AMD CPUs Will Gain Performance Boosts Due To Next-Gen Consoles According To John Carmack.

[Dravic]

 

I remember this being a huge argument when dual core CPU's were bought in. When Dual core came out multiple Single core CPU's were more efficient and generally a lot faster. Because, especially with early dual cores they shared most of their resources and were had much lower IPC than their single core equivalent. Instead of thinking about it as 4 modules, Think as it as 4 Dual cores on 1 chip. Because essentially it is. Sharing resources only has a noticeable performance decrease when it comes to single threaded applications. AMD's standing on this for a long time has been parallel over serial. As you can see with the 7zip benchmark it performs very well when things are parallel optimised.

 

 

The problem with this is Linus said that "its not really 8 cores". As much as I like Linus and agree with most of what he said. The way in which he said it means that all the people watching his videos take his word for it.

 

In terms of Physical cores yes it is an 8 CORE CPU.

 

 

 

Now I've got that over with I am going to comment on the original Topic.

 

I personally think that Multi-threaded optimisation is not going to have a direct advantage to AMD. It is going to advantage Intel aswell. Especially with their Hyper-threaded SKU's. Currently the biggest problem with hyper threading is there isn't really much that uses it. This could be the turning point.

 

Like John says further in though is the Optimisations that can be made for the AMD Architecture.

 

edit: I just saw that @Katness Everdeen

summed this up much better (Can't add quotes after sorry)

 

"According to John Carmack, code can be optimized for the AMD micro-architecture, so not just optmized for a higher number of cores/threads.

At about 01:34:00 he goes into much more detail explaining that developers only let most of the code run on a single thread, because having to write code that can run in parallel was "terrifying" to them, but he then goes on to explain his personal research project writing the Wolfenstein 3D code to run in parallel was not that bad, saying that it is actually better to write parallel code but that it currently has its difficulties due to lack of game developer experience."

 

 

But Carmack didn't talk about AMD CPUs, instead he explained that making a game multi-threaded leads to loads of problems and developers decided to rely on 1 thread with some smaller works on other cores if anything so that the main, first core can focus better on game logic.

 

And he wanted to try real multi-threaded game where each object is designed to work in parallel, kinda closed in a cage where it can see other objects in game world (other threads as well) but can't "touch them" as in, you need some wider solution to interacting and he thinks he figured that out but he still sees a lot of problem because game loop is a consistent thing. If all things are parallel (even if resources are shared, they can only be checked once in a while) and - following his example - two objects tried to go through one door, how does the code decide what happens then? You need a lot of solutions for small and big problems like that.

 

That's totally different from optimising games for AMD CPUs here. That's about making games using multiple threads... AT ALL. Because most don't right now and if they do they are doing it "wrong" according to Carmack (and me, imho) - using other cores for small, minor tasks and not for true parallelism.

[Kuzma]

But Carmack didn't talk about AMD CPUs, instead he explained that making a game multi-threaded leads to loads of problems and developers decided to rely on 1 thread with some smaller works on other cores if anything so that the main, first core can focus better on game logic.

 

And he wanted to try real multi-threaded game where each object is designed to work in parallel, kinda closed in a cage where it can see other objects in game world (other threads as well) but can't "touch them" as in, you need some wider solution to interacting and he thinks he figured that out but he still sees a lot of problem because game loop is a consistent thing. If all things are parallel (even if resources are shared, they can only be checked once in a while) and - following his example - two objects tried to go through one door, how does the code decide what happens then? You need a lot of solutions for small and big problems like that.

 

That's totally different from optimising games for AMD CPUs here. That's about making games using multiple threads... AT ALL. Because most don't right now and if they do they are doing it "wrong" according to Carmack (and me, imho) - using other cores for small, minor tasks and not for true parallelism.

If two objects try to go through one door? I believe that is covered by the CPU itself but otherwise :p you end up with access violations at 0xXXXXXX address or one thing going before the other, latency is not good

[Dravic]

Yes and that's what he was talking about at that 1h32min or so you guys talked about, I watched it and listened closely.

 

He spoke about multithreading topic as a whole being hard to perform and he is very good programmer so it may seem 'easy enough' for him but he also took effort to optimise RAGE for stuff nobody else ever used. Smart but not profitable. :D

[Xelithium]

All this will lead to is people who use AMD saying AMD is better and people who use Intel saying Intel is better.

 

Basically, we have to wait for the benchmarks. Only then will we know.

[Dravic]

All this will lead to is people who use AMD saying AMD is better and people who use Intel saying Intel is better.

 

Basically, we have to wait for the benchmarks. Only then will we know.

 

Obviously.

 

 

But intel aint magically going to get 70% slower and AMD aint magically going to get 70% faster :D

 

It's predictable that if games start using ALUs in AMD processor efficiently like some Winrar or other synthethic benchmarks, those processors will greatly benefit by showing better results.

[Kuzma]

Yes and that's what he was talking about at that 1h32min or so you guys talked about, I watched it and listened closely.

 

He spoke about multithreading topic as a whole being hard to perform and he is very good programmer so it may seem 'easy enough' for him but he also took effort to optimise RAGE for stuff nobody else ever used. Smart but not profitable. :D

I am yet to watch the video, probably will later but I 100% agree with him ^_^ but it won't only improve AMD cpu performance; it will improve gaming performance as a whole as there are still some games that don't even run on dual cores let alone quad cores :/.

 

As you can see from my example above it is long and tedious to do multi-threaded scripts, it took me less than a minute to type the single threaded code and about 5 to do the multi-threaded one; not because I didn't know the code buy simply because it's tedious to split a single function into many even if it will give better performance.

 

All this will lead to is people who use AMD saying AMD is better and people who use Intel saying Intel is better.

 

Basically, we have to wait for the benchmarks. Only then will we know.

Even if AMD gain a performance increase it doesn't matter that much as intel will too.

[Kuzma]

From a game studio's point of view 5x the time for a "small" performance gain is not worth it; that's 5x less profit as time is money.

[Dravic]

I am yet to watch the video, probably will later but I 100% agree with him ^_^ but it won't only improve AMD cpu performance; it will improve gaming performance as a whole as there are still some games that don't even run on dual cores let alone quad cores :/.

 

As you can see from my example above it is long and tedious to do multi-threaded scripts, it took me less than a minute to type the single threaded code and about 5 to do the multi-threaded one; not because I didn't know the code buy simply because it's tedious to split a single function into many even if it will give better performance.

 

Even if AMD gain a performance increase it doesn't matter that much as intel will too.

 

Man I am a beginning programmer as well and i understand a bit of what you or Carmack say and i showed others what he said above. Multi threading is troublesome and nobody got a full solution for making Game Loop multi threaded without sacrificing features, not even Carmack and he said that he didnt tinker with this enough.

 

If we get some permanent solution (maybe Carmack, maybe somebody else comes up with a full multi-threaded API/Engine for making game loops with multiple thread), then that will happen. Until then we will keep seeing 1 thread with game loop and other threads supporting it with minor calculations (as far as games go).

[Kuzma]

Man I am a beginning programmer as well and i understand a bit of what you or Carmack say and i showed others what he said above. Multi threading is troublesome and nobody got a full solution for making Game Loop multi threaded without sacrificing features, not even Carmack and he said that he didnt tinker with this enough.

 

If we get some permanent solution (maybe Carmack, maybe somebody else comes up with a full multi-threaded API/Engine for making game loops with multiple thread), then that will happen. Until then we will keep seeing 1 thread with game loop and other threads supporting it with minor calculations (as far as games go).

I am by no stretch of the imagination a beginning programmer :P but my main issue we have right now is the engines don't begin with multi-threading in mind; they all have single threaded bases (except Frostbite 2 and a few exceptions). Once companies start making new engines for the xbone and ps4's multiple cores in mind we'll start seeing all the cores being pushed ^_^ and it'll be good for the industry.

[Dravic]

I am by no stretch of the imagination a beginning programmer :P but my main issue we have right now is the engines don't begin with multi-threading in mind; they all have single threaded bases (except Frostbite 2 and a few exceptions). Once companies start making new engines for the xbone and ps4's multiple cores in mind we'll start seeing all the cores being pushed ^_^ and it'll be good for the industry.

 

I liked how Carmack actually tried to 'port' a very old and somewhat simple game (compared to some of today's games) and said it was easy but he didnt manage to finish; usage of threads is only sensible ingames if they have purpose like different threads for different enemies to make veeeery good branching code for AI etc.

 

This ain't possible with todays approach of game developers: use 1 core and additional ones for gimmicks.

 

Carmack tried to make each NPC (monster?) a different thread and that was when he saw how problematic it is to synchronise parallel code in gaming where you can't predict what gamer does next (and as AI gets more and more advanced you can't really predict AI either because advanced AI is unpredictable to some degree - randomness and adapting to situation).

[Anubikai]

okay im just gonna bring this down to what actually could happen. Optimisation, thats the word thats being thrown around here. It is true that optimisation is a very powerful thing and this can clearly be shown in the mobile market....

 

take an iphone 4, thats running a apple a4 - 1ghz a8 and PowerVR SGX535. This isnt the most powerful of mobile hardware but it runs basically everything in the app store just fine??? why??? optimisation......iphones consistent hardware allowed developers to know that the majority of user will have this hardware so their apps need to work smoothly on said hardware....now lets take that same hardware and put it on a theoretical android phone....the experience would suck ballz......android has too wide hardware base for anything to be correctly optimised for one single configuration. Thats why the more powerful android phones get to run the games and everything smoothly.

 

That same situation will apply to consoles and pc gaming. You will be able to get great performance (you can right now aswell) with the fx-X350 cpus for much less than their intel counterparts. Once engines start to utilise more cores and break past the 4 core optimisation into 6 core then you might see a difference. But i doubt it as the cores on intel have been proven to be quiet a bit more powerful than the fx series so until they get to the full scale 8 core optimisation nothing will really change. Its going to take some time for the engines to become so heavily threaded that anything below an i7 will see a major hit in performance, even once this happens the current intel user base can just buy the i7. In 2-3 years time the i7-4770k will be like £180 there or about with the two new intel refreshes and the new intel architecture coming out.....so yeah thats how i see it......all in all i think people are forgetting that consoles are just for gaming....you might only see performance gains in gaming but for all the other stuff pc's do that will continue to be single threaded or even going up to 4 threades.....intel might come out on top. This is assuming amd cant come up with some chips that equal or beat intel single core performance whilst retaining all their 'cores'.....all in all from now on going intel or amd is fine. I dont think any major changes will occur any time soon. If they do happen it will instantly be apparent with new game engines.....

 

-Anubikai

[qwertywarrior]

old news

this was reported by other developers about 2 weeks +

[Kuzma]

okay im just gonna bring this down to what actually could happen. Optimisation, thats the word thats being thrown around here. It is true that optimisation is a very powerful thing and this can clearly be shown in the mobile market....

 

take an iphone 4, thats running a apple a4 - 1ghz a8 and PowerVR SGX535. This isnt the most powerful of mobile hardware but it runs basically everything in the app store just fine??? why??? optimisation......iphones consistent hardware allowed developers to know that the majority of user will have this hardware so their apps need to work smoothly on said hardware....now lets take that same hardware and put it on a theoretical android phone....the experience would suck ballz......android has too wide hardware base for anything to be correctly optimised for one single configuration. Thats why the more powerful android phones get to run the games and everything smoothly.

 

That same situation will apply to consoles and pc gaming. You will be able to get great performance (you can right now aswell) with the fx-X350 cpus for much less than their intel counterparts. Once engines start to utilise more cores and break past the 4 core optimisation into 6 core then you might see a difference. But i doubt it as the cores on intel have been proven to be quiet a bit more powerful than the fx series so until they get to the full scale 8 core optimisation nothing will really change. Its going to take some time for the engines to become so heavily threaded that anything below an i7 will see a major hit in performance, even once this happens the current intel user base can just buy the i7. In 2-3 years time the i7-4770k will be like £180 there or about with the two new intel refreshes and the new intel architecture coming out.....so yeah thats how i see it......all in all i think people are forgetting that consoles are just for gaming....you might only see performance gains in gaming but for all the other stuff pc's do that will continue to be single threaded or even going up to 4 threades.....intel might come out on top. This is assuming amd cant come up with some chips that equal or beat intel single core performance whilst retaining all their 'cores'.....all in all from now on going intel or amd is fine. I dont think any major changes will occur any time soon. If they do happen it will instantly be apparent with new game engines.....

 

-Anubikai

Multi-threading is useless in games because of the very nature of its existance, want a lesson?

Due to the weak nature of the 8 cores on ps4 and xbone, developers will be REQUIRED to use all 8 cores if they want to do anything because anything less will be far too weak. But here's the good news? i5s will also increase in performance as games are still barely using 2 cores :/.

 

Look at my above code for an example of optimisation; although the second code took much longer to do; if that code was to run every frame then the multi-core optimisation I did there would help; a LOT

[qwertywarrior]

hmmm

the jaguar was introduced in 2013

it lets say 5 years time new AMD cpus will be vastly different than their older brothers

 

newer AMD cpus will be as strange as intel CPUs to the old console hardware  ,no?

[qwertywarrior]

Multi-threading is useless in games because of the very nature of its existance, want a lesson?

Due to the weak nature of the 8 cores on ps4 and xbone, developers will be REQUIRED to use all 8 cores if they want to do anything because anything less will be far too weak. But here's the good news? i5s will also increase in performance as games are still barely using 2 cores :/.

 

Look at my above code for an example of optimisation; although the second code took much longer to do; if that code was to run every frame then the multi-core optimisation I did there would help; a LOT

 i wonder how do game engines work

i mean the engines them selves are already optimized right?

like cake mix  for example (just add water)

 

the new Unreal engine for example  ( i dont know if its already optimized or not but lets say it is )

what do u do with it just add textures and models etc ? and thats it ?

[Dravic]

 i wonder how do game engines work

i mean the engines them selves are already optimized right?

like cake mix  for example (just add water)

 

the new Unreal engine for example  ( i dont know if its already optimized or not but lets say it is )

what do u do with it just add textures and models etc ? and thats it ?

 

Depends on what gameplay you wanna get.

 

Think of Engine as a framework or skeleton. You are working with framework, slowly adding more and more pieces, filling it with the stuff you want to have ingame.

 

Now, there are lots of in-depth guides/explanations/definitions how whole game development looks but in short:

 

Games are built with code (depending on framework it may use different code) and assets mostly. Code takes assets for a spin and you are seeing what you see ingame normally.

 

In other words, programmers work hard to code game loop - everything that happens in-game - so that it works at desirable framerate. Each frame needs to be first calculated by CPU and then sent to GPU to become rendered fully before game can continue with next frame. You are getting for example 60 frames per second (FPS) in normal games. That means your processor and graphics card go through all the game loop AND rendering AND sending data all over the place 60 times per second operating on BILLIONS of pixels each time.

 

It's huge when you look at it like that. Thankfully nowadays we got a lot of API (interfaces) we can use to program a game (including game engines, efficient scripting languages etc.).

 

Building a game from 0% to 100% is a very lengthy process and is very very indepth and complicated.

 

Game engine is an interface developers work with to bind every asset and piece of code together into a game... It's hard to explain. you'd need a good read to understand. Everything is very complicated.

 

As to the topic, game developers are opting for using only one thread for game loop (the one that calculates AI of NPCs, player actions, what's happening in the world etc.) because it's easier and quicker to WRITE by programmers. Multi-threaded applications are faster but far harder to make. And you still have to synchronize everything before a frame is sent to be rendered.

 

Nowadays you can see that a game uses more than 1 thread, but i haven't seen any game that really utilises multiple cores. Instead devs opt for 1 single thread for gameloop and sometimes few more for smaller things that control physics of the game, complicated AI or environment only etc.

 

Hope I explained that well, it's hard to explain well in a foreign language to somebody who doesn't sit in the topic on daily basis.

[Kuzma]

Depends on what gameplay you wanna get.

 

Think of Engine as a framework or skeleton. You are working with framework, slowly adding more and more pieces, filling it with the stuff you want to have ingame.

 

Now, there are lots of in-depth guides/explanations/definitions how whole game development looks but in short:

 

Games are built with code (depending on framework it may use different code) and assets mostly. Code takes assets for a spin and you are seeing what you see ingame normally.

 

In other words, programmers work hard to code game loop - everything that happens in-game - so that it works at desirable framerate. Each frame needs to be first calculated by CPU and then sent to GPU to become rendered fully before game can continue with next frame. You are getting for example 60 frames per second (FPS) in normal games. That means your processor and graphics card go through all the game loop AND rendering AND sending data all over the place 60 times per second operating on BILLIONS of pixels each time.

 

It's huge when you look at it like that. Thankfully nowadays we got a lot of API (interfaces) we can use to program a game (including game engines, efficient scripting languages etc.).

 

Building a game from 0% to 100% is a very lengthy process and is very very indepth and complicated.

 

Game engine is an interface developers work with to bind every asset and piece of code together into a game... It's hard to explain. you'd need a good read to understand. Everything is very complicated.

 

As to the topic, game developers are opting for using only one thread for game loop (the one that calculates AI of NPCs, player actions, what's happening in the world etc.) because it's easier and quicker to WRITE by programmers. Multi-threaded applications are faster but far harder to make. And you still have to synchronize everything before a frame is sent to be rendered.

 

Nowadays you can see that a game uses more than 1 thread, but i haven't seen any game that really utilises multiple cores. Instead devs opt for 1 single thread for gameloop and sometimes few more for smaller things that control physics of the game, complicated AI or environment only etc.

 

Hope I explained that well, it's hard to explain well in a foreign language to somebody who doesn't sit in the topic on daily basis.

That's wayyy too complicated XD.

 

It's more like comparing a tree, do you get a single tall and think trunk with a few tiny brances. or do you get multiple equally think trunks and branches?

[piplupgao]

I think I'll just stick to my 3930k @5.0ghz

[Kuzma]

I think I'll just stick to my 3930k @5.0ghz

That works :p but compared to a 4770k @4.5ghz at single core it may not do so well.

You'll benefit from multi-threaded optimisations too though.

[Anubikai]

That works :P but compared to a 4770k @4.5ghz at single core it may not do so well.

You'll benefit from multi-threaded optimisations too though.

 

i would take a 3930k over a 3770k any day =/ i wanted one now but too much monies....the single threaded performance cant be that much worse....can it?

 

-Anubikai

[Dravic]

i would take a 3930k over a 3770k any day =/ i wanted one now but too much monies....the single threaded performance cant be that much worse....can it?

 

-Anubikai

 

No it's not that much worse. In the end 3930k is sandy bridge with proper TIM and stuff, this is THE overclocker. Single core performance may suffer like 10% between this and Haswell, not enough to justify dropping 6 core for 4 cores xD

 

Of course Haswell is much more power efficient and has some instruction extensions that previous generations didn't have that help with some specific applications sometimes. But it's not relevant unless it's something you're doing every day and then again that probably uses all cores so 3930k has an edge.

[bcredeur97]

i guess ill be the first one to say this: Who cares?

[Kuzma]

No it's not that much worse. In the end 3930k is sandy bridge with proper TIM and stuff, this is THE overclocker. Single core performance may suffer like 10% between this and Haswell, not enough to justify dropping 6 core for 4 cores xD

 

Of course Haswell is much more power efficient and has some instruction extensions that previous generations didn't have that help with some specific applications sometimes. But it's not relevant unless it's something you're doing every day and then again that probably uses all cores so 3930k has an edge.

Ivybridge-e with proper TIM is going to be THE best :p

[bluedyguard]

i guess ill be the first one to say this: Who cares?

 

People looking to buy a new CPU to play games?

[bcredeur97]

People looking to buy a new CPU to play games?

why when you can get a 4770k, just because its a 4771 doesnt mean its better(except by default) for gaming. overclocking a 4770k will beat the 4771 in gaming. and they are both probably going to be pretty close in price.