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by SeanBoocock 3420 days ago
This is increasingly untrue. Modern consoles like the Xbox One and PS4 guarantee availability of six hardware threads with provisional access to a seventh. This combined with things like VR putting a premium on high FPS has motivated more parallel architectures.

Most game engines architectures have supported limited parallelism in the form of dedicated game simulation and render threads, as well as often having asynchronous processing of audio, network, and IO. More modern engines have task based architectures that allow for parallelism of the game simulation. This is often implemented as a fork-join model around sync points spread throughout the simulation update: pre-physics and post-physics update periods for instance. While it is true that some game logic relies on knowledge of global state and complicated dependencies between entities in the simulation, games can and do find meaningful reductions in CPU wall time.
1 comments
dogma1138 3420 days ago
50% of the PC gaming market is dual core, there are plenty of benchmarks that show it.

I wish this was increasingly untrue.

Running For Honor just now a new title built for consoles one CPU core is at 100% the rest are <10%

;)

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SeanBoocock 3420 days ago
Sure, the Steam Hardware Survey indicates as much. Most AAA games, however, sell the vast majority of their units on console platforms that have eight cores. If you are a developer/publisher targeting the top end of the market, you are highly incentivized to take full advantage of the multi-core console architecture. Also, the trend in CPU desktop architecture for the past decade has been more cores versus higher frequencies or large IPC improvements. Might as well architect your technology for parallelism now (consoles) and the future (mainstream PC consumers moving to four, six, and eight core processors). Those technology investments and trends eventually trickle down to smaller developers who aren't developing their own proprietary engines.
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dogma1138 3420 days ago
Again this isn't about steam hardware survey it's about reality.

Out of the lastest 10 AAA titles only one I would call something that might be worth more than 4 cores and it's WD2.

2 cores on 100%, 2 more on 60-70% and 2 more on 20%. W/ HT it will be 2, 100% and the 10 left "cores" at about 15%.

And this is by far the best "multithreaded" game that came out in the past 8-12 months.

What devs do for consoles doesn't translates to PC, PCs come with a huge variety in hardware and unlike consoles where devs get 6-7 cores out of the 8 exclusively for their game on a PC they have to live with everything else from AV scans to Streaming.

No one is taking advantages of multicore CPUs because no one can do it right on a fragmented platform where you don't control over the runstate of the app, co-hosting and have zero knowledge about it's hardware and configuration.

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