How is late game preformance?

[Ginno the Seer]

My, 'aging', laptop can run this game, or it meets the requirements anyway.
But like all games the longer it goes on the more there is for the PC to worry about.
So, what's the performance dip like once late game starts?

[pickpacket]

My laptop is a single core 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with 2 GB of RAM from 2015. I play with buildings and trees transparent (because they get in the way). In the late game on a 1024x1024 map with more than 800 trains, 50+ ships, and a bit more than 100 road vehicles I experience some heavy lag if I zoom out further than the highest zoom level and turn off transparency for buildings and trees. Other than that I've never had any noticeable issues performance-wise

I run Debian Linux with the MATE desktop environment. As far as operating system/background processes go that's not very demanding.

Of course ymmv.

[Redirect Left]

This is entirely dependant on what vehicles you use. A lot of road vehicles, aircraft & boats seem to be the worst, based on testing with AI that used a lot of them. It's worth noting that i was running a very 'lax' rule base with those NPCs, allowing them to build several thousand of every possible type, except aircraft (max of 50). It's worth noting that OpenTTD remains primarily a single thread application, and uses a second thread exclusively for multiplayer netcode (i think, anyway), so a lower core count isn't a big deal anyway, it'll only be using 1 of them anyway in non-multiplayer play, although obviously newer processors do more with less, as would be demonstrated by putting 3.8 Ghz Pentium 4 from 2005 next to a 1.2GHz Core i3 from this year.

tldr;
If you play in a limited style, limiting yourself to a set amount of vehicles from each class, on a fairly lowish-sized map, should be able to play it fairly okay for a while at least. Aim to use railway only though, in my experience. Perhaps throw a few RVs in there to help build towns, but don't heavily rely on RVs, boats or aircraft, and you should do well.

[skc]

My laptop is a single core 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with 2 GB of RAM from 2015. I play with buildings and trees transparent (because they get in the way). In the late game on a 1024x1024 map with more than 800 trains, 50+ ships, and a bit more than 100 road vehicles I experience some heavy lag if I zoom out further than the highest zoom level and turn off transparency for buildings and trees. Other than that I've never had any noticeable issues performance-wise

I run Debian Linux with the MATE desktop environment. As far as operating system/background processes go that's not very demanding.

Of course ymmv.

If you edit the config file, and use 'sdl-opengl' as the videodriver, you should be able to off-load a lot of graphics work to the graphics card.
I did that with my Ryzen 7, using the built-in GPU. CPU load dropped from 100% to about 20% (of 1 core, in both cases) in top.

[jfs]

OpenTTD can basically be as lightweight or demanding as you want. If you play on a small map and don't build a huge number of vehicles, any 20 years old computer can run it no problem. If you use a huge map or a ton of vehicles, it can get so demanding that no computer is able to run it well.
Using mods (NewGRF, Game Script, AI players) can also slow things down, especially some NewGRFs can have complex graphics rules that require more processing power.

Maps sized 256x256 (the default) should run good on all computers that are able to start OpenTTD at all. 512x512 maps should also run very well on most systems. Larger than that it gets much more variable, and 2048x2048 or bigger is extremely demanding.

[odisseus]

In my experience, the most lag is caused by many objects appearing on the screen. Not just vehicles, but also houses. Usually it is enough to move the camera away from a big city, in order for the lag to stop.

Of course, other factors such as amount of graphic add-ons and especially map size can also contribute a big deal.

[jfs]

The standard houses are quite fast to draw, since most are just one or two static sprites, but NewGRF houses can have various programmed logic added that demand a lot more computation every time the game needs to draw one of them.