgraded and used when necessary, but I don't really build much more of a land army from that point on.

If my playthroughgoes perfectly, I will have conquered my starting continent before I meet any civs off-continent, so I don't have to deal with "warmonger" penalties from other civs.

I'll build settler units, and if any civ pisses me off and tries to settle in any empty space on my continent, I'll take it from them, but other than that, my land war years are over at that point.

This is when I build up my navy and defend my continent.

I tend to like to build up three fleets of 5 ranged ships and 5 melee ships each to be able to handle multiple conflicts at the same time. Sometimes I do this in large part by using Privateer units and taking "prize ships". The cool part is that they tretain their "prize ships" ability when they are upraded all the way to destroyers. If I am feeling frisky I'll add an aircraft carrier and a few planes to each fleet for good measure (and a little air defense) I also give each a great admiral if I can.

Late game, whenever an opponent is at risk of scoring a culture, or other victory against me, I figure out which - if any - conquered cities or city states they have within reach of the coast, and go there and liberate them. It gives me liberation brownie points in diplomacy, at the same time as it degrades their abilities to steal a victory away from me. Essentially, it allows me to intervene in their ability to win without pissing off all th eother states so they stp trading with me (and giving me the amenities I need to keep my large emprie happy)

I don't like to win conquest victories, so I usually just use my overpowering navy to defend my interests while I go for the Science, Culture or other win depending on what I am feeling like at the time.

I should mix it up some time, but I tend to fall into this strategy for whatever reason. It's comfortable and well worn at this point I guess.

So for me when BE was announced, I immediately thought of Alpha Centuari which was great back in the day. Not even in the same ballpark.

I never played either. I did watch some gameplay samples when BE came out and decided I wasnt really interested. I remember thinking Alpha Centauri would be cool back in the day, but I was very busy in the late 90's, so I pretty much skipped all of the Civ II and III era only getting back into the franchise when Civ IV launched.

And yeah I'm sure I'll end up buying 7 eventually but I'll let it get cheaper and get patched up a bit first.

That is probably a good idea.

My recollection is that vanilla Civ5 had some brutal resource and money accounting bugs when it first launched. Like somethign could mess up, and suddenly you had -100 amenities for no apparent reason, and your civ started revolting.

Other times, something similar would happen with money, and all of a sudden all of your units would start disbanding due to insufficient cash.

They seem to have (mostly) fixed this over time though.

 

[Zarathustra]

Community Patch Project

The expanded UI takes some getting used to, it throws a TON of info on the screen. On a big honkin' monitor, it's fine. On a laptop it makes for a cramped experience. Parts of it can be turned off. The AI is SO much harder than vanilla. And navies REALLY matter. I never gave a crap about navies in vanilla.

So for me when BE was announced, I immediately thought of Alpha Centuari which was great back in the day. Not even in the same ballpark.

And yeah I'm sure I'll end up buying 7 eventually but I'll let it get cheaper and get patched up a bit first.

I just installed it last night.

After some initial problems (I have never used a mod in any Civ game before, I didn't realize I had to start the game from the mod menu, not the main menu) I am really liking it.

I had also forgotten how much more I appreciate the Civ5 graphics over the Civ6 cartoon art style.

Thanks for bringing this up, I'm not sure I would have given it a try if you hadn't.

 

[Burticus]

I just installed it last night.

After some initial problems (I have never used a mod in any Civ game before, I didn't realize I had to start the game from the mod menu, not the main menu) I am really liking it.

I had also forgotten how much more I appreciate the Civ5 graphics over the Civ6 cartoon art style.

Thanks for bringing this up, I'm not sure I would have given it a try if you hadn't.

Hope you enjoy it.

Yeah even if you yeet out of a game to restart you have to re-engage the mods.

I love the customizable options like Espionage etc. I hate the Espionage part and you can just turn it off.

It is also constantly in development and refinement. Bugs get squashed pretty quickly. The only downside to the constant updates is the savegames are not typically compatible with newer versions. So if you're a play for a while, put it aside for a while, then go back type of player, don't update Vox unless you're ready to start a new game.

And yeah I don't love the Civ 6 cartoony style at all.

 

[Zarathustra]

In both Civ 5 and 6 they claimed awesome threaded scaling prior to launch, but once the game launched, it turned out to not be that awesome after all.

After I picked up my Threadripper 3960x in 2019 (24C/48T) I decided to test how Civ VI was loaded up. This was the result:

View attachment 3309

It seems to be avoiding SMT all together, and only running anything at all on one thread per physical core.

If we count the threads that have any load I count about 22 (depending on what your threshold for noise at the bottom is) but if we are talking threads hat are doing any real work, 16 seems to be the magic number (maybe 18 if you are generous)

I also did not note any significant end of round or framerate performance increase (as measured in the internal benchmark) by adding more cores.

Would be really cool if Civ 7 is able to really distribute the CPU actions at round end and speed that up, as it can bog things down a little late game on really large maps.

I've played Civ 5 at 1080p on a Skylake IGP, and at 4k on a 5700G...

Realistically the GPU is just there for fidelity.

But as Z questions above... we wonder how 'threaded' the game will be. Would be nice to be able to throw threads at it and see a noticeable difference!

Just to add to this a little bit, here are the AI end of turn time benchmarks from my last two CPU's in my main desktop. I also - for ****s and giggles - tested it on my testbench machine with its rather large queanttity of old slow Xeon cores (the board and CPUs were from my old server)

CPU	Vanilla Civ 6 End of Turn Benchmark Time	Gathering Storm End of Turn Benchmark Time
Sandy Bridge-E, 6C/12T, 4.7Ghz OC	16.76s​	N/A*​
2x Ivy Bridge Xeon E5-2697 V2 24C/48T total at 2.7Ghz base, max turbo of 3.5Ghz	8.47s​	48.46​
Threadripper 3960x (Zen2, 24C/48T, 3.8Ghz base 4.5Ghz max turbo)	6.72s​	31.61s​

*Sadly I didn't have this CPU installed in any system that could run the game once Gathering Storm came out, so I never tested it.

The comparison is interesting.

The first system was highly overclocked. It never throttled, and ran at 4.7Ghz on all cores.

The second system is Ivy bridge, which means a maybe ~3% IPC improvement, but at the same time the core clocks are much MUCH lower. (anywhere from 57% to 74% of the top systems clock depending on turbo level. I forgot to check what it was actually clocking at in this test, but in less threaded loads (Like TimeSpy) it has no problem pinning itself at 3.5Ghz as illustrated below:

I scored 3 349 in Time Spy

Intel Xeon Processor E5-2697 v2, NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan x 1, 262116 MB, 64-bit Windows 10}

www.3dmark.com

(Yes, it is amusing, apparently I hold a world record in Timespy for a system with 2x Xeon E5-2697's and a 2013 6GB Kepler Titan as I beat the "best" score. Which is particularly odd, as everything was running at stock. What were the others doing to get lower scores?)

The Threadripper of course shreds everything else, as - despite it being 5 years old now, compared to the other CPU's it has both high core count and best per thread performance of the three.

But the interesting part is the comparison between the Sandy bridge chip and the Ivy Bridge server.

If Civ6 couldn't take advantage of threading above 6C/12T, the server chips should lose badly. The per thread performance, once IPC improvements are factored in is only 59% to 75% of the per thread performance of the sandy chip, and it also uses registered ECC RAM which is slower. It does have a boatload of RAM (256GB) but the Sandy system also had a decent amount (64GB) so I doubt that made much of a difference.

So the fact that it has many cores was able to not just make up for its much lower per core performance, but also allowed it to surpass the Sandy chip, coming within a hair of doubling its performance.

That is actually pretty cool, and illustrates that while Civ6 maybe doesn't quite take advantage of all the cores, it can definitely scale with core counts well above typical desktop levels.

I'm actually amused at how well this over a decade old server board actually handles both Civ5 and Civ6.

Civ5 shouldn't be a surprise. It had already been on the market for 3 years when both this Xeon and the 6GB Titan were launched in 2013. It handles them admirably.

In typical heavy late game scenarios, I get ~80-90fps in Civ 5.

In Civ 6, it only musters ~48fps in heavy late game scenes, but this is Civ. Civ is playable even at 15fps. And honestly, the heavy late game benchmark is kind of extreme. It definitely does 60fps in early game, and probably manages to do so most of a playthrough.

I only have it hooked up to a ****ty 1680x1050 HP monitor I pulled out of a recycling bin on th eloading dock at work a decade ago, so it isnt exactly challenging the titan with high resolution gamiong, but still. The fact that this aging hulk of a server board and my old Tiitan does even this well, is actually pretty amusing.

So, anyway, long story short. Yes. Civ6 benefits from threadcount.