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AotS: need more CPU cores, and if only all GPUs supported Async compute...

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No matter how many cores, or how much VRAM your system has, there will be a dev that wishes for more. That is what dev's do. They do as much as they can with what you have, and wish they had more so they could do more.

All these things would be nice, I'm certain, but don't think that if his wishes came true that he'd be happy with what he has.
 
TheELF said:
I'm just asking you to confirm it,task manager shows the average usage of each core over a period of 60 seconds...
Process hacker will show you the threads in (almost) real-time.
Click to expand...

Not really sure what i'm looking at here but just downloaded Process Hacker and took a screenshot of the Threads tab while running a benchmark in Ashes:

wJEa4hK.png
 
Bump...someone who knows Process Hacker well can you tell me how many threads are running from Ashes in the screenshot above?
 
Mercennarius said:
Taken with his previous statement that would mean 16 cores with multithreading would be up to 32 threads. So possibly he meant it was limited to 16 physical cores and 32 logical cores. But I never heard that on the official forums. Either way, the graph posted on that thread clearly looks like the game is not utilizing the 2nd CPU so I suspect something else was preventing him from using more than 16 threads. Even on my setup the game loses some multithreading efficiency when using the 2nd CPU but it still scales to around 18 threads for me.
Click to expand...

They are likely pooling threads. They make n number of threads on game initialisation and then they dispatch, dispose and reuse them when needed. So yes, you are somewhat correct about there being a ceiling on the number of threads they can use at once, we just don't know how many to be exact. Also, games don't know whether or not tasks are run on a physical core, they only know the total amount of threads they can use.
 
16 threads(1main thread+15 worker threads) + the xaudio one equals 17 threads total.
The rest isn't doing anything so it's not counted,they just keep files open and stuff like that.

Now I'm not really sure on how it measures HT usage but 12 real cores would amount to each core being 8.3% of the total cores,so a thread running at 8.3% would mean that it runs on 100% of this one core.
(if HT is counted as well you halve these numbers)

Point being that all threads have a low utilization because that's enough for the GPU you have and there would be no difference with fewer cores and higher utilization.
 
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would be nice to see if they can fully use a 2 proc system with multiple graphic cards to feed 🙂
 
TheELF said:
Point being that all threads have a low utilization because that's enough for the GPU you have and there would be no difference with fewer cores and higher utilization.
Click to expand...

Actually,

A few months back I tested this game limiting the number of threads and the effect on performance.

I ran the test again twice, once with the games Affinity set to only use 8 threads and the other allowing all threads to be used. Here were the out comes:

8 Threads Test:
a1nErvp.jpg

HN11hdK.jpg


All Threads Test:
yxo6vM4.jpg

uEktZBC.jpg


Since this game (like most games) is mostly GPU limited there was a very small change in overall FPS. Fortunately the DX12 benchmark breaks out the CPU performance and shows a 18% performance increase when utilzing all of my systems threads instead of limiting it to only 8.
Click to expand...
 
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digitaldurandal said:
The fact that you don't understand that this does not necessarily mean that every core with usage you see equals a thread is not my problem. You are equating the dev statement with something slightly different. It is still possible that your GPU is holding back the performance and that the game has no need for x threads and is really running at x-1 where x is the number of cores you see used but it has just moved one of the threads to another core to balance.

What I said was just because you see usage on a core does not mean it has its own thread, you cannot simply look at performance in task manager and count the number of cores with usage to determine the threads. That statement stands.
Click to expand...

Looks like you were wrong.
 
sm625 said:
I seriously cannot imagine even Intel going with only 4 cores max for its mainstream 10nm parts. At that point, the extra two cores would only add 5-7% more size to their die, which would probably end up being less than 100 mm^2 if it were only 4 cores and still might end up less than 100mm^2 even with 6 cores. Even Intel isnt that greedy. But then again they could always prove me wrong.
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they probably will give more than 4. If AMD wasn't coming with anything we would get milked as before though.
 
Intel would happily milk us with 4 cores if it wasn't for AMD. Intel is happy selling us smaller and smaller dies for $350 till the cows come home. They can always use the rest of their fab capacity for Nand flash or something else.

Can't wait to go back to AMD once Zen is out. I just hope Zen doesn't suck.
 
sirmo said:
Can't wait to go back to AMD once Zen is out. I just hope Zen doesn't suck.
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We shall see. I have no problem going back to AMD. I just hope that they actually release a competitive product and are still in business when that time comes when I'm ready to upgrade once again. AMD may have to wait awhile.
 
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Mercennarius said:
For what ever reason there have been people that just won't believe that AOTS uses that many threads. Some people still think games can't utilize more than 4 cores.
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AOTS has a CPU only benchmark where it could use how ever many cores,also AOTS is pretty much a rendering benchmark in itself even when playing the game,all the units just scramble about shooting at each other all the time,yes this is pretty much a straight distributed computing scenario,only limited by your GPU,very impressive and nice to look at but it is important to understand what exactly you are seeing.

It's the equivalent of running cinebench,or looking at the sky in crysis3 and other games,if there is nothing for the CPU to do gamewise it can focus al it's power towards rendering frames.
 
TheELF said:
AOTS has a CPU only benchmark where it could use how ever many cores,also AOTS is pretty much a rendering benchmark in itself even when playing the game,all the units just scramble about shooting at each other all the time,yes this is pretty much a straight distributed computing scenario,only limited by your GPU,very impressive and nice to look at but it is important to understand what exactly you are seeing.

It's the equivalent of running cinebench,or looking at the sky in crysis3 and other games,if there is nothing for the CPU to do gamewise it can focus al it's power towards rendering frames.
Click to expand...

There are more games that use more than 4 cores.
 
bigboxes said:
I paid $250 for my X2 4400+ back in 2006. I paid the same for my 4790K a year and a half ago.
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well... msrp was not $250 obviously. And 2 cores to 4 cores in 10 years. Sure IPC improvements, but over a 90nm chip? come on now. 2 cores gained from 90nm to 14nm.
 
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Azix said:
well... msrp was not $250 obviously. And 2 cores to 4 cores in 10 years. Sure IPC improvements, but over a 90nm chip? come on now. 2 cores gained from 90nm to 14nm.
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I had an i7 920 in between. I paid $200 for that. Who pays MSRP?

Are you saying the only gain in performance is by the addition of more cores? Of course, I'm playing devil's advocate. I expected to be @ hex-core a long time ago.

My point that is that I haven't been gouged. I don't purchase immediately upon release and do my research.
 
Okay, if the game actually needs all those cores, why doesn't the 6950X have a huge advantage over an i5-6600K in the game?

Or does it, and I just never noticed?

In my mind, if a game actually needs 8 or more threads to run well, then an 8 thread chip will run rings around a 4 thread chip, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
 
LTC8K6 said:
Okay, if the game actually needs all those cores, why doesn't the 6950X have a huge advantage over an i5-6600K in the game?

Or does it, and I just never noticed?

In my mind, if a game actually needs 8 or more threads to run well, then an 8 thread chip will run rings around a 4 thread chip, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
Click to expand...

The game like most all games is mostly GPU limited. While the games performance will benefit from more cores/threads the benefit is small beyond 6 cores since the CPU is not the bottleneck. None the less, seeing a game actually take advantage of many cores is still impressive and an idea where the future of gaming is heading.
 
Keeping all those CPU cores active with work and scheduling access calls, including to the GPU, properly scheduled to not bottleneck the GPU(s) with out of sequence work. Impressive.
 
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So we don't see any benefit of the 6950X over a 6700 unless/until we remove a gpu bottleneck? It is a GPU limit that keeps the higher core count CPUS from running away from the rest?

Such as if we went from a 1080 to two 1080s in SLI, or AMD cards in xfire if you prefer? We would then see the 6950X leave the 6600K behind?

Somehow, I don't think we are going to see that happen, though.
 
It's pretty obvious why the engine designers chose to do it that way. GPUs will continue to get faster and faster with shrinks and new architectures, whereas CPU performance from an per-core throughput standpoint is largely at a standstill with 10% being about the best IPC improvement we've seen in a great while. Core counts are still increasing. This means 3 years down the line when they're still selling this engine to people the threading capability will allow the engine to scale to meet the power of future GPUs better.

We're GPU bound today on a modern 6c/12t CPU. What about when Big Pascal and Vega are in our hands? What about when we have Navi and Volta? At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if intel had just recently moved to a 6 core for the top end mainstream chip by the time we have Volta/Navi.
 
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LTC8K6 said:
So we don't see any benefit of the 6950X over a 6700 unless/until we remove a gpu bottleneck? It is a GPU limit that keeps the higher core count CPUS from running away from the rest?

Such as if we went from a 1080 to two 1080s in SLI, or AMD cards in xfire if you prefer? We would then see the 6950X leave the 6600K behind?

Somehow, I don't think we are going to see that happen, though.
Click to expand...


I think people are not aware how fast today CPUs really are.Or to put it in other way;I think people are not aware how much software hides true potential of hardware.

And yes even todays fastest graphics cards cannot process all data that todays fastest CPUs can throw at them.
 
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