Question Zen 6 Speculation Thread

[soresu]

UE5 is very very very brand new.

*Lumen and Nanite are brand new, the old pipelines are still there which facilitates UE4 project migration/compatibility.

Nanite still doesn't even cover all the animation solvers of the old geometry pipeline though - morph targets are missing at least, and I think skeletal/bone solvers are still not production ready as of 5.7.

 

[Joe NYC]

Very true, but they CAN average 1 baby/month for 9 months!

But what's the 1% low FPS on that? I mean BPM (babies per month)?

 

[Tuna-Fish]

I think if system architects went at a game engine from the ground up with the explicit purpose of scaling with the number of cores, it is totally possible.

This has been done, multiple times. It's not even that hard. The problem is that it has very real costs.

A system where there is ultimately a single thread driving things and only uses other threads to offload work into is much easier to understand, test and bugfix than using fully distributed scheduling. And the time that QA needs is time that your game is not on the market. Plenty of people have built such engines as tests or hobby projects, but big games still keep getting built around a single core thread. The FPS that you get is not the key thing that the game developers are trying to optimize.

 

[OneEng2]

A system where there is ultimately a single thread driving things and only uses other threads to offload work into is much easier to understand, test and bugfix than using fully distributed scheduling.

I can certainly belief this.

I have also architected systems that did highly threaded work loads (several hundred to 1000 threads) in production critical applications (manufacturing test for major OEMs).

I have never attempted a game engine, so it is possible that this is a more difficult task.

Still, it will have to be the future IMO. IPC and clock scaling will not be increasing nearly as quickly as cores (and hasn't been for some time now). Either games will stagnate with IPC and clock scaling, or they will figure out how to effectively manage lots of threads at a low cost point.