Planet Coaster performance on newer CPU's?

[Ramm]

Hello everyone,

Haven't really been here or playing much games anyway lately and am looking into getting into it again now that winter time is coming and there is less to do outside. I really love Planet Coaster but since I am only running an intel i7 6700k I did have alot of performance issues when playing medium to big parks. I could pretty much only play small parks before framerates became too low that it became unplayable (for me this is pretty much when it goes below 40fps).

As my current 6700k is getting older (I think I have had it for 5 or maybe 6 years by now) I am looking into upgrading my system especially with newest generation of AMD and Intel CPU's being just around the corner. Now I kinda am curious about people's experience with newer CPU's. The more cores and the higher the Ghz the better?

I would love for people to share their experience, what their CPU's are (and motherboard and ram if that helps) and what framerates they are experiencing in what kind of parks. Surely as CPU's improve this game framerate improves too and I can now finally build my maximum-sized dreampark full of coasters, rides, scenery and guests without getting to unplayable framerates.

Thanks alot for sharing your experience and tips!

 

[Gohax]

The more cores and the higher the Ghz the better?

Hi,

I cannot speak from hands-on experience as I'm still using a 4th gen i7, but your above question hints at a common misconception about CPUs in gaming. If you don't mind a wall of text, I will answer with a simplified bit of theory:

GHz as an indicator for real-world speed became pretty much obsolete about 12 years ago (give or take). The frequency, measured in Hertz, denotes the internal reference clock speed inside a CPU. You might notice that the GHz are pretty much stuck between 3 and 4.5 for many years now. That is due to physical limitations. However, actual computation speeds vary widely for different CPU models, even if they share the same frequency. A 3GHz CPU from 2010 is drastically slower than a 3GHz CPU from 2022. That is because many other optimizations have been implemented inside CPUs to get faster even without increasing the frequency (keywords: improved pipelining, optimized superscalar technology, speculative execution etc.). GHz pretty much only matters anymore when comparing chips of the same or very similar types. Think of a single-lane highway with a speed limit of 100mph vs. multiple parallel, multi-lane highways with the same speed limit (the speed limit being a metaphor for GHz).

The number of CPU cores is only relevant if you have enough tasks to do in parallel. The thing is, games usually have only a handful of (computationally heavy) "tasks" which can be performed in parallel by the CPU, the most work usually has to be done sequentially by a single core. This means that for gaming, it is most often irrelevant whether you have 4, 8, 16 or 32 cores, as only a handful of those will be busy. Most of the calculations in games are done sequentially, so you are better of looking at single-core performance (an owner of four cars cannot reach his destination any faster than an owner of one car).

This in total is the reason why i am still using a ten year old CPU for gaming. While multi-core performance has increased by maybe 4x to 16x for consumer CPUs, single core performance (may also be called "Single Thread Rating") maybe doubled in the same time. And even then, there are other effects to consider as well, so you should not expect your framerate to double just because your CPU core can in theory calculate twice as much.

TL;DR: So yes, you should be able to benefit from a newer CPU as large parks are very CPU-heavy, but not as much as the CPU specifications may suggest. Of course, if anyone has any practical experience with newer CPUs in Planet Coaster I'd like to hear these reports as well.

 

[RobBoss]

Hello Planet Coaster friends,

I've actually played again recently to test this same thing. Was previously running on an old 7th gen i5 7500 cpu and nvidea 1060 3gb gpu. Small parks were okay but large parks were unplayable. I've upgraded my rig to an i7 11700k and a 3080 12gb gpu so that I can work from home. Admittedly I haven't kept up with current creators in the Planco community so decided to test performance on some old favorites. MKPFestival I previously would run at about 4-10 fps, Aliens the ride I was lucky to get 5fps. Since upgrading I was able to run MKPFestival on ultra settings and a 4k resolution (+2k guests) around 30-45 fps, Aliens the ride was a fairly stable 40-45 fps. This was some pretty casual testing and had other programs running on my second monitor as well so potentially fps could could be higher. I did notice when testing this most recent time that Planco is very cpu heavy and hardly utilized my gpu power. Planco did appear to utilize multiple cores, but sequentially rather than simultaneous with around a 45% load on each thread when in use. This testing does lead me to believe the games engine is at it's limits, new 4000 series gpu's will likely not change anything as my 3080 didn't even feel the need to spin up it's cooling fans. The cpu limitations and gpu utilization are where I believe we'll need to see improvements if Planco ever gets a sequel; only 1 thread being used at a time along with only reaching a 45% load leaves the fps limitations squarely on the game engine.

TL;DR: New systems greatly improve performance, however the old Planco engine is bottlenecking on cpu power without taking advantage of multiple threads or newer powerhouse gpu's leaving room for improvement within the game engine.

 

[Ramm]

Hello Planet Coaster friends,

I've actually played again recently to test this same thing. Was previously running on an old 7th gen i5 7500 cpu and nvidea 1060 3gb gpu. Small parks were okay but large parks were unplayable. I've upgraded my rig to an i7 11700k and a 3080 12gb gpu so that I can work from home. Admittedly I haven't kept up with current creators in the Planco community so decided to test performance on some old favorites. MKPFestival I previously would run at about 4-10 fps, Aliens the ride I was lucky to get 5fps. Since upgrading I was able to run MKPFestival on ultra settings and a 4k resolution (+2k guests) around 30-45 fps, Aliens the ride was a fairly stable 40-45 fps. This was some pretty casual testing and had other programs running on my second monitor as well so potentially fps could could be higher. I did notice when testing this most recent time that Planco is very cpu heavy and hardly utilized my gpu power. Planco did appear to utilize multiple cores, but sequentially rather than simultaneous with around a 45% load on each thread when in use. This testing does lead me to believe the games engine is at it's limits, new 4000 series gpu's will likely not change anything as my 3080 didn't even feel the need to spin up it's cooling fans. The cpu limitations and gpu utilization are where I believe we'll need to see improvements if Planco ever gets a sequel; only 1 thread being used at a time along with only reaching a 45% load leaves the fps limitations squarely on the game engine.

TL;DR: New systems greatly improve performance, however the old Planco engine is bottlenecking on cpu power without taking advantage of multiple threads or newer powerhouse gpu's leaving room for improvement within the game engine.

Thanks alot, just the information I needed

 

[Spyro1997]

Hello everyone,

Haven't really been here or playing much games anyway lately and am looking into getting into it again now that winter time is coming and there is less to do outside. I really love Planet Coaster but since I am only running an intel i7 6700k I did have alot of performance issues when playing medium to big parks. I could pretty much only play small parks before framerates became too low that it became unplayable (for me this is pretty much when it goes below 40fps).

As my current 6700k is getting older (I think I have had it for 5 or maybe 6 years by now) I am looking into upgrading my system especially with newest generation of AMD and Intel CPU's being just around the corner. Now I kinda am curious about people's experience with newer CPU's. The more cores and the higher the Ghz the better?

I would love for people to share their experience, what their CPU's are (and motherboard and ram if that helps) and what framerates they are experiencing in what kind of parks. Surely as CPU's improve this game framerate improves too and I can now finally build my maximum-sized dreampark full of coasters, rides, scenery and guests without getting to unplayable framerates.

Thanks alot for sharing your experience and tips!

Idk if there is something wrong with my planetco settings, but I made an even more significant upgrade than this and saw almost no difference in performance (5 fps more at most)