Multicore support?

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Joel_GGG wrote:

I can't comment on this game, but I know most games use a single cpu core because multicore support is really difficult with games due to their real-time nature, or something. The source engine took a long time to support it and they have many more developers than we do.

Because of this I generally go for higher per-core clock speed than multi-core when selecting a CPU.

Currently for gaming, the 3570k is the ultimate chip. What i'd do is just clock the first two cores higher than the last two.

Hmm..have to try this then, thanks!

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Xendran wrote:

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Joel_GGG wrote:

I can't comment on this game, but I know most games use a single cpu core because multicore support is really difficult with games due to their real-time nature, or something. The source engine took a long time to support it and they have many more developers than we do.

Because of this I generally go for higher per-core clock speed than multi-core when selecting a CPU.

Currently for gaming, the 3570k is the ultimate chip. What i'd do is just clock the first two cores higher than the last two.

If you take the IHS off and add a some proper TIM, yes. Otherwise, a 2500k will reach higher clocks

If this is the case, is there a way to 'move' PoE to a single core? I have a 2600k CPU (8 cores). I usually have xfire, steam, mumble and other programs running as well and would like to put them on a separate so that PoE can max out on a single core.

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Soroban wrote:

If this is the case, is there a way to 'move' PoE to a single core?

Probably by setting its affinity in task manager?

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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Xendran wrote:

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Joel_GGG wrote:

I can't comment on this game, but I know most games use a single cpu core because multicore support is really difficult with games due to their real-time nature, or something. The source engine took a long time to support it and they have many more developers than we do.

Because of this I generally go for higher per-core clock speed than multi-core when selecting a CPU.

Currently for gaming, the 3570k is the ultimate chip. What i'd do is just clock the first two cores higher than the last two.

If you take the IHS off and add a some proper TIM, yes. Otherwise, a 2500k will reach higher clocks

Remember that 3570k gets more performance per clock. On average around an advantage equivelant to around 300MHz (So to match a 4.8 ivy you'd be looking at a 5.1 sandy)

this might be unrelated but is it possible/stable to swap clocking power between cores? i have 6 core processor of around 3.3 with ability to downclock some and upclock others, or even turning some cpu's off. if i upped one cpu to 4.8 and lowered another to 1.8, would things be ok? stock fans btw if that is important.

Should be fine, i was running at 4.6 4.6 4.3 4.3 for quite a while (now i just run 4.6 on all cores)

If you have many cores, you can assign a specific program to a specific core using the task manager. You simply disable all the other cores for that application and the OS will be forced to stick it on one core.

Multi-threading a game engine is serious, serious work and it's extremely time consuming and difficult. If you want to game, you shouldn't buy a processor that tries to make up performance with many cores. You should get the highest clock speed you can per processor.

In the future, I imagine most game engines will be designed to be natively multiprocessor - but as I said, that kind of thing is very expensive and time consuming to write into an existing engine. When this game was first being developed years ago, I imagine Chris and the team didn't understand the scope of their future work or simply chose not to write the engine for multi-threading because it would be too difficult. Most developers probably 'wish' they could have multicore support for their game, but make the decision not to early in development to cut time and development cost.

For everyone here who isn't experienced in coding and development, the decision to "multi-core" is typically something that has to be made in the early stages of programming. And unfortunately, the state of parallel-programming isn't easy to work with at the moment.

In any process that makes use of multiple processors you'd want to plan you program so that processors spend the least amount of time sitting idle waiting for others to finish - otherwise the extra performance you get is not worth putting in the extra effort (and it *is* a lot). A good way is to lay out everything you need to calculate and apportion them where needed. Then you want to figure out how to deal with spikes in the number of game objects, i.e. scenarios like carpet-bombing and dual-totems spawning ground objects.

I point out your particular case because of what skills like Arctic breath effectively requires of a game engine. A simple way to implement it (I'm not an expert in shortcuts) is to create ground ice "objects" as the projectile flies - each time going to memory and creating data there. So the game ends up with, say 4 times the number of things it has to keep track of compared to 95% of gamers/situation.

So, until the coding complexity situation improves, for small teams it's just easier for them to deal single-core and make sure 95% of the time it's playable. One doesn't want to expend the extra time making sure the game runs off N-processors if it's not strictly needed most of the time - and unfortunately you can't just ask for more processors when you expect an incoming carpet-bomb.