Games using more then 4 cores

[k.m.p]

Most of the time, cpu's with high core counts ie 6/8 cores are not utilized properly in games, I get it, higher frequency cpu's are better for this.....on pc

 

All the new consoles (xbox one/ps4 and later) have octa-core cpu's that run at laughably low frequencies, as far as gaming is concerned. From that I can assume that game dev's have managed to make use of each core, which would mean that 8-core game support should be here.

 

Why does pc only still use 4 cores???

Is it the way games are made or that pc hasn't seen a mainstream cpu with more then 4 cores until this year that has stopped us getting that support?

 

Edited July 20, 2017 by k.m.p
typo

[Guest]

#blameIntel

[JakeNTech]

PC games only tend to utilise 4 cores  max because the majority of people only have quad core chips, because intel. Games consoles can have higher core counts as the games and the engines that run on them can utilise all the cores. PC games have to work with a wide range of hardware but console games only have to work with the hardware that the console there designed for contains. 

[grimreeper132]

because up until this year AMD had not released ryzen making 6 and 8 cores affordable for everyone, and intel weren't willing to, also it's hard to do it, linus has done a video on it. How ever it will be coming soon as ryzen has given the games developers a reason to, as more and more CPUs have more than 4 cores

[Guest]

AMD puts chips in several Consoles, if I am correct. That would explain them high core count consoles.

 

If it were up to Intel, consoles would be running a quart-core CPU.

[Shiv78]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

because up until this year AMD had not released ryzen making 6 and 8 cores affordable for everyone

well there was FX *shudders*

[Shiv78]

Just now, Dutch-stoner said:

If it were up to Intel, consoles would be running a quart-core CPU.

dual core

[grimreeper132]

Just now, Shiv78 said:

well there was FX *shudders*

I think that shudder explains that one

[Guest]

AMD had to force Intel to switch to dual core... Don't forget that please @Shiv78. Also, I would be shocked if Intel wouldn't disable parts of a core if they had to create console CPU's >>> quart core.

[k.m.p]

3 minutes ago, grimreeper132 said:

because up until this year AMD had not released ryzen making 6 and 8 cores affordable for everyone, and intel weren't willing to, also it's hard to do it, linus has done a video on it. How ever it will be coming soon as ryzen has given the games developers a reason to, as more and more CPUs have more than 4 cores

Sooooooo how likely is it we'll see 6/8 core support in 2017/early 2018

What was the title of the video?

 

[grimreeper132]

Just now, Shiv78 said:

dual core

nah dual core with HT,

 

Also this is why there is not 6 and 8 core laptops, until ryzen came along as although ryzen isn't as fast as intel, it is very power efficient so it can be fitted into laptops, as well as it being cheap enough for there still to be a market, as it would be £800 just for the CPU and you haven't even added in cooling etc. for the laptop, there just wasn't a big enough market for them

 

(ASUS is releasing an 8 core ryzen laptop soon, yes I know it's not out yet but it should be soonish)

[Shiv78]

3 minutes ago, Dutch-stoner said:

AMD had to force Intel to switch to dual core... Don't forget that please @Shiv78. Also, I would be shocked if Intel wouldn't disable parts of a core if they had to create console CPU's >>> quart core.

my point was that an intel console would be 2c/4t 

[grimreeper132]

1 minute ago, k.m.p said:

Sooooooo how likely is it we'll see 6/8 core support in 2017/early 2018

What was the title of the video?

 

It's hard to say, as every game is different, but support for more cores is already starting to become a thing, slowly with a handful games so it won't happen over night but it will happen over several years. 

[Guest]

Me feels sad and insecure @Shiv78. Not sure if you got the joke. QuaRT core. Wasn't a typ0 or whatever, was talking about Intel putting an 1/4th of an CPU in an Console.

 

*Next best thing to taking a shi* on Intel, is taking a *hit on consoles.

[Shiv78]

22 minutes ago, Dutch-stoner said:

Me feels sad and insecure @Shiv78. Not sure if you got the joke. QuaRT core. Wasn't a typ0 or whatever, was talking about Intel putting an 1/4th of an CPU in an Console.

 

*Next best thing to taking a shi* on Intel, is taking a *hit on consoles.

OMG LOOOOOOOL

[typographie]

47 minutes ago, k.m.p said:

Is it the way games are made or that pc hasn't seen a mainstream cpu with more then 4 cores until this year that has stopped us getting that support?

I don't know if this is the only reason, but developers have to target the hardware the masses actually own. Consoles all have identical hardware, but the majority of PC gamers probably still own a quad-core/quad-thread CPU at this point. At best, to spend too much time and money optimizing games for heavy multithreading wastes resources that will only benefit a very small minority of their players. At worst, it could cause performance issues for those with lesser hardware.

 

Keep in mind that the PC gamers who actually engage in a tech forum like this are a subset of a subset. We're just a few hundred of the most dedicated and engaged and tech-literate. More casual gamers take years to upgrade their hardware, and may just buy entire new systems at once instead of swapping components. I doubt the majority even owns a CPU as fast as a Kaby Lake i5. Even now that Ryzen is out and fairly affordable for the mainstream, it could still take awhile before developers can actually plan around us owning them.

[Guest]

@typographie I have to agree partly with what you are saying. However... There are "enough" people with an high-end gaming pc. And they can be called "influencers". If a game has been optimized for the really high end stuff, with awesome graphics and whatnot... That would be the target. Add some benchmark stuff inside, and you have something special. Them high end people will try to brag about FPS, other people will read up on the game and just might test their own older hardware.

 

If said game could make good use of 8 cores, but also run great on 4 cores with lowered settings... The PR will be made by them high end gamers while the casual gamer can also join in.

[k.m.p]

14 minutes ago, typographie said:

I don't know if this is the only reason, but developers have to target the hardware the masses actually own. Consoles all have identical hardware, but the majority of PC gamers probably still own a quad-core/quad-thread CPU at this point. At best, to spend too much time and money optimizing games for heavy multithreading wastes resources that will only benefit a very small minority of their players. At worst, it could cause performance issues for those with lesser hardware.

 

Keep in mind that the PC gamers who actually engage in a tech forum like this are a subset of a subset. We're just a few hundred of the most dedicated and engaged and tech-literate. More casual gamers take years to upgrade their hardware, and may just buy entire new systems at once instead of swapping components. I doubt the majority even owns a CPU as fast as a Kaby Lake i5. Even now that Ryzen is out and fairly affordable for the mainstream, it could still take awhile before developers can actually plan around us owning them.

 

8 minutes ago, Dutch-stoner said:

@typographie I have to agree partly with what you are saying. However... There are "enough" people with an high-end gaming pc. And they can be called "influencers". If a game has been optimized for the really high end stuff, with awesome graphics and whatnot... That would be the target. Add some benchmark stuff inside, and you have something special. Them high end people will try to brag about FPS, other people will read up on the game and just might test their own older hardware.

 

If said game could make good use of 8 cores, but also run great on 4 cores with lowered settings... The PR will be made by them high end gamers while the casual gamer can also join in.

The main reason a lot of people join pc is that we have a faster upgrade cycle, 90% of people won't have kaby lake cpu's but are likely to have something high end from an older gen. If ryzen manages to get 10% or more market share by the end of 2017 or q1 2018, lets hope that is enough for devs to optimize for more cores.

 

Lets look at something slightly different, 90% of people don't have sli/crossfire rigs, but in this case, the majority of games do offer at least half decent scaling and a clean experience at least up to 2-way, maybe in the same way, 6/8 core support doesn't take too long to make it to pc, especially considering that its already there for console, they just need to implement it

[typographie]

Just now, Dutch-stoner said:

@typographie I have to agree partly with what you are saying. However... There are "enough" people with an high-end gaming pc. And they can be called "influencers". If a game has been optimized for the really high end stuff, with awesome graphics and whatnot... That would be the target. Add some benchmark stuff inside, and you have something special. Them high end people will try to brag about FPS, other people will read up on the game and just might test their own older hardware.

 

If said game could make good use of 8 cores, but also run great on 4 cores with lowered settings... The PR will be made by them high end gamers while the casual gamer can also join in.

I'd say that's already happening to some degree. The Witcher 3, Battlefield 1, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Hitman, Overwatch, and others all respond positively to CPUs with more than four fast cores, and we hear about it all the time (ad nauseam, some might say) on this forum. So I think you're correct on that front.

 

But since those games all exist and can definitely benefit from more than 4 cores, I assumed the OP was talking about optimizing for 6/8-core processors to the point where you actually need one in order to reach some reasonable performance baseline. Like, a hypothetical game where you definitely need a 6 core Ryzen or Intel CPU to maintain a stable ~60 FPS. I have no doubts that will be the norm some years from now, but to do something like that now would be perceived as a disastrous "unoptimized mess."

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, k.m.p said:

All the new consoles (xbox one/ps4 and later) have octa-core cpu's that run at laughably low frequencies, as far as gaming is concerned. From that I can assume that game dev's have managed to make use of each core, which would mean that 8-core game support should be here.

 

Why does pc only still use 4 cores???

Is it the way games are made or that pc hasn't seen a mainstream cpu with more then 4 cores until this year that has stopped us getting that support?

 

I can't find the link to the page, but one of the tech websites ran GTA V and Ashes of the Singularity with an Intel CPU profiler to see how many threads from the application were being run on a 4C/8T processor. They found a bell curve on GTA V where it tends to issue at most four threads to execute, but it can peak up to 8. Ashes of the Singularity however would would issue 8 threads most of the time.

 

The other part is that when comparing console performance to PCs, you have to know that consoles are using comparatively weak processors. The Jaguar in both systems was meant to compete with the likes of the Atom and or lower than the Celeron. Sure, you have eight cores, but they're all weak cores. Any sufficiently high performing single core can beat multiple cores. In fact, even of the same single-core performance, a sufficiently fast single core processor will almost always beat a multi-core processor of a divided frequency. You can prove this by going:

• You have three tasks that take 1, 2, and 3 seconds if they ran on a single core at 2.0 GHz and they can't be broken up.
• If you put this in a quad core at 2.0GHz per core, it will take 3 seconds to do the job
• If you put this on a single core at 8.0GHz, it will take 1.5 seconds to do the job ((1 + 2 + 3 )/(8/2)  = 6/4 = 1.5).

Or to put it another way, think of it as factory workers. The newbies will take longer to do a job than the veterans. So one veteran may be able to do the same amount of work as a few of the newbies in the same time.

 

So maybe GTA V on the PS4 can use all eight cores available to it. But because the PS4's processor is really weak compared to say a Core i7 and little has changed with regards to what GTA V processes, the i7 maybe doing the job twice as fast. And depending on the timing of when GTA V's threads are scheduled, it may only seem that it's issuing only four at once most of the time.

 

Also, multi-threaded programming is hard: