7 ms·

This was the kind of stuff that excited me back when I was first getting into PC gaming. Nowadays, computers are so fast and games are so forgiving that I haven

by ehnto 5y ago

This was the kind of stuff that excited me back when I was first getting into PC gaming. Nowadays, computers are so fast and games are so forgiving that I haven't had to fuss with overclocking for years. Back then it felt like the only option, getting maximum frames was a function of my ability to build a highly effective cooling setup and how much patience I had to tweak everything. My very last foray into custom cooling was a homebrew phase change cooler using a cell I had bought off eBay. This is making me want to jump back in just for the fun of the build. But without the need for performance, it does lack a bit of thst purpose it had back then.

the_only_law 5y ago
Unfortunately one of my favorite games of recent time (Total War Attila) is almost incapable of running on my current vanilla setup at decent frame rate (not a top of the line gaming PC, but a decent machine with a Ryzen 9 and a 30 series GPU) due to poor optimization and abdonment. The hardware used is years ahead of the game.
- sph 5y ago
  Same. I got tired of arguing on forums that some games I play are badly optimised, and it's not my $3000 desktop PC the bottleneck, especially when the vast majority play on a thermally constrained laptop. There's some nasty software around that would have issues running on this nitrogen cooled rocket. Good hardware in gaming has somewhat become a waste of money because often the bottleneck is just bad unoptimised code, and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising; meanwhile good game engines (like id Tech) fly on any modern hardware.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    It becomes ever worse on Linux. I remember being basically unable to play native ports, only saved by proton. > and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising hah, when the game in my original post was new I was running it on garbage tier hardware. I got spoiled when I had a top of the line GPU. Nowadays I have to run it like I still have decade old hardware to get decent perf.
  - grishka 5y ago
    I do wonder though, if it's so terrible on top of the line hardware, what do these developers test their games on that they run fine for them?
    - fxtentacle 5y ago
      After 2 months of crunch time, everyone is like: fuck it, let's ship and go home
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Even amongst fairly involved programmers I'm usually able to find a speedup just by fiddling with the compiler flags, I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. How many Joules have we lost to Microsoft C++ vs. LLVM for example
    - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
      > I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. I worked as a programmer for a AAA game. My feeling is that there needs to be someone in the team with enough influence who cares about optimisation enough to invest a lot of time on it. After working on the game for a while I had enough political budget to spend time fixing ocasional frame stalls that annoyed me, which felt nice. I also worked a bit on general optimisation, but mostly on stalls. There were definitely lots of people who cared about performance, but this probably varies from studio to studio. If I hadn't done this, I'm sure someone else would have fixed some of them, but not necessarily all of them. Let's also remember that lots of teams are under tight pressure and deadlines to deliver features and they may not have time to work on performance even if they want to - and if you're using an external engine, this gets even harder to work on. Anyway, just my 2 cents, maybe other people who were in similar contexts will chime in with their own experiences.
      - nollbit 5y ago
        Another issue with game dev for games that release on PC is that devs are usually on very high-end machines. NVMe RAIDs, 3080's, etc. Great for productivity, but there's very little dog fooding on low-spec machines.
        FartyMcFarter 5y ago
        That is true. The game I worked on was also on PS4 and Xbox One, which are both somewhat similar in architecture to a PC (at least in terms of CPU performance), just slower. If we could make the game perform well on the XB1, we knew it most likely would do well on PS4 and PC as well. But you're right, there could be PC-specific issues that would only show up on low-spec PCs. In previous console generations things were harder back then as each platform's code was more different than now.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    arma3 - 9 years old - still get 40fps in multiplayer on an RTX2080. Its hilariously badly optimised but so inutterably brilliant that there is nothing* else that compares, it's a genre of 1* - kind of ironic that the game I really look forwards to playing after I upgrade backend of this year next will be a decade old.
    - srer 5y ago
      Much like you I look forward to (mostly CPU) increases to get better arma3 performance! We need all the performance we can get, because even if it was the worlds most optimized engine, we'd just create bigger scenarios. Who wouldn't find a 10,000 unit mission fun, even if it was only at 40fps? :) Inutterably brilliant and a genre of 1, I couldn't agree more.
    - mahesh_rm 5y ago
      arma4 should come up soon
      - xattt 5y ago
        Will there be arma4 on arm64?
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      Just add the DayZ mod and you'll not only be able to enjoy thrilling Zombie survival bugs, but also dreadful 20 FPS :)
- moron4hire 5y ago
  I don't know anything about that game in particular, but I have experienced extremely poor performance from old games before. Sometimes it can be fixed by installing an old copy of the DirectX 9 runtime. DX9 to DX10 completely changed architectures and eventually (I don't remember when), the old DX9 stuff was reimplemented as being emulated through the newer architecture. But that emulation is extremely inefficient.
mhh__ 5y ago
One of the reason why overclocking has gone away is because they boost really high straight out of the factory. A 12900K will coast at 5GHz if you let it.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  I have an 8700K that has been running at a stable 5GHz for several years with just a basic watercooled setup and manual tweaking. Will the 12900K give a meaningful performance bump at the same clock speed?
  - bytehowl 5y ago
    About 52% single-threaded, 196% multi-threaded improvement. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-8700K-vs-Intel-i9-12900K/3098vs4597 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-8700K-vs-Intel...
    - iforgotpassword 5y ago
      And probably also better performance per watt should you care about that.
      - bytehowl 5y ago
        Not sure about that one; TDP isn't exactly the same as actual power consumption, but for i9-12900K it is more than doubled.
        formerly_proven 5y ago
        You're comparing the 8700K TDP to the 12900K maximum turbo power (which you can only "achieve" when using all cores fully). In "normal" usage 12th gen is very energy efficient and perform (unsurprisingly) much better than AMD Zen 2/3 SKUs.
        5y ago
Comevius 5y ago
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Switch emulators are very much CPU bottlenecked. Simulator games too, though many of those are memory performance bottlenecked.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Yes and no. They're CPU bottlenecked but not due to the lack of raw performance, but due to the fact that those custom architectures had some IP blocks that are so radically different that what you can find on ARM and X86, that can't be easily emulated in SW no matter how much raw CPU power you throw at it. This is where you need to use FPGAs, but getting a 1:1 soft-core clean room reverse engineered clone of a PS3 Sony Cell processor would be a monumental effort we're unlikely to see anytime soon. It would probably be easier to reverse engineer the games themselves and use hooks to replace the API calls that use the custom IP blocks with standard Vulkan API calls that achieve the same functionality for example.
  - lynguist 5y ago
    AVX-512 maps really well to the SPEs inside of Xbox 360 and PS3. Just enabling AVX-512 increases frame rates at almost 20% in some instances!
JohnBooty 5y ago
Yeah. Back in the 90s, especially in the days of software rendering, a combination of overclocking and config tweaking was often the different between "playable" and "unplayable" framerates for something like Quake. The difference was hugely important. These days, generally, you'll be getting playable frame rates no matter what in modern games. Powering up your rig or your config can help to eliminate stutters, push higher levels of detail, etc. But it's generally not needed just to play the dang game in some kind of baseline reasonable way. A faster CPU would help me write code faster, especially when I'm working on a big hairy Rails monolith or whatever. But when you're working on something that slow, a 10% or even a 50% CPU usually doesn't help that much. You need to address the root causes in the software itself - fixing the test suite or whatever.
aunty_helen 5y ago
Feeling this vibe, back when overclocking meant changing pins or dip switches. My first overclocking foray was a 333mHz Celeron up to 416 (if I remember correctly) and that was a performance improvement proportional to the base clock. But heat was then an issue and the cpu card (as it was) with the integrated cooler was getting too hot for comfort. My last system I built was for an 4970k but the system doesn’t get used in anger anymore and so it sits at stock clocks under 600$ of custom water cooling gear, with me afraid to push it in case the 8 year old hardware blows a capacitor or mosfet. I’m glad you went and did the phase change cooling. My dream next step was to put a peltier under the water cooling setup and get sub ambient temps but the power bill and possible condensation issue kept my plans as just being plans.

by ehnto 5y ago

the_only_law 5y ago

Unfortunately one of my favorite games of recent time (Total War Attila) is almost incapable of running on my current vanilla setup at decent frame rate (not a top of the line gaming PC, but a decent machine with a Ryzen 9 and a 30 series GPU) due to poor optimization and abdonment. The hardware used is years ahead of the game.

sph 5y ago
Same. I got tired of arguing on forums that some games I play are badly optimised, and it's not my $3000 desktop PC the bottleneck, especially when the vast majority play on a thermally constrained laptop. There's some nasty software around that would have issues running on this nitrogen cooled rocket. Good hardware in gaming has somewhat become a waste of money because often the bottleneck is just bad unoptimised code, and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising; meanwhile good game engines (like id Tech) fly on any modern hardware.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  It becomes ever worse on Linux. I remember being basically unable to play native ports, only saved by proton. > and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising hah, when the game in my original post was new I was running it on garbage tier hardware. I got spoiled when I had a top of the line GPU. Nowadays I have to run it like I still have decade old hardware to get decent perf.
- grishka 5y ago
  I do wonder though, if it's so terrible on top of the line hardware, what do these developers test their games on that they run fine for them?
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    After 2 months of crunch time, everyone is like: fuck it, let's ship and go home
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Even amongst fairly involved programmers I'm usually able to find a speedup just by fiddling with the compiler flags, I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. How many Joules have we lost to Microsoft C++ vs. LLVM for example
  - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
    > I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. I worked as a programmer for a AAA game. My feeling is that there needs to be someone in the team with enough influence who cares about optimisation enough to invest a lot of time on it. After working on the game for a while I had enough political budget to spend time fixing ocasional frame stalls that annoyed me, which felt nice. I also worked a bit on general optimisation, but mostly on stalls. There were definitely lots of people who cared about performance, but this probably varies from studio to studio. If I hadn't done this, I'm sure someone else would have fixed some of them, but not necessarily all of them. Let's also remember that lots of teams are under tight pressure and deadlines to deliver features and they may not have time to work on performance even if they want to - and if you're using an external engine, this gets even harder to work on. Anyway, just my 2 cents, maybe other people who were in similar contexts will chime in with their own experiences.
    - nollbit 5y ago
      Another issue with game dev for games that release on PC is that devs are usually on very high-end machines. NVMe RAIDs, 3080's, etc. Great for productivity, but there's very little dog fooding on low-spec machines.
      - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
        That is true. The game I worked on was also on PS4 and Xbox One, which are both somewhat similar in architecture to a PC (at least in terms of CPU performance), just slower. If we could make the game perform well on the XB1, we knew it most likely would do well on PS4 and PC as well. But you're right, there could be PC-specific issues that would only show up on low-spec PCs. In previous console generations things were harder back then as each platform's code was more different than now.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  arma3 - 9 years old - still get 40fps in multiplayer on an RTX2080. Its hilariously badly optimised but so inutterably brilliant that there is nothing* else that compares, it's a genre of 1* - kind of ironic that the game I really look forwards to playing after I upgrade backend of this year next will be a decade old.
  - srer 5y ago
    Much like you I look forward to (mostly CPU) increases to get better arma3 performance! We need all the performance we can get, because even if it was the worlds most optimized engine, we'd just create bigger scenarios. Who wouldn't find a 10,000 unit mission fun, even if it was only at 40fps? :) Inutterably brilliant and a genre of 1, I couldn't agree more.
  - mahesh_rm 5y ago
    arma4 should come up soon
    - xattt 5y ago
      Will there be arma4 on arm64?
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    Just add the DayZ mod and you'll not only be able to enjoy thrilling Zombie survival bugs, but also dreadful 20 FPS :)
moron4hire 5y ago
I don't know anything about that game in particular, but I have experienced extremely poor performance from old games before. Sometimes it can be fixed by installing an old copy of the DirectX 9 runtime. DX9 to DX10 completely changed architectures and eventually (I don't remember when), the old DX9 stuff was reimplemented as being emulated through the newer architecture. But that emulation is extremely inefficient.

mhh__ 5y ago

One of the reason why overclocking has gone away is because they boost really high straight out of the factory. A 12900K will coast at 5GHz if you let it.

alasdair_ 5y ago
I have an 8700K that has been running at a stable 5GHz for several years with just a basic watercooled setup and manual tweaking. Will the 12900K give a meaningful performance bump at the same clock speed?
- bytehowl 5y ago
  About 52% single-threaded, 196% multi-threaded improvement. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-8700K-vs-Intel-i9-12900K/3098vs4597 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-8700K-vs-Intel...
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    And probably also better performance per watt should you care about that.
    - bytehowl 5y ago
      Not sure about that one; TDP isn't exactly the same as actual power consumption, but for i9-12900K it is more than doubled.
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        You're comparing the 8700K TDP to the 12900K maximum turbo power (which you can only "achieve" when using all cores fully). In "normal" usage 12th gen is very energy efficient and perform (unsurprisingly) much better than AMD Zen 2/3 SKUs.
        5y ago

Comevius 5y ago

Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Switch emulators are very much CPU bottlenecked. Simulator games too, though many of those are memory performance bottlenecked.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Yes and no. They're CPU bottlenecked but not due to the lack of raw performance, but due to the fact that those custom architectures had some IP blocks that are so radically different that what you can find on ARM and X86, that can't be easily emulated in SW no matter how much raw CPU power you throw at it. This is where you need to use FPGAs, but getting a 1:1 soft-core clean room reverse engineered clone of a PS3 Sony Cell processor would be a monumental effort we're unlikely to see anytime soon. It would probably be easier to reverse engineer the games themselves and use hooks to replace the API calls that use the custom IP blocks with standard Vulkan API calls that achieve the same functionality for example.
- lynguist 5y ago
  AVX-512 maps really well to the SPEs inside of Xbox 360 and PS3. Just enabling AVX-512 increases frame rates at almost 20% in some instances!

JohnBooty 5y ago

Yeah. Back in the 90s, especially in the days of software rendering, a combination of overclocking and config tweaking was often the different between "playable" and "unplayable" framerates for something like Quake. The difference was hugely important. These days, generally, you'll be getting playable frame rates no matter what in modern games. Powering up your rig or your config can help to eliminate stutters, push higher levels of detail, etc. But it's generally not needed just to play the dang game in some kind of baseline reasonable way. A faster CPU would help me write code faster, especially when I'm working on a big hairy Rails monolith or whatever. But when you're working on something that slow, a 10% or even a 50% CPU usually doesn't help that much. You need to address the root causes in the software itself - fixing the test suite or whatever.

aunty_helen 5y ago

Feeling this vibe, back when overclocking meant changing pins or dip switches. My first overclocking foray was a 333mHz Celeron up to 416 (if I remember correctly) and that was a performance improvement proportional to the base clock. But heat was then an issue and the cpu card (as it was) with the integrated cooler was getting too hot for comfort. My last system I built was for an 4970k but the system doesn’t get used in anger anymore and so it sits at stock clocks under 600$ of custom water cooling gear, with me afraid to push it in case the 8 year old hardware blows a capacitor or mosfet. I’m glad you went and did the phase change cooling. My dream next step was to put a peltier under the water cooling setup and get sub ambient temps but the power bill and possible condensation issue kept my plans as just being plans.