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

[humbug]

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.

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!

 

[humbug]

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.

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.

 

[humbug]

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

I don't understand your attacking me there, if you had read the post you would see that's not at all whats going on.

 

[humbug]

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.

 

[humbug]

@ 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.

 

[humbug]

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.

Thank you Bru
And Teppic

 

[humbug]

Except that we don't live in a perfect world which all games use 8 cores fully (and never will). With the launch of the next gen console it would no doubt help a lot in making multi-platform games much more likely to use the cores fully, but situation won't change much for the PC exclusive games (i.e. PlanestSide 2, and other mmos and real-time strategies in general...which hammer CPU the most), the Piledriver will still lag behind the likes of i5.

As Sony themselves say Planet Side 2 will not work on the PS4 as it currently is, so it will get a complete overhaul and as a result AMD Desktop users will get a huge boost in performance.

Their words

This is the point, the PS4 and xBox One are x86 with a CPU that's only strong enough if the load is distributed across most or all of its 8 weak cores.

By in large it will change the landscape, what's more once developers take that step forward then game features and technology will also start to develop as they will have more than just a small fraction of a CPU's power available to them.

MMO's that don't want to be on Game Consoles or just bring their game development up-to-date will continue to be stuck in 2003, and that's their prerogative, but it means those 'PC only Games' will be like games from 2003 in comparison to their Game Console counter parts.

AMD absolutely need to do better on per core per clock performance, I have said the same so many times here my self, but that is not what this thread is about.

I find it absolutely ironic and somewhat disturbing that it is Game Consoles that are or will drive forward gaming technologies, not PC's!
Some people need to ask themselves how that has happened.

 

[humbug]

I added to my post #31

 

[humbug]

AMD's Modula cores are 'not fast'

To put it into context Bulldozer was 10% per core per clock slower than Thuban (AMD's own predecessor)

PileDriver is a little better but still 5% slower per core / clock than Thuban, it also has 10% better power efficiency than BulllDozer

AMD's 8 core CPU's could be very good with just a bit more per core / clock performance.
IMO they don't have to be as fast or faster than Intel per core / clock, they just have to be better than what PileDriver is.

SteamRoller slides say:



If that is right, and its a big IF, then we could be looking at 20% ~ per core / clock performance improvement.
Clocked at 4Ghz with 4.2Ghz Boost out of the box we would be looking at -15% Single threaded Haswell performance (@ stock) and a monster in fully threaded apps.

Sticking 8 cores in models was not necessarily a bad idea, a normal 8 core with each core in its own module would have been a much larger chip.

Its a bit like Porsche with the engine in the back behind the back wheels, early models did not work very well with that engine hanging out of the back of the car swinging about like a pendulum.
But they stuck with it and perfected it, now Porsche are arguably the best handling car there is, certainly enthusiasts say you cannot beat a 911 for handling and shear excitement, its a concept which works beautifully where on paper it shouldn't work at all, some how Porsche defied the laws of physics and made it work.

AMD had a radical idea and it looks like they are sticking with it, time will tell if they can perfect it.

 

[humbug]

Smaller companies are more likely to make games which can run on a wider range of hardware,ie,something like a 2GHZ Core2 or something similar. An example is the Torchlight series. Making games which need 4.5GHZ Core i5 CPUs will mean they will only have a very small audience.

However there are companies like CD Projekt RED and 4A games(under 120 employees) who are not that large but still developed custom engines which could use upto 4 cores effectively,but they were backed by much larger companies AFAIK.

Re: A4 Games.

Metro 2033 would use 6 core fully that I know of,

On my P-II x6 with Advanced PhysX on my Minimum FPS never dropped much below 35 FPS, perfectly playable.

I don't have the link any more, just this screen shot in my Photobucket account.



Tom's used it to test advanced PhysX on the GPU vs CPU with Metro 2003, the result was the Phenom II x6 1090T @ 4Ghz was only 10% slower than with it loaded on a GTX 480.

So yeah, if the little guys can do it, so can the rest.

But.....

Metro 2033 was 'to my knowledge' the last multithreaded Nvidia PhysX game.

While I have not looked at why yet, as I have only benched it a played it for 5 minutes, Metro LL on my Lynnfield i7 massively bottlenecks my Tahiti LE GPU, and I do mean massively, it drops to 70% in places and the game turns into a slide show, literally. (without advanced PhysX) the Lynnfield i7 is still a fast CPU even today.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if one core is pegging 100% usage because of Nvidias new PhysX SKD's.

 

[humbug]

When'd you go socket 1156 Humbug ?

Oops... sorry, Bloomfield, my CPU is a Socket 1366 i7 Bloomfield