Football Manager 2020 Benchmarking

FM21 Bechmarking Article can be found here

Every year on the Official SIGames forums there is a benchmarking thread which attempts to gauge, via various benchmarks, how fast a system can run Football Manager. This year I took up the mantle to run the thread. Its been a real eye opener and a lot of fun trying to make sense of some of the results

The idea behind each benchmark is as follows

• Benchmark A - Represents a typical set up by the average user

• Benchmark B - The classic benchmark of all leagues loaded

• Benchmark C - Same as above but with extra detail level to test extra cores

If you'd like to get involved just click on the links below to download the file, Save files to \Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2020\games

It's quite hard to draw too many conclusions from such a small sample base but i'll try. Here i'll bullet point a few things that stand out. Please bear in mind that my take-away is literally only based on these findings and conclusions are only based on FM. Further analysis will/may happen when we get more samples, then i'll knock up a few graphs and dig a little deeper, here goes..

• Intel is still king when it comes to raw performance

• Single core and overall clock-speed are still the defining factor when it comes to FM

• Great strides have been made in multi core and threading performance by the developers but only when leagues are simulated in full detail (Benchmark C), which for the majority of users it won't be as they are likely to stick to the defaults mainly due to being unaware of the existence of the detail level setting.

• There are still good arguments to be made for AMD chips when it comes to a performance/cost comparison

• Despite the misconception that FM20 is essentially one large spreadsheet and would lend itself well to AMD Ryzens extra cores and threads, this is seemingly not the case and the benchmarks as a whole are more comparable to other gaming benchmarks, or at least in titles where the games are more CPU bound.

• High end graphics cards are definitely not required for FM, I myself only have an NVIDIA GTX 760 - 2GB and I can run the 3D on the highest settings, so with a future system purchase this would be where the greatest savings could be made

• There have been massive gains by Ryzen in the mobile CPU market

So I suppose the question is if I had to buy/build a system right now solely for FM on a reasonable budget what would I get?

For a Desktop PC my answer might surprise a few but I would get a latest generation Intel i5 unlocked K processor, i'd also pray that the gods of silicon had been kind to me and attempt to apply a reasonable overclock to get to the magic 5GHz mark (although that could be discussed another article entirely). I feel personally that the cost/performance for FM from the i5 is perfect. For every other use case its hard to look past AMD Ryzen, they seem to be ahead in every other metric, just not FM. Yet..

In terms of Laptops, its really close between Ryzen and Intel, and the difference between a good and bad system is likely to be whether you can grab a good deal at a certain time and what the cooling is like on any given model. It's always worth checking reviews thoroughly with an eye on the thermals as FM is very CPU intensive and a system with a bad cooling solution is definitely one to avoid. Its a tough one to recommend laptops as certain things like portability come into play.

You can post your own benchmark results results on the SiGames forum thread