4 ms·

"Gaming = single threaded" really hasn't been true for a while now, at least in the arena of AAA games. My gaming desktop has a Core i7-4790k (4 core/8 thread),

• rf15 8y ago
  No, most games are single threaded, even AAA ones. You might get this impression from a vocal minority though, "vocal" in the sense that they're the ones landing on your radar, while the technical details of other games do not. (you could argue for ps3 of course, But there it's not a choice)
  • foepys 8y ago
    I don't know enough about games but if that's true, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One have 6 to 7 cores just idling most of the time? Why did Sony and Microsoft put 8 core CPUs in their consoles instead fewer cores with higher clockspeed if that's the case?
    • rf15 8y ago
      they use extra cores for live video recording and fun like that, also console games are usually run in a vm on the console these days so it's giving the OS some spare space too (contact lists/chat, achievements, etc.). Also it gives games the possibility to run on more cores if you're AAA and want to leverage them.
      • rf15 8y ago
        if you are disagreeing with my broad-ish statements about two very different platforms please explain how I am wrong instead of just downvoting.
        • daemin 8y ago
          You are wrong because games released in the past few years are heavily multithreaded. The only game recently that I've seen not be multithreaded is Battletech. The latest Total War series are heavily multithreaded. As far as the cores go on consoles, game developers try to use all of them all the time, and in general there's only one core that is half dedicated to doing OS / interaction / video recording tasks.
          • rf15 8y ago
            I checked a few sources and you are right. turns out I was in a bubble there.
  • garmaine 8y ago
    This is not true. If nothing else a lot of the work done by a game engine pipeline is actually handled by the OS or device driver (GPU, audio, and network) and scheduled in a different thread. So even a “single threaded” game would benefit from 2-4 cores.
    • rf15 8y ago
      confirming that there's definitely a trend towards separate threads for audio, but the rest, especially networking, depends strongly on the engine
      • garmaine 8y ago
        No... it’s made concurrent by the OS anyway. If you tell OpenGL or DirectX or Vulkan or whatever to render a vertex buffer, what actually happens is it is added to a queue and returns immediately. An OS-provided thread asynchronously processes that queue and actually spends a fair amount of resources, on a different hardware core, scheduling the hardware to do what you asked. Same for audio and network. This is regardless of what concurrency the game is written to exploit.
    • lev99 8y ago
      Great, the 2011 i7 has more than one core.
• codinghorror 8y ago
  it's still true, the sweet spot just moved to 2 cores instead of 1