My Brazilian compatriot doesn’t want to spend 200$ to change his processor, motherboard and memories. Much less to spend $600 to buy an excellent whole computer with integrated graphics (Ryzen 4350G with 16Gb of RAM), but rather invest $1123.89 on a PS5 in a country where the minimum wage is $196.68. Those are the facts, I still don’t understand what the developers have to do with it, as he doesn’t even care enough about not playing.
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I saved 30% off my computer’s value by buying new and used parts on AliExpress and am extremely happy with them, this guy uses the high taxes and being from a third world country as an excuse, when in fact he just doesn’t care enough about Age Of Empires to find a real solution.
Computer parts are expensive all over the world, and due to scarcity, the PS5 is exactly the same price in Brazil and the US, despite our PS5 having 40% of its value in taxes, nullifying his arguments.
If things went the way he says, Brazil wouldn’t be growing so fast and moving 165 billion dollars annually in the gaming sector.
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According to the Steam Hardware Survey only a bit over 5% of the players don’t have AVX. So I guess that’s something they decided they can live with.
People with newer hardware are also generally more likely to buy new games so the effective percentage is likely even lower. They have the numbers for the Insider signups too so I can assume that they know how many people are affected.
Yuu are 3x not supported.
macOS is not supported, ARM CPUs are not supported and AVX is required.
I’m mainly a Linux user and I can feel your problems.
(I also have a iPad with an M1 chip but that’s 5x not supported because not x86 emulation and no steam)
You also need to be aware that at the point they decided to make AVX a requirement they likely didn’t know about the M1 chip yet and and especially didn’t know how many people would buy it.
If Apple manages to increase it’s market share thanks to AppleSilicon than it is getting increasingly likely that game developers are trying to support it.
But it’s also partially Apples fault for not supporting Vulcan.
Makes sense, a unit for parallel execution is perfect for something like path finding.
btw. I’m personally not affected I have two computers with a Ryzen CPU. (Can’t get Windows 11 for my 1700X but I’m using Linux on that machine anyway.)
It would be stupid for them to not put the game on xcloud.
Very unlikely because Microsoft has their own xcloud. But it’s not confirmed for xcloud yet.
It shows how many people have AVX. That’s exactly what we want to know, doesn’t matter if they have a 1 year or 10 years old CPU.
The question is how much performance they would lose. The CPUs without AVX are less powerful already so they would suffer the most from it.
Also having two binaries (of the affected library at last) so you can have a version with and without AVX would increase the file size and build time and could potentially cause synchronisation problems.
Making the game worse for the 95% of the players with AVX so the 5% without can play it also doesn’t seem like a good solution.
AVX could be one of the things that makes the game possible on lower end CPUs in the first place so removing it could make the game unplayable for people with older CPUs that support AVX.
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Ahh it is included in SHS stats, I was trying to look into detailed CPU graphs instead of ‘other’… I guess it was too late at night to think about that and explore everything…
AVX 94.70% +0.50%
Well that pretty much ends the discussion of whether they should rebuild the game to remove reliance on this technology. I was expecting an even smaller number.
The best data to use would be one from DXDIAG files sent by people that wanted to qualify for the closed beta. Having Steam installed means only… having Steam installed on a PC. I would expect in reality maybe >1-2% of people with budget processors like Intel Pentium, or very old units, would be actually interested in buying this game
Personally, I have on two additional laptops where I don’t play almost at all, and when I do- only old stuff or 2D games like Darkest Dungeon. Both with Steam, one runs Win7, one Win10.
Nothing really that was said here in reality justifies attempts from Microsoft and Relic to turn things around. Using Pentium-line processors that are being sold isn’t really helpful as justification, for reasons I’ve mentioned earlier. Even for a F2P game, it wouldn’t make sense since when it comes to money investment - F2P titles earn money on microtransactions, and <5% minority of -potential- players with low power, budget CPUs is not a reliable potential or significant source of money and their absence doesn’t really impact potential success of the game.
Publishers were deciding to exclude HUGE number of players by limiting games to DX10/11 or Windows 7/Vista/10 when these had <50% market share.
Having <5% of PC machines with Steam without support for this technology is nothing compared to situations like early DX10 adoption.
And most important- game is almost out, and these decisions take place much earlier into dame development. And unlike some examples where eventually games got DX9/10 modes - I’m not sure anything here can be solved as easily.
10% of people have less than 8GBs or RAM.
~10% (of Win users) don’t have W10x64.
Only 77.38% run W10+DX12 (both required!)
What is >5%?
But for the time xCloud has only xbox games, so I would be surprised to see AOE4 on xCloud soon.
Seems like they only want to have games in xCloud that support an xbox controller for now.
But xCloud is still considered Beta and just recently got a PC client.
So it’s not unlikely that they will add PC games relatively soon. There are already a lot of PC exclusive games that require mouse and keyboard on Game Pass.
Scource from another game with the same topic
At this point your cpu should be around 10 intel generations old…
I know that alot of people start to run into this issue, especially since AMD phenoms and the first i5s/i7s are really popular, but AVX is pretty much getting used by everything for complex math nowadays.
Any desktop cpu that is 9 years old or younger is going to support it.
Matter of the fact is that we all can speculate if the game would run better or worse with AVX or with MMX/SSE, so the developers are the only ones that could give us insight if it’s possible/worth it for the game.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask in the forums at all.
That beeing said tho, you can’t expect technology or software developement to make a halt just because you have different financial priorities.
Especially when it comes to operating systems (smartphone models or just pc) or APIs such as d3d9, there’s always going to be progress in certain aspects of hardware and with it ppl are going to make use of it.
Some to an extend at which they become reliant on having those implemented.
Compatibility in that sense is alot of work and sometimes just not worth it because of the difficulties it brings with it.
I am all for max compatibility and having less e-waste, don’t get me wrong here, but sometimes it might just not be possible with the way things are set up.
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Some of us use old 6 core 12 thread xeon processors (X5670) which perform fine in most games and cannot be considered low end. These CPUs will not have any issues running a non AVX version in terms of performance.
I personally, will cancel my xbox game pass subscription if the product managers do not allocate the time to support dual AVX /non AVX optimized compilation.
The problem with that mentality is that unless people with non-AVX CPUs make up a sizable number of users, you simply aren’t going to be worth the cost of supporting two versions of the game.
This means that at some point, as with any holdout for cheaper/older tech, you’re going to just start missing out on more and more games because you don’t want to upgrade to the required hardware to support it.
5.41% of the steam user base (120mill) does not support AVX this equates to 6.5 million users or possible sales. Within this user base I would imagine to be a large target market of nostalgia users from AOE 2 who are more likely to subscribe to the xbox game pass or buy the game.
AVX has been around for ages so why make this all of sudden a requirement now (10 years and a day).
What is the trigger for this? Is it windows 11? Is it because intel stopped creating non-AVX processors in 11th gen? Is it because x86 translation to ARM is less performant with AVX (M1)? Is it really simply a magic number of users under which it is not worth it? Perhaps they have the figures of how any users playing AOE 2 / HD / DE have support for AVX? Has someone got figures to back the decision?
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There might be 5% of the userbase that doesn’t have AVX but:
- How many of those CPUs are not powerful enough in the first place?
- How many people with 10 years old hardware will buy a new full price title?
AVX is likely needed for the path finding in the game.
Just removing it would make the performance worse for the 95% of players.
Making it optional would likely brake multiplayer because the path finding is calculated differently.
It’s not like a graphic setting that you can just turn of and than don’t have some visual effect, it influences the gameplay.
They know how many people don’t have AVX, insiders even had to send in their complete hardware details.
They know how many people won’t buy the game because of it. Making another thread about it won’t change their opinion.
5% of the user base is not enough to warrant trying to support multiple versions of the game, or to remove functionality that 95% of users benefit from.
Couple that with the fact that you can upgrade your system with a CPU that’s several years old to save money and still play, and from a business perspective it’s a simple choice.
You do what will give the (overwhelming in this case) majority of players the best possible experience.
If that 5% was a meaningful amount of potential profit, you can be sure that they would be supported. The fact that it isn’t shows that the people making the money decisions don’t find the cost to be worth the marginal gain in players (since not all 100% of that 5% are even potential AoE players).
Folks, I actually explored this topic given the # of questions I’ve been getting. Linked below in case you’re interested.
It seems like the absolute bare minimum are ULV processors (from Intel, at least) that are 4th gen onward on a laptop (or a slightly older, comparable desktop CPU). I.e. you play on the absolute lowest settings and get around 25-ish FPS. Someone from Reddit mentioned that he got it working on his Surface Pro 3, which is really old and really not designed for gaming. For reference, that laptop’s i7 ULV variant is 4th gen and comes with Intel HD 5000 (which doesn’t support DirectX12, but somehow still works according to him)
In other words, if you have a CPU that old that doesn’t support AVX, you won’t be able to get playable FPS regardless even if you got the game running somehow, and that’s assuming you had a decent GPU at the time. The GTX 400 or 500 series are pretty much obsolete now. The exception here are the modern CPUs with no AVX I suppose, but I’d reckon that’s a very low % of PCs out there today.
TL;DR: After some investigation, it seems like, at the engine’s current state, the game is unplayable with CPUs that old, even if the AVX restriction didn’t exist.
Happy to hear from others in case they got the game running on older hardware somehow!
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This decision has been made by game developers over and over. Age of empires IV is an exceptional case.
This is speculation. I highly doubt it would degrade those who have AVX if they compile for both using say the intel C++ compiler. All other RTS I know of do not have this issue requiring AVX for path finding.
If they are still in use they are likely powerful enough.
There has been no need to upgrade to newer hardware until this title. At this point upgrading is not a great idea since both intel and AMD will be changing socket. This has no bearing on affordability since for example I could still spend more money on an even faster GPU and still see gains in FPS without a CPU upgrade. Obviously, however the game would need not require AVX.
What you’re doing is speculation as well. The only thing anyone can assume is that the game requires AVX for a reason. That is literally the only safe assumption anyone can make.
- Does this mean some people will be unable to play the game without upgrading their hardware? Yes.
- Is this something the developers will have been aware of from whenever the AVX requirement was locked in? Also yes.
If you’re affected by this, I get that it sucks. Not everyone can afford to upgrade their hardware just to play a single game. But at the same time, games cannot stay in stasis forever. If you cannot play a new game, released in 2021, because your hardware is too low-spec, or too old, or both . . . that’s the consequence of having hardware that old.
We had this debate when games started requiring 64-bit operating systems. We had this debate when games started requiring more hard drive space. We have this debate every time a game requires something that, to a layperson, seems excessive. These things aren’t done for a laugh. These things are done because - for whatever reason - they’re unavoidable. The developers will know the impact of requiring AVX. The game will still require it regardless.
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Is this true though? What modern game (non-indie) have people been able to play on 10+ year old hardware? I’m 100% all for using our equipment to the absolute max to eliminate e-waste (and quite frankly money) as much as possible, but 10 years is due time. There are also a plethora of security issues that begin surfacing with hardware that old.
Technically true, but impractical - as you’d ironically be wasting money. Games have been increasingly using more and more of the CPU compared to the mid 2000s/early 2010s. With a CPU that old, you’d be bottlenecking so hard and wasting the potential of your GPU upgrade.
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In my first post I linked a video that will help people who do not have this issue understand why someone would be so “insane” to use such old hardware.
Here is that link again.
If they make it run on my iPad or my Xiaomi phone, I’ll buy it.
I’m not discrediting using non-consumer level old, second hand CPUs as a bad idea - it’s genius and folks tight on money who can do it, should do it.
But be realistic - how many Xeons that old are available out there? How many people even know how to order one and swap their CPU. What about the motherboards? Are you going to assume that 10+ year old motherboards will be compatible with the Xeons? What percentage of people who are in the minority will be able to take advantage of this? We’re talking about the fraction of a fraction of folks out there.
The decisions other companies have made for other products with different requirements are completely irrelevant here.
When people were evaluating this game it was decided that supporting AVX would be better than not supporting it. While it may be that the company just decided to arbitrarily exclude some possible customers, this is contrary to how publicly traded, US based companies function; they will go for the maximum possible profit.
Regardless, the 5% of people without AVX compatible chips aren’t even all potential AoE customers, so the reality is that the impact of people without AVX is significantly less than 5% of the potential AoE4 player base.
And, again, combined with the fact that there is a decade worth of CPUs to pick from at a huge range of price points and it simply isn’t worth not taking advantage of AVX.