Sins Forums
I've been thinking of having another gaming rig built exclusively for SoaSE.
What setup would I need to be able to play at maxed graphics with let's say... a minimum one thousand planets mixed up over ten Star Systems along with the Distant Stars Mod and all nine AI Opponents with Fleets maxed to Cap?
Is it even possible? 
No the bottleneck is software related
you need Sins 2 to do that (don't worry, the DS team is ready for that, or so we like to think)
true a single 8Ghz would do it
any multi cores just don't do it because the game was not designed to use them
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/24/pentium-4-overclocked-to-8ghz-lets-see-your-fancy-core-2-try-t/
They've gotten past 5 with the i7's, that should be sufficient to get most of the way there...
Due to limitations in the OS....aka the 2 GB RAM limit just running highest graphics will crash your game. Unmodded Sins can run close to this limit just by itself. There been a few post around suggesting with a 64bit OS you can 'hack' the .exe and give Sins 3 GB. Make sure you have 4 GB min. if you do that. Ive not done it, not really had a problem.
I can run a 50-150 planet game with high settings. 9 AI and me, both with 3x the Fleet points with:
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz
4 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
I will get lag end game with 4 or more end game fleets in the same grav well fighting. Or if alot of things go boom all at once. I have disabled alot of things though, to help my FPS and such so I can play like this. Turned off Show Trade Ship Icons, Show Ownership Icons, No Dust, No planet cities.
The biggest boost you can do IMHO, is trim your Empire tree down to nothing or the bare bones you need to use. For example, before I basically killed my Tree I had everything on autopin. Well with 50+ grav well the CPU needs to keep track of what in it, I would get horrible FPS/lag. So, while playing around with different options to reduce it, I found that little to no Empire tree got rid of most of my lag/FPS drop. This allowed me to crank up the Fleet points to what I have set now.
Anyhow, for what you want its not possible due to RAM limits for max settings. And any CPU now a days has its limits with either planet count or fleet size.
I run 4x fleet points in Distant Stars on a i7 920 @ 3.67GHz without any problems.
As an experiment I had a fleet of 1000+ Kodiaks, looked an awesome sight...
Thanks Carbon for the detailed suggestions to increase the frame rate. Wouldn't a GPU upgrade help a lot in your case? I'm considering that myself (I have a similar type of GPU, also about 2 years old).
I thought the hack would also work on 32 bit systems with 4gb of RAM, right?
not really seems how the bottleneck is CPU based (lots of ships to keep track of) and not GPU based
I dont think so, since SINS was designed to run on older computer its not a GPU hog. Like Crysis per se.
And I think my Framerate loss was due the CPU having to keep track of all the planets, all the ships, all the structures. And of course what your zoomed in on the screen. I wish IC would let me set if SB are autopinned. I hate having those pop up when I dont need them.
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