On a serious note are games going to use more cores

[Mr Evil]

Your logic is getting quite circular here. If I take your post quite literally, it says we need more CPU cores because our CPU cores are idle...

Perhaps that wasn't worded clearly: GPUs are usually the limit to performance, while a lot of the CPU is idle. It would therefore make sense to allocate more work to the CPU rather than the GPU.

Which goes back to the cost point. Anything that is obvious to make use of more idle cores has already been done. Yes, they can do more. But it is non-obvious and exceedingly difficult. Thus it is exceedingly expensive and game developers want to make money not come up with reasons to use more cores...

Who said it was going to be easy? But if game developers want to continue to increase the complexity of game worlds, then they have to make better use of the available resources. The alternative is to languish waiting for Intel or AMD to significantly increase single-threaded performance, which is a much harder problem.

...Back to my first comment above, you seem to be arguing that we need more cores so that we can have them idle?..

That's not what I'm saying. Hardware should ideally be fast enough that it is never insufficiently fast. That of course means that it will at times be faster than it needs to be. Indeed, most PCs are idle most of the time. If that wasn't acceptable then people would run BOINC all the time. Instead, they will actually take steps specifically to reduce the work being done when it isn't needed, hence frame rate limiters, Chill, clock gating etc.

...Yes, having more or less bells and whistles based on hardware is known and acceptable to users. But having the entire gameplay change is quite another thing. Think about this which would then likely happen: you can't get past a level until your anti-virus kicks in and the AI has to give up a core?...

There's nothing unusual about gameplay being affected by performance. It's pretty common in strategy games for the number of units or size of the map to be limited by the performance of your computer, or for physics accuracy to change with frame rate, with faster machines offering a different experience. Settings like draw distance and FOV can also significantly affect gameplay. I really don't think it reasonable to hold back AI just because some people don't have fast enough machines to take fuill adavantage anymore than it would have been reasonable to not make Crysis just because no one could run it at the time.

 

[TheELF]

Perhaps that wasn't worded clearly: GPUs are usually the limit to performance, while a lot of the CPU is idle. It would therefore make sense to allocate more work to the CPU rather than the GPU.

CPUs on the consoles are NOT idle,games are being developed for consoles and not for desktop PCs.

Who said it was going to be easy? But if game developers want to continue to increase the complexity of game worlds, then they have to make better use of the available resources. The alternative is to languish waiting for Intel or AMD to significantly increase single-threaded performance, which is a much harder problem.

They make full use of the available resources,of the consoles,because they do develop for the consoles and not for desktop PCs.

That's not what I'm saying. Hardware should ideally be fast enough that it is never insufficiently fast. That of course means that it will at times be faster than it needs to be. Indeed, most PCs are idle most of the time. If that wasn't acceptable then people would run BOINC all the time. Instead, they will actually take steps specifically to reduce the work being done when it isn't needed, hence frame rate limiters, Chill, clock gating etc.

Because you run a game developed for a console on a desktop PC with a CPU that's multiple times faster then a console's one a lot faster proportional to how much faster the graphics are compared to the consoles.

There's nothing unusual about gameplay being affected by performance. It's pretty common in strategy games for the number of units or size of the map to be limited by the performance of your computer, or for physics accuracy to change with frame rate, with faster machines offering a different experience. Settings like draw distance and FOV can also significantly affect gameplay. I really don't think it reasonable to hold back AI just because some people don't have fast enough machines to take fuill adavantage anymore than it would have been reasonable to not make Crysis just because no one could run it at the time.

Devs will not write two versions of a game one for console and one "open-ended" where the AI can scale to whatever.
Devs write for consoles!



Also what do people expect AI to be running that it would completely use up a whole desktop PC core let alone multiple cores?

 

[thesmokingman]

Devs will not write two versions of a game one for console and one "open-ended" where the AI can scale to whatever.
Devs write for consoles!

Also what do people expect AI to be running that it would completely use up a whole desktop PC core let alone multiple cores?

Not anymore. With AMD's presence on consoles, they have become PC's in essence. As devs get more and more used to coding on the PS4 and Xbox 1+, they get more en-grained with using the 8 core cpus. The whole essence and point of AMD's move to consoles and you know that whole Mantle thing, getting closer to metal, and transferring that to DX12 later, was to make the console port more like PC, and in turn make the console port to PC super easy.

 

[XavierMace]

Devs write for consoles!

Also what do people expect AI to be running that it would completely use up a whole desktop PC core let alone multiple cores?

I take it you don't play strategy games. Take Stellaris. It does managed to spread some load across all 8C/16T on my 1700x, but 80% of the load is on one core. Mid-late game you start getting significant slowdown and stalls which scales with the number of AI players you have. Paradox has never released any of their grand strategy games on consoles, there's no indication they have any plans to. Therefore why doesn't it scale better?

Not anymore. With AMD's presence on consoles, they have become PC's in essence. As devs get more and more used to coding on the PS4 and Xbox 1+, they get more en-grained with using the 8 core cpus. The whole essence and point of AMD's move to consoles and you know that whole Mantle thing, getting closer to metal, and transferring that to DX12 later, was to make the console port more like PC, and in turn make the console port to PC super easy.

Yes it's closer, but the CPU's in the consoles are basically training wheel CPU's so multiplatform games are still developed based off that performance baseline.

 

[Dribble]

Audio doesn't take a lot of CPU at the moment because the current tech is potato-level. To get an idea of what could be accomplished with more processing power, listen to the binaural audio in Hellblade. That's pre-recorded with a binaural microphone, so it only works for the specific sounds recorded, but it could be calculated in real-time for arbitrary sounds, leading to a massive improvement in immersion.

That requires a custom audio processor, not cpu grunt - sort of thing that was being done in the 90's but has gone out of fashion, although AMD had their audio thing recently that no one has used.

AIs don't need to know anything about other AIs, they only need to know about the physical state of the world. Just like when you interact with a real human, you don't have access what's going on in their head. That means that if you had one AI per thread, they would not require any communication with each other beyond their effect on the world, which is the same as is already required if you have only one thread for all AI.

Err, no. All the intelligent beings (soldiers, monsters, etc) interact with each other. Even path finding - it's not just about path finding in the world, it's about moving around your allied soldiers towards enemy soldiers. All of which are doing the same thing at the same time. The AI bit means they are trying to do the smart thing (flank/charge/whatever) which means they need to be reacting to what the others are doing. It's all interconnected - none of these AI's are operating in isolation. That makes threading hard.

 

[TheELF]

I take it you don't play strategy games. Take Stellaris. It does managed to spread some load across all 8C/16T on my 1700x, but 80% of the load is on one core. Mid-late game you start getting significant slowdown and stalls which scales with the number of AI players you have. Paradox has never released any of their grand strategy games on consoles, there's no indication they have any plans to. Therefore why doesn't it scale better?

This.

Err, no. All the intelligent beings (soldiers, monsters, etc) interact with each other. Even path finding - it's not just about path finding in the world, it's about moving around your allied soldiers towards enemy soldiers. All of which are doing the same thing at the same time. The AI bit means they are trying to do the smart thing (flank/charge/whatever) which means they need to be reacting to what the others are doing. It's all interconnected - none of these AI's are operating in isolation. That makes threading hard.

I was responding to people that where talking about splitting up AI.
A strategy game where each faction has it's own thread would be chaos since each faction would just do random stuff in complete disregard of what all the others do since they would all be doing everything at the same time...

 

[Qwertilot]

Should be OK for turn based games of course - it works very nicely for chess Civ is a bit messier but I'd think it should work? Do some opposition modelling then have all the computer preselect/premove all their stuff & execute it.
(I've no idea how they manage things at the moment.).

 

[Mr Evil]

...Also what do people expect AI to be running that it would completely use up a whole desktop PC core let alone multiple cores?

I remember several times in the past when devs promised a fully dynamic world, where every NPC acted independently, so that the large-scale economy was entirely dynamic. None of them delivered.

That requires a custom audio processor, not cpu grunt - sort of thing that was being done in the 90's but has gone out of fashion, although AMD had their audio thing recently that no one has used.

A hardware audio accelerator would be nice, but it looks like that idea has as much of a future as dedicated physics accelerators had. There just isn't the incentive to develop for hardware that isn't widespread, and no one will buy the hardware if no games use it. Multicore CPUs on the other hand, are already ubiquitous. Also, not enonugh people care that current game audio lacks any sort of sophistication.

Err, no. All the intelligent beings (soldiers, monsters, etc) interact with each other. Even path finding - it's not just about path finding in the world, it's about moving around your allied soldiers towards enemy soldiers. All of which are doing the same thing at the same time. The AI bit means they are trying to do the smart thing (flank/charge/whatever) which means they need to be reacting to what the others are doing. It's all interconnected - none of these AI's are operating in isolation. That makes threading hard.

Each AI should make decisions based on the current state of the world. The position of other characters is part of that world state. They don't* make decisions based on the internal state of other AIs, so there does not need to be any communication between AI threads. Furthermore, simpler pathfinding may only take static obstacles into account, ignoring characters etc. completely.

*Just to pre-empt the imminent objections - yes, some games give the AI magical knowledge of what every other AI is doing. This reduces CPU use, but is unrealistic and causes players to complain that the AI cheats.

 

[Headfoot]

I remember several times in the past when devs promised a fully dynamic world, where every NPC acted independently, so that the large-scale economy was entirely dynamic. None of them delivered.


A hardware audio accelerator would be nice, but it looks like that idea has as much of a future as dedicated physics accelerators had. There just isn't the incentive to develop for hardware that isn't widespread, and no one will buy the hardware if no games use it. Multicore CPUs on the other hand, are already ubiquitous. Also, not enonugh people care that current game audio lacks any sort of sophistication.


Each AI should make decisions based on the current state of the world. The position of other characters is part of that world state. They don't* make decisions based on the internal state of other AIs, so there does not need to be any communication between AI threads. Furthermore, simpler pathfinding may only take static obstacles into account, ignoring characters etc. completely.

*Just to pre-empt the imminent objections - yes, some games give the AI magical knowledge of what every other AI is doing. This reduces CPU use, but is unrealistic and causes players to complain that the AI cheats.

Hardware audio has worked out fine, just only on consoles. Both of them had some fixed function stuff to accelerate specific tasks for audio. I dont see it working on PC short of a specific requirement in DX

 

[IRobot23]

AM4 is great.

Well most of games is tested in non-real scenarios. They do no benchmark most intense MP maps or whatever. I would mostly recommend you to get R5 1600 with decent AM4 and then upgrade to 7nm - Ryzen 2/3. Easy to OC, cheap, power efficient, lots of threads. No matter what you show me I know that i7 7700K@5GHz will use lots of power, needs decent cooling and needs delidding and also frametimes might be worse.

Z370-6 (mesh or ring) cores are also incoming, but AM4 ryzen 2 7nm is also taped out... probably next year Q2-Q3.

 

[TeknoBug]

Games are already starting more cores, for now 4 cores is still fine for most games but with some games you'll see much smoother performance with more than 4 cores/threads.