Few computer games have the audacity to encompass the entire span of human civilization within their boundaries or to resurrect famous leaders across centuries of human existence to offer guidance to gamers. Sid Meier’s Civilization* franchise doesn’t shirk from giving players an epic journey through the victories and perils of building an empire, whether through diplomacy, ingenuity, or physical force.
Civilization V (Civ5), the latest version of this long-running, turn-based computer strategy game, introduces a brand new architecture built from the ground up. This architecture substantially improves the performance of the game engine and uses parallelism to enhance the responsiveness of gameplay on a wide range of hardware platforms. Given a processor with two, four, or six cores, Civ5 will distribute tasks and workloads to maximum advantage. Efficient threading is the key to rapid-fire gameplay (with up to 12 threads available on some Intel® processors) and tools to streamline threading proved to be an essential element of Firaxis’ development process.
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