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Games will ship with AVX512 special paths once the AMD chips in consoles support it. Until then it is just a fancy feature to make already fast CPUs a bit faste

Games will ship with AVX512 special paths once the AMD chips in consoles support it. Until then it is just a fancy feature to make already fast CPUs a bit faster. Game programmers will put time into making slow CPUs faster. Outside tech demos or hardware marketing tie-ins no budget is allocated to making yet more spare capacity.

jandrese 7y ago
AFAIK all of the consoles use AMD chips so I wouldn't expect games to adopt AVX512 anytime soon.
- paulmd 7y ago
  And specifically the next generation of consoles is using Zen2 architecture, which does not support AVX-512. That said, desktops can apply whatever optimizations they want. Denuvo uses AVX in their DRM, which is also not a thing on console, so presumably they will eventually incorporate AVX-512.
shmerl 7y ago
What kind of games care about such specific instructions? Unless you are writing something in assembly, that's not something game developers usually are focused on.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  Unity is a very high level engine, that uses C#, and it now has a system built in that lets you write code that looks like C# but will translate it to whatever SIMD instruction set is available, like ISPC. There are also various libraries that leverage metaprogramming to do similar things. I don't think you understand what game devs are willing to do, to get a few more polygons and pixels on the screen!
  - shmerl 7y ago
    > I don't think you understand what game devs are willing to do, to get a few more polygons and pixels on the screen! Totally depends on the trade-offs. You can write your whole game in assembly, and target very specific hardware, and may be beat optimizing compiler (doubtful). But at what cost? Time spent on that could be spent on making more games. Normal up to date hardware handles games just fine, as long as they are not using some abysmal and poorly parallelized engines. Modern CPUs with more cores are also helping that, especially after Ryzen processors opened the gates for it.
- paulmd 7y ago
  All kinds of games use AVX. Particularly, anything using Denuvo won't run without it. AVX-512 isn't just wider execution units, it's different types of instructions, particularly some that fill in holes in the existing sets of instructions. Once it starts to be widely available, it will get used, and will eventually be a requirement, just like AVX has. Ice Lake is introducing AVX-512 on Intel mobile, Tiger Lake will introduce it on desktop, presumably Zen3 will be introducing it on AMD.

jandrese 7y ago

AFAIK all of the consoles use AMD chips so I wouldn't expect games to adopt AVX512 anytime soon.

paulmd 7y ago
And specifically the next generation of consoles is using Zen2 architecture, which does not support AVX-512. That said, desktops can apply whatever optimizations they want. Denuvo uses AVX in their DRM, which is also not a thing on console, so presumably they will eventually incorporate AVX-512.

shmerl 7y ago

What kind of games care about such specific instructions? Unless you are writing something in assembly, that's not something game developers usually are focused on.

gameswithgo 7y ago
Unity is a very high level engine, that uses C#, and it now has a system built in that lets you write code that looks like C# but will translate it to whatever SIMD instruction set is available, like ISPC. There are also various libraries that leverage metaprogramming to do similar things. I don't think you understand what game devs are willing to do, to get a few more polygons and pixels on the screen!
- shmerl 7y ago
  > I don't think you understand what game devs are willing to do, to get a few more polygons and pixels on the screen! Totally depends on the trade-offs. You can write your whole game in assembly, and target very specific hardware, and may be beat optimizing compiler (doubtful). But at what cost? Time spent on that could be spent on making more games. Normal up to date hardware handles games just fine, as long as they are not using some abysmal and poorly parallelized engines. Modern CPUs with more cores are also helping that, especially after Ryzen processors opened the gates for it.
paulmd 7y ago
All kinds of games use AVX. Particularly, anything using Denuvo won't run without it. AVX-512 isn't just wider execution units, it's different types of instructions, particularly some that fill in holes in the existing sets of instructions. Once it starts to be widely available, it will get used, and will eventually be a requirement, just like AVX has. Ice Lake is introducing AVX-512 on Intel mobile, Tiger Lake will introduce it on desktop, presumably Zen3 will be introducing it on AMD.