Oldest Computer That You Have Run Thrive On

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I have been looking into what the oldest and lowest performance computers that can run Thrive are. Do any of you think you might run Thrive on uniquely old or low performance hardware? If anyone would like to post their specs of computers they actually use to play Thrive on, that would be helpful in seeing what the current state of the community running Thrive on older computers is.

Here is my current candidate for oldest computer I have run modern Thrive on: Dell Precision M4400 from 2009:
Core 2 Duo T9900 @ 3.06 GHz
Quadro FX 770 512MB VRAM

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I had to recompile Thrive to get it to run on this machine since we dropped support for it in 0.6.3, and it runs at maybe 10fps at the start of the game. It is not something that I would consider playable, but it does run.

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I think we might better/also look at the oldest computers for which Thrive is playable, not just runnable.

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I am most interested in not just computers that people could play on, but actually do or would play on. Though it is fun to see how far the game can be stretched on older computers.

What is playable is a bit subjective though, as I would consider 20fps a playable framerate for me, but I could probably also play a game at 10fps if I had to and it was consistent. Though I donā€™t think I would want to list a ā€˜minimum spec systemā€™ at anything below 25 or 30fps.

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I wonder if at some point in development weā€™ll see computers emerge which can handle microbe and multicellular but not macroscopic and beyondā€¦

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I will be trying to optimize the world generator to run well on the oldest/minimum spec computers, though I am still trying to figure out what computer exactly I should use as that reference to test on.

But I would expect the performance to the macroscopic stages to be determined more by the 3D creature rendering/animation system then the world rendering/generation. Maybe the world generator would be the most performance intensive system during the industrial and space stages. Could potentially end up with the industrial and space stages requiring less then the macroscopic stages.

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Cries in 2.4ghz dual core

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Would the society stage then be the least intensive stage?

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Do you have any specific specs? It would be useful to know, as a 2.4 GHz dual core could range from hilariously bad performance (Anyone remember the Pentium D?) to really good.

Actually, I think that might be the most intensive stage as it would still have the 3D creatures on screen as well as a larger scale view of the world. Though once it gets to later Society stage it would probably be big enough scale that individual 3D creatures wonā€™t need to be rendered anymore.

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And awakening would be the second most intensive then?

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Probably, because you would be controlling a group of 3D creatures and still interacting a lot with other 3D creatures.

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How intensive would be the ā€œcontrol one individual in strategy stagesā€ mode?

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Just tried out my NVIDIA 8800gt from 2007, and it seems like it runs the game pretty well for such an old card. It gets 20fps in game with all the settings at default, and got 30fps when lowering the settings.

I ran it in a system with an i5-3570 CPU from 2012, so it isnā€™t quite period correct, but the core2 duo system I wanted to test it in has unfortunately died.

That is more difficult to say, but I would guess it would be fairly similar to the late awakening stage in terms of perfomance.

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Do you think Thrive could run on a WinXP?

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My current CPU is an Athlon Gold 3150U with integrated graphics.

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What year was the computer created/assembled in?

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The oldest laptop Iā€™ve run Thrive on is an HP Pavilion G7 from 2011, or 2012 (Iā€™m not exactly sure which ear my specific model is from). It has Windows 7, and surprisingly thanks to the AMD A8 CPU it even has AVX, so instruction set support is not the limit. It just is a plain old slow computer, when Iā€™m lucky I can almost reach 20 FPS (using quite minimal settings, though that was before we got resolution scaling so I havenā€™t tested with that) just when starting the game but it quickly falls to near to 10. So itā€™s basically unplayable. Thatā€™s why Iā€™ve considered the SSE 4.2 to be a kind of a clear-cut cutoff when older stuff just canā€™t really reasonably run the game even if they supported the needed CPU instructions.

No, because the engine and tools (like C# runtime) are absolutely not made to work on Windows XP. It probably wonā€™t be too long until Windows 7 is also no longer going to work. Even Windows 10 support from Microsoft is ending this year.

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Windows 10 will technically be supported for longer if one has access to government edition of that OS, which iirc is supposed to keep updating for like 2 more years.

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Yeah, that really isnā€™t a great cpu for how relatively new it is. It seems like that cpu and graphics is comparable but somewhat better then the i5-4300U in my Surface Pro 3 from 2014, which I had been using as my ā€œMinimum Specā€ Thrive computer. At least it supports Vulkan though, which should make it a fair bit better.

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Do you think weā€™ll ever get to a point when Thrive becomes unplayable on Win10?

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The oldest computer Iā€™ve run the game on would be my main PC, which is a pre-built from 2013, it has an Intel i3-4160 CPU with 2 cores running at up to 3.60 Gigahertz, integrated graphics (Intel 4400), and 8 Gigabytes of RAM. It runs Windows 10.
The game runs at acceptable frame rate most of the time (though I donā€™t have a frame counter up), with some slowdown when thereā€™s a lot on screen, though it has extremely long load times entering the editor for auto-evo (Greater than 3 minutes towards the end of the game).

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