in the blue corner star citizen a game that's been in development for roughly 10 years
massively controversial lots of people think it's a scam it's not a scam
they are building a game and you can play it now but it is controversial it's raised over
400 million dollars in backing from the backers people who want to play the game some of those
guys have just spent 45 dollars some of them have probably spent 45 000 it's a crazy situation but
there you go people can do what they want with their money and in the other corner we've got a
$3000 PC it's got an i7 which would cost about $520 a motherboard which would be about $275
the ram the ddr5 ram that it's got in there crazy fast doesn't make much performance difference but
it costs $480 and then the diamond in the system the rtx 3080 from nvidia which i fortunately
didn't pay this for but if i wanted to buy one right now in the uk it would cost me roughly $1600
so what happens when you pit pretty much the best of the best against a game that really is
the latest crysis so here are the results and if you've never played Star Citizen before you might
be thinking why are these results so bad why can't the game hit 60fps consistently even at 1080p and
the answer to that is in most stages of the game you are completely bottlenecked by your cpu now
it doesn't really matter how many cores you've got so you've got threadripper or some sort of crazy
cpu with thousands of cores the game engine just cannot utilize all those cores fully it will use
them but it kind of dabbles in using some of them the game engine really is completely bottlenecked
by a couple of threads a couple of pieces of work that it's doing to get each frame out to your gpu
so it doesn't really matter if you've got loads of cores the main thing is can those cores get the
work done really quickly which is why the latest intel cpus the alderlake cpus are the best they
have the best ipc they can crunch through the work faster than anybody else and so that is
what i've been recommending and that's why this pc can get relatively good performance because
if you look at that performance you think that's not very good wait until you try it with
a cpu that's not brand new it really it really isn't great so cpu is the most important thing
that's what you prioritize and although these results look bad they're actually pretty good for
star citizen now there are a few occasions where the game then bizarrely flips to being completely
gpu bound the volumetric clouds that cig have introduced in the last year
are absolutely brutal and if we look at these results here in origin when the
clouds are on medium settings at 4k you're still taking a tiny hit but when you put the
volumetric clouds up to very high settings and they look much much better when you put them up to
very high you'll see absolute brutal performance of 4k unplayable 15 fps is just completely not
not a thing that doesn't work you can't play a game at 15 fps so the game is in a bizarre
situation where the cpu is completely unoptimized and can't utilize your whole cpu calls and threads
but there's also some parts of the game that are unbelievably brutal on a gpu so
this really is the new crisis it really is very hard and yes you can you could spend even more on
this you could get 69 100 xt you could get uh the i9 all delayed cpu and but really however
much money you throw at star citizen you can't do much at this point to get better performance
the main thing we're waiting for is optimization from crg they are working on converting everything
across the vulcan which in theory they've talked about this in the past will allow the cpu to use
all the threads and cause much more fully and then at some point in the future there will also focus
on things like dlss and fsr they've mentioned this but really the point of all this is to say
if you try it out and you're like what on earth is going on my pc is relatively good why can't
i get good performance well remember this video even if you spend all the money in the world you
just cannot get good performance from star citizen at this point if you like this more technical look
at star citizen please subscribe like this video as well you can now join the discord
come and talk about all this sort of stuff and also you can join the channel become a member
which is a bit like patreon but it's on youtube so that's enough for this one i'll see you soon bye