5 ms·

Gaming has not been single-threaded for a while, even on mobile.

• dragontamer 8y ago
  Gaming has multiple threads, but often is single-threaded bound due to Ahmdal's law. Lets say you can split up your threads to AI, Physics, Rendering, Networking, etc. etc. But lets say Physics dominates: then your game is still single-threaded bound. You only get faster if you make your physics faster. You can split your game up into work-queues, thread pools, and such. Except not everyone is up-to-date with the latest techniques yet. Furthermore, thread-pools aren't always cache friendly and may hamper your performance. (If Core1 works on something, then Core4 completes the work, you have to transfer all the data out of your L1 and L2 cache to continue working on it on Core4). So its not exactly an easy thing to program.
  • gameswithgo 8y ago
    newer AAA games/3d drivers lead to a pretty nice workload split over multiple cores really. Battlegrounds was coded in a rush and inexpertly so but it still lights up 4 cores pretty well. Probably in part due to drivers and unreal engine helping out even if the game programmers aren't explicitly working at it.
    • dragontamer 8y ago
      Oh yeah, SOME games are certainly multithreaded well. Doom, Battlegrounds, and more. DX12 apparently helped a lot with that. But many games are still single-thread bound (despite being multithreaded). As such, Gamers should still prefer single-thread performance.
      • laythea 8y ago
        Games that are single thread bound are not maximising their potential on the common multi-core CPUs. Not many games strictly dictate sequential computations of the numerous things a game has to calculate. Gamer's who prefer cutting edge performance should prefer multi-thread performance.
        • paulmd 8y ago
          In almost all cases, modern processors have enough multi-threaded performance to play optimized (multi-threaded) games acceptably. It's the single-threaded ones that will be challenging to run, and it's those challenging tasks that you should optimize your system around. Optimizing for MT-heavy games is the gaming equivalent of premature optimization - everybody can run Doom at a million FPS, but Fallout 4 or PUBG shit all over every system and you'll be begging for every frame you can get. You can "prefer" whatever you want but developers don't care. This site of all places knows that time-to-market is what really matters. If you want to play those titles, you have to deal with it. Either optimize for the shitty titles, accept that you're going to be losing a fairly significant amount of frames (the 2700X is behind as much as 30% in some titles), or don't play those titles.
          • laythea 8y ago
            I'm not talking about getting the same done, different ways. Ie multi vs single threaded. I mean that if the software is implemented in the correct manner, "more can be done" by utilizing multiple threads.
      • TylerE 8y ago
        I would say not just SOME but MOST, if you look at recent releases. As of PS4/XB1 single threading isn't really viable for an AAA title. PC ports are generally seeing the benefits of that.
        • paulmd 8y ago
          People have been saying that for 5 years (which is, in fact, how long XB1/PS4 have been on the market). Single-threaded performance is still the dominant factor in gaming performance. Games make use of up to 6 threads, but single-threaded performance still determines overall framerate to a large extent. Games are not exempt from Amdahl's law: as long as you've got enough threads to offload work, it comes down to the single-threaded portion of the workload. The faster you can run the main game loop the faster the game runs.
• GuB-42 8y ago
  Game engines are multi-threaded, but there is still a critical path. And passed a certain amount of cores (typically 4 in modern games), you won't get any improvement by adding more. That's because once you are down the critical path, the only way to go faster is by improving single core performance. There is a reason reason why Core i5 are so popular with gamers. They have just enough cores not to limit a game engine, excellent single-thread performance, and they are affordable.
• vbezhenar 8y ago
  I'm playing WoW and Factorio and both games are single-core limited. So while it might be true for most games, it depends on user, I'm not really interested in games, I just have few I'm playing for years and I want them to run fast.
  • loeg 8y ago
    It's worth remembering that WoW dates to 2004.
• loeg 8y ago
  Maybe AAA games can scale beyond 2 or even 4 cores, but historically (and probably still true on the low end) games were heavily depended on 1-2 core perf.