Malryn wrote:the game engine never maxes out my resources on my PC.
if it's hurting in performance, then that means it actually is.
this is the mistake/trick that Microsoft ends up leading people into - Task Manager shows almost nothing relevant to actual CPU usage. the numbers and charts you see for Processor utilization are basically useless.
CPU loads can only process the way they have to be processed. if it's a task that must be executed Single Thread - then it always will be. having more Processor Cores for that particular task, will not benefit that task at all.
furthermore, loads in things like games, if we try to give an easily understandable result akin to Task Manager - there maybe 1 Nanosecond where suddenly 50x as many calculations are happening as every other Nanosecond. utilization is not a fixed amount.
which is actually a good time to explain why the percentages and charts you see are useless - because Processors work with tasks ~ per Nanosecond (it's close enough for this explanation), so that '50% utilization' you get in Task Manager is an average across the past entire Second, but that one Second covers ~1 Billion CPU Cycles.
don't be tricked by GUI charts - they give you completely incorrect information, that has almost nothing to do with actual Processor capabilities and limitations.
what you see on the Chart, and what's actually happening in terms of CPU tasks - are barely related if at all due to the way the information is represented.
'Load Balancing' is also an interesting (and annoying at the same time) thing, that is involved here too.
Malryn wrote:Well the direction technology has gone in the last decade is not faster cores but more cores.
mostly because we're running out of ideas of how to make Cores that can do more by themselves, because that's harder to do than have more Processor Cores in general.
Processor Core count is still not that important for most games because games all in all, generally have
very Single Threaded tasks.
it would be nice if as a species we could figure out a way to resolve this issue, but so far nothing has worked yet. nobody yet has had 'the genius idea' to make Processor Cores able to talk to each other so that Single Thread tasks can simultaneously be calculated across many Threads.
Malryn wrote:My 3 year old i7 core is only 500 megahertz slower than the latest and greatest i7. It makes sense not to limit a program's capability by only giving it the ability to work with an 1/8 of a computer's processing speed because the program does not multi thread. Perhaps during the XP days it was sound but not today.
Frequency is not comparable between Architectures. at all. it just isn't. don't do it. there is no comparison. the Ghz war ended decades ago.
Frequency also gives you basically no idea of how much 'performance' you actually have.
'starholme' beat me to part of the explanation too.
on topic though, Underground Belts, Robots, and in general making things closer together whenever possible helps a lot with performance.
(and if you must go long distance with stuff, keeping to Trains should also help, as the Rails themselves have little to none for CPU load and are cheaper than Belts too)
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Rseding91 wrote:Got it! We'll spawn threads and have them eat 100% of the cpu so it looks like it's using all of the computer's processor.
so, like the Frostbite Engine? :p
because i
honestly think Frostbite does that, no matter what Processor anyone has, even if they limit Refresh Rate to where they have reasonable headroom on GPU performance (And therefore should be able to expect CPU to have headroom as well), the silly GUI Charts still show 100% Utilization across all Threads.
starholme wrote:Guess I should really get a new machine someday!
i got out of the hole of seriously outdated hardware when i could, and times of year where there's normally big sales can help a lot. if you're in a part of the world where these sorts of sales don't apply though, then i feel you.
was stuck on 775 (also with a Q9550, though for the first few years with an E8400) for many years. every year definitely felt worse than the last! especially with how sloppy a lot of people are with their games (in general, not anyone in particular. except maybe Ubisoft, their monkeys in particular are exceptionally sloppy).