4 ms·

Gaming workloads are strict superset of almost any other workload (because they are extremely taxing on almost any metric a platform can have). Game benchmarks

Gaming workloads are strict superset of almost any other workload (because they are extremely taxing on almost any metric a platform can have). Game benchmarks are abundant and reproducible. They are a good indicator of how a platform will deal with almost any other software. AMD did have a CAD benchmark thrown in. > Threadripper Not a bad choice at all (wait for that 5000 TR announcement), however, a *950X comes close to TR for much less. My 3950X has made a striking difference for Rust compilation times and I'm strongly considering a 5950X.

pdimitar 6y ago
Did it improve the final step though? That seems to be single core and I still can't pinpoint how to accelerate it (written a down-thread comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796)
dvdplm 6y ago
Indeed. And for rust compilation, good single threaded performance can have a significant impact on that last annoyingly slow linking step (at least when building executables).
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Have you noticed an actual improvement? I couldn't pinpoint what was the bottleneck in the last Rust program compilation step at all. I have two machines with extremely fast NVMe SSDs and an incremental compilation improvement from i7-8565U (laptop, 24s) to Xeon W-2150B (iMac Pro, 12s) was extremely disappointing. I'm pondering a Threadripper workstation but I'm very worried if I'll gain any actual incremental compilation speed at all. Do you have any observations?
- steffan 6y ago
  I've noticed the same thing on EC2 instances, compiling, e.g. Alacritty, there wasn't a lot of difference between 8 vs 16 vCPUs since the last step took a significant portion of time and was single-threaded. It's fun watching 16 (or 32) CPUs maxed out though.
celrod 6y ago
Gaming doesn't really have SIMD or FP at all though, does it?
- zamalek 6y ago
  Couldn't be further from the truth. Rasterization is all linear algebra. That being said, you don't really see games with the likes of AVX-512.
  - moonchild 6y ago
    That all happens on the GPU. There's a tiny (trivial) amount of linalg on the CPU and the rest is punted to shaders.
    - zamalek 6y ago
      It's not always trivial, especially if any computational geometry is being done (read: any game with a landscape).
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Physics are still often CPU, though I guess sometimes on compute shaders by now? Then there's bad engines, e.g. Fallout 4 seems like it might be calculating some part of the shadows on the CPU…
- sharpneli 6y ago
  Plenty of it. Going trough the transform hierarchy (tons of 4x4 matrix multiplications which definitely are vectorized) and then the physics simulations, and that’s just part of it.
- anfilt 6y ago
  Floating point yes, but SIMD depends.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Can gaming workloads simulate the 100% of all cores that a parallel large scale native C++ compilation will generate?
- m12k 6y ago
  Modern game engines can, yes
- zamalek 6y ago
  Games are typically written in C++, so that's a yes. As for the threading, older (2yr or so back) games tend to assume 4 cores and don't scale past that (thanks, Intel!). More recent games tend to aim at arbitrary horizontal scaling. You do still get major titles that are completely single-threaded.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    written in C++ not means it's compatible workload. Gaming performance is just gaming. For gaming, realtimeness is important and normally single thread perf is important even though some process is multithreaded.
  - moonchild 6y ago
    ? no The parent was talking about c++ compilation. A c++ compiler is very different from a game engine written in c++.
  - anfilt 6y ago
    uh what??? No most games do no scale like compilation does. For instances when compiling a large program GNU make lets me the following: make -j 16 That will create 16 instances of the compiler each compiling different compilation units. I could even do the following: make -j 128 and that will spawn a 128 processes, and still scale. I can keep scaling this assuming I have enough compilation units (aka files)
    - zamalek 6y ago
      Games use threads.
pimeys 6y ago
I'm also having a 3950x for Rust work and it has been the fastest CPU I've ever used. It just flies every day and makes rust compilation times not an issue anymore. That means, I really don't know do I want to have the trouble of finding the 5950x and the work of replacing the CPU. I really don't feel like I need more CPU power at this point. But replacing my 2080ti with a new fast Radeon, that would be something...
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Did it help with the final compilation step which seems to be single-core-bound?

pdimitar 6y ago

Did it improve the final step though? That seems to be single core and I still can't pinpoint how to accelerate it (written a down-thread comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796)

dvdplm 6y ago

Indeed. And for rust compilation, good single threaded performance can have a significant impact on that last annoyingly slow linking step (at least when building executables).

pdimitar 6y ago
Have you noticed an actual improvement? I couldn't pinpoint what was the bottleneck in the last Rust program compilation step at all. I have two machines with extremely fast NVMe SSDs and an incremental compilation improvement from i7-8565U (laptop, 24s) to Xeon W-2150B (iMac Pro, 12s) was extremely disappointing. I'm pondering a Threadripper workstation but I'm very worried if I'll gain any actual incremental compilation speed at all. Do you have any observations?
steffan 6y ago
I've noticed the same thing on EC2 instances, compiling, e.g. Alacritty, there wasn't a lot of difference between 8 vs 16 vCPUs since the last step took a significant portion of time and was single-threaded. It's fun watching 16 (or 32) CPUs maxed out though.

celrod 6y ago

Gaming doesn't really have SIMD or FP at all though, does it?

zamalek 6y ago
Couldn't be further from the truth. Rasterization is all linear algebra. That being said, you don't really see games with the likes of AVX-512.
- moonchild 6y ago
  That all happens on the GPU. There's a tiny (trivial) amount of linalg on the CPU and the rest is punted to shaders.
  - zamalek 6y ago
    It's not always trivial, especially if any computational geometry is being done (read: any game with a landscape).
  - floatboth 6y ago
    Physics are still often CPU, though I guess sometimes on compute shaders by now? Then there's bad engines, e.g. Fallout 4 seems like it might be calculating some part of the shadows on the CPU…
sharpneli 6y ago
Plenty of it. Going trough the transform hierarchy (tons of 4x4 matrix multiplications which definitely are vectorized) and then the physics simulations, and that’s just part of it.
anfilt 6y ago
Floating point yes, but SIMD depends.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Can gaming workloads simulate the 100% of all cores that a parallel large scale native C++ compilation will generate?

m12k 6y ago
Modern game engines can, yes
zamalek 6y ago
Games are typically written in C++, so that's a yes. As for the threading, older (2yr or so back) games tend to assume 4 cores and don't scale past that (thanks, Intel!). More recent games tend to aim at arbitrary horizontal scaling. You do still get major titles that are completely single-threaded.
- fomine3 6y ago
  written in C++ not means it's compatible workload. Gaming performance is just gaming. For gaming, realtimeness is important and normally single thread perf is important even though some process is multithreaded.
- moonchild 6y ago
  ? no The parent was talking about c++ compilation. A c++ compiler is very different from a game engine written in c++.
- anfilt 6y ago
  uh what??? No most games do no scale like compilation does. For instances when compiling a large program GNU make lets me the following: make -j 16 That will create 16 instances of the compiler each compiling different compilation units. I could even do the following: make -j 128 and that will spawn a 128 processes, and still scale. I can keep scaling this assuming I have enough compilation units (aka files)
  - zamalek 6y ago
    Games use threads.

pimeys 6y ago

I'm also having a 3950x for Rust work and it has been the fastest CPU I've ever used. It just flies every day and makes rust compilation times not an issue anymore. That means, I really don't know do I want to have the trouble of finding the 5950x and the work of replacing the CPU. I really don't feel like I need more CPU power at this point. But replacing my 2080ti with a new fast Radeon, that would be something...

pdimitar 6y ago
Did it help with the final compilation step which seems to be single-core-bound?