Will Horizons run on a dual core CPU?

[the100thmonkey]

I've checked the motherboard spec in this Compaq system (P5LP-LE (Leonite2)), according to the spec it only supports up to Conroe E6x00.. I've bought an E6600 from ebay for £6 but I don't believe it supports the Core 2 Quads

Ah. Well in that case don't spend the money!

That board is going to limit your E6600 too - you won't be able to overclock in BIOS and will have to use software like ClockGen to overclock, and you'll probably need to.

 

[Zaite12]

Hopefully it will at least run the game in space to a reasonable standard, as long as it can do 30fps with minimum settings that will be good enough, at least he will be able to play

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Holy moly.. if the HP spec page is to be believed, that mobo still uses DDR2 RAM. Now that is one venerable mobo. And yeah, the CPU list doesn't have the Core 2 Quads, just up to Duo.

Yes I checked out the BIOS she has 4 glorious GB of the stuff

 

[shadragon]

Horizons? I sort of doubt. Base game, sure. Just a hunch, based on that I ran base ED ages ago with dual core (core 2 duo) laptop.

This. Running under recommended specs will cause issues in Horizons unless you are willing to basically run the game in 640 x 480 and low res on everything which frankly, would suck.

You can minimize this with a decent video card and SSD (PCIe, M2 or NVMe preferred) but that CPU is going to be working hard and you'll need very efficient cooling to keep it under control.

 

[Sentenza]

This. Running under recommended specs will cause issues in Horizons unless you are willing to basically run the game in 640 x 480 and low res on everything which frankly, would suck.

You can minimize this with a decent video card and SSD (PCIe, M2 or NVMe preferred) but that CPU is going to be working hard and you'll need very efficient cooling to keep it under control.

Horizon is more forgiving than you think. When I fried my motherboard last year I could run it on Ultra 1920x1200 on my backup i3, but I could reuse the graphics card. The GPU is the key.

 

[Winterwalker]

Here's mine;

AMD E1-6010 APU (Lenovo) Laptop (2 core)
with AMD Radeon R2 (integrated graphics) 1.35GHz
and 3.46GB of usable RAM
(64) BIT
Add a wi-fi internet connection for good measure.

It shouldn't .. but it's 'playable' (rubberbands with PvP a bit, microsoft and other associated gunk-ware are my bigger personal problem, usually halfway into a station slot! But I can, and drive SRV)

 

[Zaite12]

Here's mine;

AMD E1-6010 APU (Lenovo) Laptop (2 core)
with AMD Radeon R2 (integrated graphics) 1.35GHz
and 3.46GB of usable RAM
(64) BIT
Add a wi-fi internet connection for good measure.

It shouldn't .. but it's 'playable' (rubberbands with PvP a bit, microsoft and other associated gunk-ware are my bigger personal problem, usually halfway into a station slot! But I can, and drive SRV)

That sounds encouraging for the E6600. I'm going to find a cheap GPU from ebay, perhaps a GTX 580 or 660Ti

 

[Wylie28]

You will probably see some horrible horrible frame drops once you get to a system where there is more then one landable planet in render range. Technically there is a slider to delegate CPU work to your GPU, but for that you will need a beefier GPU (which I kinda doubt judging by the dual core base setup). If you don't mind lowering the settings for terrain quality and co, you might be able to get it to a playable framerate.

That slider doesn't move work over from the CPU to the GPU. ALL planetary terrain work is done on the GPU. The CPU cannot use computer shaders to do any planet generation. The slider just changes when LODs are allowed to change and how many can be used at once. The more to the left the closer you need to get to the surface for higher quality, the farther right you see higher quality meshes and textures from further away.

 

[fitzsteve]

I ran horizons until about 3 months ago on a dual core. 750ti graphics card and 4Mb of RAM. It ran fine, but as has already been said, most of the settings were on medium and the frame rate hovered around 40 until I went into and station or lots of ships were about, then it dropped to about 30. Always playable but not epic.

That's still better then it runs on xbox

 

[Y2K]

yup. i turned hyper-threading of on my i7 and disabled 2 cores.. runs perfect ^_^

 

[Mr T]

Thanks. Is that definitely Horizons (not the base game) ?

Yep, I ran Horizons on it.

 

[thorn-]

I ran 2.x on a dual core duo for months and months.

Ran fine.

 

[Ra'Kaan]

I run EDH on a 10 year old AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400 (3.21ghz) with Win 10 (It ran better on Win 7) at 3072x1280 resolution eyefinity with an ATI R9 285 (for mixed portrait mode.)

I enjoy perfectly acceptable gameplay with med-high settings between 20 to 60 FPS depending on the environment.

I run vsync with frame rate limiter on 60FPS and its really smooth even with Track IR.

The exceptions are space stations, and a little menu lag in RES'es, but quite playable in a wing.

Planet generation is typically acceptable except for the 2.2 bug that introduced stutter around binary planets.

The biggest setting to watch out for is to keep supersampling at 1.0 or less.

EDH typically uses 65-100% CPU. The highest usage is inside starports, and don't let 4gb RAM worry you. ED, Windows, and all the software to run joysticks, track IR, etc... only uses 65-85% RAM dependant on windows background crap.

Make sure you get minimum 2gb graphics card, more if possible, ED will use it!

The biggest problem you will face with an older system is running background apps, such as EDEngineer, Captain's log, Voice attack etc... I wouldn't get too hooked on 3rd party apps until you can get a better mutitasking machine, ie 4+ cores. I do however run ED Market Connector with no problems. Tabbing out to a browser can sometimes be veeery slow ... (YMMV) I find Firefox to eat up the least resourses while i'm playing.

TLDR It will work. Use med settings, SS 1.0, don't expect to run too many 3rd party apps.