ARMA rant

inhotep

Senior member
Oct 14, 2004
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Are there any good reason on why this game is not optimized for muti-core CPUs?

WTF?




Core2 Q6600
Asus P5N-E SLI
Crucial 2GB DDR2 667
EVGA GF8600GT 512MB
THERMALTAKE W0093RU TR2 500W
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
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Probably because it's a lot work, and most games are GPU bound except on slower CPUs.

Almost all games are multithreaded, they just only allocate single threads for different tasks like AI, audio, rendering.

It's a huge amount of extra work to parallelize those tasks, and it usually makes little or no difference except in silly benchmarks like running at 1024x768 at 200 fps.
 

Wapp

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2003
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Originally posted by: inhotep
Are there any good reason on why this game is not optimized for muti-core CPUs?

WTF?

There is a lot more to complain about ARMA than just the multi-core issue. How about the poor animations, the crack-shot enemy AI, the retarded friendly AI, etc? I like the game but it just needs some work.
 

rstrohkirch

Platinum Member
May 31, 2005
2,434
367
126
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Probably because it's a lot work, and most games are GPU bound except on slower CPUs.

Almost all games are multithreaded, they just only allocate single threads for different tasks like AI, audio, rendering.

It's a huge amount of extra work to parallelize those tasks, and it usually makes little or no difference except in silly benchmarks like running at 1024x768 at 200 fps.

I would believe this not to be the case.

The game engines over the last couple of years could have easily brought any single core system to it's knees with more advanced physics routines if the developers had chosen to. The main reason games are gpu bound is because people respond more to fancy lighting and pretty textures than they do advanced AI or a more advanced collision system.

 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
126
Originally posted by: rstrohkirch
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Probably because it's a lot work, and most games are GPU bound except on slower CPUs.

Almost all games are multithreaded, they just only allocate single threads for different tasks like AI, audio, rendering.

It's a huge amount of extra work to parallelize those tasks, and it usually makes little or no difference except in silly benchmarks like running at 1024x768 at 200 fps.

I would believe this not to be the case.

The game engines over the last couple of years could have easily brought any single core system to it's knees with more advanced physics routines if the developers had chosen to. The main reason games are gpu bound is because people respond more to fancy lighting and pretty textures than they do advanced AI or a more advanced collision system.
That isn't a counter-argument to my statement that actual current game designs generally don't benefit from multi-threaded parallelism in their code.

Your point requires that game designs (not just implementations) change to incldue new features, and that those new features would then beneift from parallelism in their code. Possibly true, but that's a different discussion from "given the existing design, is parallelism useful enough to make the effort worthwhile."
 

inhotep

Senior member
Oct 14, 2004
557
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0
Originally posted by: Wapp
Originally posted by: inhotep
Are there any good reason on why this game is not optimized for muti-core CPUs?

WTF?

There is a lot more to complain about ARMA than just the multi-core issue. How about the poor animations, the crack-shot enemy AI, the retarded friendly AI, etc? I like the game but it just needs some work.


Poor animations, the crack-shot enemy AI, the retarded friendly AI. Yea it is retarded that this game does not use more than one cpu to manage all of this stuff.