I'll chip in that Civ 6 is kind of notoriously buggy and crash prone. I have a top of the line Windows PC and the game spontaneously crashes for me in full screen mode so I can only do windowed mode.
It's still super fun (I have over 1,000 hours played) but it's not something I would call a reliable or stable piece of software.
Porting it to a different CPU architecture sounds like a recipe for introducing even more bugs to an already unstable program.
Because that's not how games work - they don't run "at minimum capabilities" and they run their game loop constantly, rendering graphics. This means that it will almost certanly saturate at least M1s GPU and probably at least one of P cores. At that stage, even the M1 starts drawing a lot of power which needs disspiation.
Also Civ 6s target GPU is much faster than any of the M1s (which, despite the marketing, are still mobile CPU/GPU SoCs, not high clocked 100W+ TDP desktop CPUs with a separate 100W+ TDP GPU) so you won't see it use less than maximum what GPU (and CPU) can handle.
Don't mix performance profiles of games with performance profiles of bursty desktop browser software running Electron.
I've played plenty of games on M1 that are graphically more impressive and have higher base requirements than Civ 6.
Seems that others have pointed out that Civ is more CPU bound than GPU so I don't know if that's something that could be optimised without completely changing the mechanics of the game or if Civ is just an unoptimised beast but then again the M1 is way above the minimum required spec for Civ 6 so i don't think it's some unfeasible concept.
> they run their game loop constantly, rendering graphics
Eh? Civ 6 is a turn-based game with really very little in the way of animation. It's not a first person shooter rendering whole screens at 30fps.
Even leaving M1 aside, on my PC with a capable graphics card Civ 6 always thrashed the CPU a ton. I know there's a lot going on under the hood but I always suspected it was nowhere near as efficient as it could be.
Not the GP, but Civ is CPU bottlenecked. I don't know how their code is written under the hood, but games slow down as you get farther in the game. If you play too many turns the game can take minutes to process a single turn.
I can saturate all my 16 cores, on my workstation, the only result is that the turns are processed faster. When you play multiplayer, everyone is going to be pinned to the slowest person in the lobby.
I think that's because surprisingly, it's still a marketable/profitable game. If only it weren't, then maybe it would eventually be open sourced. Only flaw I find is that due to it's age, it wasn't really designed with maximum concurrency in mind, and doesn't utilize the full capabilities of modern hardware, so the simulation slows to a crawl after a certain size.
The game actually does support decent threading, but it relies on old RDTSC behavior and will crash on modern CPUs if you allow all the threading to run. I nagged EA a lot to Open Source SC4 or allow fans to fix bugs on Windows version, but they are stubborn :(
The Mac version is published by Aspyr that has rights to the source and to release updates. For example the Mac version is 64bit now. Windows version is 32bit thus heavily limited regarding mods.
