I'm assuming the 1.4GHz in question is a newer processor but I could again be wrong as it's not my computer. I've gotten better performance on a 1.5GHz dual core than a 3.6GHz pentium. CC is hilariously erratic when it comes to these things.

@echinus that's fairly hilarious, I wonder if Dan's been profiling his code at all. If graphics are forming a bottleneck in a physics focussed game I'm concerned.

I have an AMD Athlon 2500+ working on 1.1 and 1GB of ram and a 512 mb. Gforce mX something card all of which I have bought in 2005. Except the further into MAginot and Dummy Assault B23 runs fairly normal.

Now I'm thinking of buying a new desktop. But exactly what kind of computers this game doesn't like?

I can tell you what it does like, not what it doesn't as that is usually seemingly unrelated to the specifications of the machine and more down to a bum configuration. If you're looking for performance with this game it's generally a great rule of thumb to watch out for low clock speeds (anything <1.5GHz is generally a waste of your time, though there are exceptions out there with newer chips).

Cortex command is eaten up by anything running an i7 processor if you're looking at getting something modern. I've also had very good performance with an AMD Phenom II 720BE and been able to tweak the game to ergonomic performance thresholds on a frugal Core 2 1.5GHz chip.

Your best bet is with an i7 for a future proof all-rounder CPU though. Intel did a damn good job with those babies.

Yay! Just got mine

The way CC handles the computers it's weird, I have an AMD Duron 1.2 GHz, 1256 MB RAM and a(OnBoard) Video card SiS VGA. B23 works better than B24 for me, but my friend has some double core intel processor around 2GHZ with 2 GB ram (Aprox.) and B24 almost doesn't lag for him but b23 does, I don't know what to think.

With lag or without lag, CC ROCKS!

I hear all the ix series is pretty damn good. Even the cheapest of all, the i3, can be easily overclocked to beastly results.

From my own experience CC seams to like a lot of processor cache. For example, I have two old computers, one fitted with a celeron 2.9@3.5Ghz and the other with a pentium 4 2.6@2.9ish. While the celeron can achieve pretty good clocks it only has 256Kb of cache. The pentium has a lower clock and is a few years older, but has a lot more cache, the double to be exact, so CC runs a lot smoother.

To further my tests I tested another pentium 4, this time one with a 1 MB of cache and 2.4ishGhz. This time around I got even better results (not outstanding or even good compared to my current core2duo, just better than the previous).

All the tests were run with a similar rig, namely 1.5 to two gigs of ram, a freshly installed windows XP and old, but dedicated graphics cards.

Also depends what it is you're wanting it to do, and how you think it should be working. B24 seems to have removed the jetpack trick, so no more zipping around the level... walking is slow in the cc universe, it seems. If you think a good rig means you should be able to run a modded in nuke with no lag on the other hand, you're in for disappointment. Like a few people have pointed out, CC uses one core and no graphics card, so it doesn't matter if you've got a hex core and triple SLI.

I have profiled the CC code, thank you very much A few relevant points:

1) The unique, bitmap-based (vs vector/polygon-based) physics engine CC is built on is utterly dependent on, and inextricably linked to, the drawing functions of said bitmaps.. there's a lot of checking against the actual pixels in those sprites and in the terrain. So, optimizing the physics means optimizing the use of the graphics lib.
2) The physics engine is one of the first things I ever wrote as a programmer, while learning C++ in high school
3) .. as a result, a lot of the implementations are naive as ♥♥♥♥, and left in a first-pass state.
4) To my credit, there's not a lot of premature optimizations in there I got things running and moved on to the next thing that needed to work.
5) There is no doubt a lot of room for improvement in how the graphics library (allegro) is used, and other areas. Echinus clearly has much deeper domain knowledge about it than I do, so I am happy to let him take a crack at it himself if he's interested?

Shaping up to be a good build #30

Data you so cool