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Planet side 2- Need to code for Multicore CPU's

humbug

humbug

humbug

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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ross-platform-play-teases-character-transfers

Re: the debate as to whether or not AMD's Came Console wins would effect their PC platform CPU's

Planet Side 2 is one of those games that only makes use of primarily one CPU core, this gives AMD a disadvantage as their CPU's are slower than Intel where only one or a couple of cores are used.
AMD need to use all available cores to keep up with Intel, as seen in Crysis 3-





Crysis 3 is very much the exception in Games where AMD's CPU's perform at the same level at Intel's i7 4 core 8 thread CPU's.

"To engineer the game for the PS4 is a lot easier because you have a consistent set of hardware that you're optimising against," Higby explained.

"It really is a challenge to optimize high-end PC games to be able to work on the pantheon of hardware that's available to players nowadays, it's just insane.

"The PS4 is a much more consistent, stable platform for us to be able to develop for. The big challenge with the PS4 is its AMD chip, and it really, heavily relies on multi-threading. We have the exact same kind of Achilles heel on the PC too. People who have AMD chips have a disadvantage, because a single core on an AMD chip doesn't really have as much horsepower and they really require you to kind of spread the load out across multiple cores to be able to take full advantage of the AMD processors.

"Our engine sucks at that right now. We are multi-threaded, but the primary gameplay thread is very expensive. The biggest piece of engineering work that they're doing right now, and it's an enormous effort, is to go back through the engine and re-optimise it to be really, truly multi-threaded and break the gameplay thread up. That's a very challenging thing to do because we're doing a lot of stuff - tracking all these different players, all of their movements, all the projectiles, all the physics they're doing.

"It's very challenging to split those really closely connected pieces of functionality across in multiple threads. So it's a big engineering task for them to do, but thankfully once they do it, AMD players who've been having sub-par performance on the PC will suddenly get a massive boost - just because of being able to take the engine and re-implement it as multi-threaded.
Click to expand...

I have always found it annoying when game developers code games like they did in 2003, they complain "its difficult"
My colleague is a software coder with published software used in the banking and security industries, naturally I have spoken at length with him about this multicore issue.
He hasn't written software that does not make use of multicore CPU's in many years, its more expensive and time consuming to code for multicore but not to do so in this day and age is not an option if you want your software to perform like its modern and not from 2003.

In my view game developers who code like its 2003 are just lazy, they can get away with it because they can always blame poor performance on the CPU even if that performance is still not great on a £250 Intel CPU.
To many 'enthusiasts' just nod and then spend £150 on cooling so they can run those CPU at ridicules overclocks just so they can get the game to run well.
Not to mention the proverbial "don't get AMD there rubbish at gaming, look at Arma II and Planet Side 2 for proof..."

The truth is there is no reason for any modern game to run badly on any CPU but for the developers laziness and / or incompetence.

IMO the PS4 running 8 slow cores will now force those developers to get with 2013~ if they want to have their product running well on that PS4.

This is IMO the first sign of that starting to take effect, hurray!
 
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There's Crysis 3 benchmarks which show the FX8350 only reaching parity with the i5 3470.

Before people start thinking that i5's are going to become defunct and that FX8350's are suddenly i7 gaming parity.

But I agree, and have said that AMD using 8 low power cores could be to push thread utilization.

But it's also wrong to insinuate that it's "easy" they can't just offload everything to other threads.
 
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Martini1991 said:
There's Crysis 3 benchmarks which show the FX8350 only reaching parity with the i5 3470.

Before people start thinking that i5's are going to become defunct and that FX8350's are suddenly i7 gaming parity.

But I agree, and have said that AMD using 8 low power cores could be to push thread utilization.

But it's also wrong to insinuate that it's "easy" they can't just offload everything to other threads.
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There is nothing in my post to "insinuate" its easy, I said its more time consuming and expensive, the easy way out of that is to blame hardware when in fact its their coding that's only taking advantage of a fraction of that hardware's full potential.

Easy or not they can no longer use that as an excuse, end result = games finally get with the times, game technology takes a giant leap forward in line with the hardware its running on.
 
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So, if you ignore overclocking and cherry pick not only a particular game, but questionable results for that game, you can make it look like an AMD chip is roughly on par with a similar Intel chip :D
 
Why are they questionable? When all 8 cores are used properly and the software makes use of modern CPU instructions, the processor performs on par with Intel CPUs.

YDbjvV1.png

The AMD CPUs are only weak if the cores aren't being utilised, which is all to do with the software being run.
 
This is not about Intel vs AMD, I really don't care for getting emotional about brands and circular nonsense arguments in this or that review is lying.

This is about better use of the given hardware, yes i'm saying this will make AMD more competitive, what i'm not saying is this will make this or that Intel obsolete or even no longer with an advantage, that's just your own emotions guys.

This will just give better parity on what can actually be done on very powerful hardware where its actually being used to its full potential, RE: AMD and Intel.
Lets be honest here, some of those titles don't run to well on Intel either, as I said.
 
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humbug said:
This is not about Intel vs AMD, I really don't care for getting emotional about brands and circular nonsense arguments in this or that review is lying.

This is about better use of the given hardware, yes i'm saying this will make AMD more competitive, what i'm not saying is this will make this or that Intel obsolete or even no longer with an advantage, that's just your own emotions guys.

This will just give better parity on what can actually be done on very powerful hardware where its actually being used to its full potential, RE: AMD and Intel.
Click to expand...

That's the point really - most games aren't programmed in a way to take advantage of 8 cores, those that do always show big gains on the 8320/8350. In terms of raw performance, all 8 cores of an 8350 is certainly comparable to all 4 cores of an i5, it just needs the software to use them all.
 
@ teppic, I feel there is more that can be done with games (if 'a' CPU is more fully utilised)

Take Planet Side 2 as a example, one of its main problems is it uses Physics gimped to one CPU core, as a result you can have what is a powerful CPU, and still not have solid performance with out overclocking the 'you know what' out of it, even then your min frame rates are still far lower than many would like, why, because its only using up to 25% of a 4 cores full potential, or 12.5% of an 8 core.

Now lets use other games as a comparison, like Crysis 3 and BF3, they also use a lot of CPU Physics, its a different type of CPU Physics which also spreads that CPU load across many more cores, the result is far better performance on the same CPU.

Planet Side 2 = Not good

Crysis 3 / BF3 = Good.

Good is what we all want, Green or Blue is irrelevant.
 
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Not often I agree with humbug, but in this case he is quit right. When more software egineers really start utilizing the many core aspects of modern CPU's things will improve for AMD in the software that doesn't use many cores.
Of course intel will also be benifit from better written software. Certainly interesting times ahead.
 
Yeah, that's what I'm saying really. Whether all 8 cores are used or just 1-2 is entirely down to the software, it's unrelated to Intel/AMD arguments. Pointing out that the 8320/8350 can perform on par with Intel CPUs is in no way saying they are 'better', just that they are being used better by the software.
 
bru said:
Not often I agree with humbug, but in this case he is quit right. When more software egineers really start utilizing the many core aspects of modern CPU's things will improve for AMD in the software that doesn't use many cores.
Of course intel will also be benifit from better written software. Certainly interesting times ahead.
Click to expand...

Thank you Bru
And Teppic

:)
 
Writing well multi-threaded software is much more challenging than having a big master thread that spawns a few others for particular tasks. You can also easily get to the point where creation and management of threads is costing more than the gain from the multi-threading itself. As a result you have to write for a target number of threads, perhaps with the ability to take advantage to some extent of further threads if they're available. You'll realistically never (never as in right now!) optimise for more than about 4 threads :(

Edit: My experience is mostly with high level languages so game engine writers may not agree!

Edit2: I am of course hoping that the new consoles help push games to multi-thread 'properly' thus pushing consumer PCs more towards mutli-thread support thus allowing normal PC development to utilise more threads. We're just not there yet! That said, new PCs almost all support decent thread counts, its all the old ones that are killing it for non-gaming program writers :(
 
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teppic said:
Where are these many reviews? And what about all the other multithreaded software that backs up the above results? Techspot has this one, which has the 8350 slightly below a 3770K (a whole 3fps):

http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/642/bench/CPU_03.png
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Which shows it on parity with an i5 3470, which is my point?
Oh no wait, you turned it into an almost i7 performance point. LOL.

I have a problem with the cherry picking on benchmarks BS.
I mean even Humbugs two benchmarks show quite a variance in the 2500K's performance.

I can quite clearly see and flipping agree that the FX8's are going to get a boost, and that AMD's 8 core consoles is to help their CPU's in gaming as they're forcing multi-threading.
 
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Martini1991 said:
Which shows it on parity with an i5 3470, which is my point?
Oh no wait, you turned it into an almost i7 performance point. LOL.

I have a problem with the cherry picking on benchmarks BS.
I mean even Humbugs two benchmarks show quite a variance in the 2500K's performance.
Click to expand...

I don't know what you're trying to argue here, but nothing that I am. The cherry picking line is getting very old.
 
teppic said:
I don't know what you're trying to argue here, but nothing that I am. The cherry picking line is getting very old.
Click to expand...

Are you being silly on purpose?
You've asked me "Where are all these reviews" which show FX8350 and i5 3470 parity in Crysis 3.

Only to show me a benchmark which actually backs up my statement, only to make the graph "show" how close the FX8350 is to the i7.
And no one mentioned other software, I know that an FX8350 in highly threaded software is very good price/performance and offers performance a stock i5 can't achieve over a stock FX8350.
 
I still don't know what you're getting at. The benchmarks have shown that the FX-8350 performs significantly better when it's running code across all its cores, and moves into the same territory as quad core Intel CPUs. Whether in one task it beats an i7 or in another it can't beat an i5 is irrelevant to what I'm saying.
 
What I'm getting as is why the results are questionable, as someone else mentioned and he was asked why they're questionable, and when I've answered, you've just moved the goal posts and answer in a silly "I'm not wrong" manner.

The results are questionable as they show a hierarchy which many other reviews show differently.

But we'll forget it, because you're simply not worth it.
 
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