Wolfenstein II & Other 2017 Games CPU Core Usage Trends - games can finally use all cores/threads?

[traderjay]

I finally got my workstation up and running right on time before the release of Wolfenstein II and Assassin's Creed origins. Reading around the various reviews and benchmarks, it seems quite a few of the recently released games in late 2017 can take advantage of more than six cores. On my workstation (not the best for gaming), no single core exceed 5% when playing at 2560x1600 with everything maxed out.

Wolfenstein:
http://www.game-debate.com/news/23948/wolfenstein-ii-the-new-colossus-pc-performance-report

Destiny 2:
http://heavy.com/games/2017/06/destiny-2-optimized-for-extra-cores-on-pc-ryzen-i9-threadripper/

 

[TheELF]

Most tools show only the average usage of each core for a period of time windows task manager/scheduler tosses each thread to a new core at the beginning of each cycle,it's wear leveling just like ssds have.
Use process explorer from microsoft or process hacker which is opensource and has more features.
Run the game in a window and have it running in the background sort the list by CPU usage and double click on the game exe,choose the threads tab in the little window that shows up to see all your threads in live action.
You will see at least one thread spiking whenever there is something more going on on screen.

 

[Carfax83]

We've had several threads on this. It's not a new phenomenon, but one that's been building momentum over the years. Certain AAA engines, the vast majority on which most games are made, have been becoming more and more parallel over time. These include Unreal Engine 4, Frostbite 3, CryEngine, AnvilNext, Disrupt Engine, Snowdrop Engine, Id Tech 6 and many others. This is the natural consequence of two forces in play:

1) Developers have to squeeze as much performance out of the weak console CPUs, so they've been forced to parallelize their engines as much as possible.

2) Market desire for bigger, more detailed and more realistic games with better simulation requires a lot of CPU, and since CPUs aren't getting any faster as far as clock speed is concerned, they only way to achieve their goals are to focus on thread level parallelism, and instruction level parallelism. The latter hasn't become a focus just yet, but I suspect it will once we seen Ryzen based CPUs in the consoles as those will have AVX2.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

We've had several threads on this. It's not a new phenomenon, but one that's been building momentum over the years. .

Yep. A few good debates. Slow momentum when the OP's wolfenstein II will run well on a 2500k

 

[Mulrian]

AC Origins use of more threads seems more to do with needing to run multiple layers of DRM as opposed to the actual engine using them.