Multi-Core Processing

orbenjcb14_ESO

Hey all, I have been playing for a while, however, there does not seem to be multi core support for ESO, I have 12 cores at 4.6GHz, however, only 1 core is used, as a result, I was curious if or when Zenimax will be expanding their processing capabilities, I would certainly make the game much smoother when surrounded by large amounts of people, such as in PvP or simply in crowded cities.

essi2

They made the client 64bit, so assuming they are willing to do the work, soon(TM)?

cravnbeer

I thought the game supported multi-core. I could have sworn that the game used all my cores.

essi2

Does it technically have multi-core support, maybe. (Haven't actually made a habit of running monitoring SW while I play)

Is it optimized for multi-core, not a chance.(But no video game is, the industry still thinks WinXP 32-bit is groundbreaking technology)

Rohaus

multiple core processing is no simple task. It is a major undertaking. Talk to any developer and they will tell you of the complexity involved. When I say developer, I am speaking about programmers.

You can't simply just program something and tell it to take advantage of multiple cores... the code has to be written in a way to break down tasks and assign those tasks to a core...

at this point, I would highly doubt you would see anything like this completed anytime soon or at all... WoW is still a single core game... most MMO's are... actually, I don't know of any MMO's that take advantage of multiple cores...

raj72616a

it uses all the cores of your gpu tho.

Drazkyth

Much of that will depend on the API (Application programming interface) the game is running with. I believe ESO runs via DX 11. If they in future bring out Vulkan or DX12 support then more cores should be utilised.

DX12 and Vulkan are the future so it would be wise for Zenimax to implement support for them eventually, we can only hope.

This is exactly why a 4 core CPU is usually recommended for a gaming PC and has been for quite a few years now, games simply will not utilise more than a few cores and usually utilise only one heavily. A 12 core CPU is much better suited to a workstation PC where the user may be rendering etc

It's currently best for gaming to run a lesser core count CPU with higher freqs than to run a higher core count CPU with lower freqs.

Balamoor

With the advent of the Vulkan API you are going to start seeing more titles like ESO use multi cores more efficiently. Things that traditionally caused lag concerns will be much less of a issue (*Cough* Cloaks *Cough*) and pop in will be larggley a thing of the past.

essi2

Apparently DX11 is "inept" at utilizing multicore CPUs, so maybe this will get better if ESO is ported to DX12.

But still, just like with 32bit and 64bit, just moving the code from one framework to the next doesn't do anything unless you specifically code for it, be that RAM optimization or CPU Core optimization.

orbenjcb14_ESO

Rohaus wrote: »

multiple core processing is no simple task. It is a major undertaking. Talk to any developer and they will tell you of the complexity involved. When I say developer, I am speaking about programmers.

You can't simply just program something and tell it to take advantage of multiple cores... the code has to be written in a way to break down tasks and assign those tasks to a core...

at this point, I would highly doubt you would see anything like this completed anytime soon or at all... WoW is still a single core game... most MMO's are... actually, I don't know of any MMO's that take advantage of multiple cores...

I agree that simply switching something to multi core is difficult, however, it should have been done from the beginning, nearly every modern game supports it.

Hand_Bacon

Technically speaking, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but...

I swear I read a post somewhere, maybe reddit, that talked about speeding up performance and in it there were some changes listed. Some to the config file, some to other settings. I believe there was a setting to take advantage of more than one core.

I could be horribly wrong though.

orbenjcb14_ESO

I should also note that this is a workstation sometimes, however, when pushing the CPU to 4.6 GHz (with two 980ti) makes it outpace even the 6700k, a quad core chip, the performance should be more than acceptable.

orbenjcb14_ESO

Hand_Bacon wrote: »

Technically speaking, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but...

I swear I read a post somewhere, maybe reddit, that talked about speeding up performance and in it there were some changes listed. Some to the config file, some to other settings. I believe there was a setting to take advantage of more than one core.

I could be horribly wrong though.

Unfortunately, that would be more a last resort for me, I do not enjoy messing with game files.

raj72616a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multithreading_(computer_architecture)

you can read about the advantages and disadvantages of multi-thread programming which can utilize multiple cores.
the advantage is that you might potentially speed things up.

but,
it is more difficult, meaning the development time will be longer,
and there will be more bugs,
and the performance gain might not be very good, because you have to add extra codes to manage how different tasks are distributed to different cores,
and some tasks simply cannot be multi threaded by nature

if the game stutter on your pc, it's more likely to be gpu problem and not cpu problem.

Spaceclown

I have a cpu monitor always up so I'll watch mine when I play again I know sometimes a pc can just be weird

magnusthorek

I hope ZOS doesn't force DirectX 12 'cause it's only available on Windows 10 and I hated i so badly that I almost got arrested for spanking my CPU

Darkstorne

magnusthorek wrote: »

I hope ZOS doesn't force DirectX 12 'cause it's only available on Windows 10 and I hated i so badly that I almost got arrested for spanking my CPU

They won't force it. Same way they don't force the 64 bit client right now. Too many people still don't use Windows 10.

That said, Windows 10 is clearly the future (and vastly improved from launch), and for a relatively new MMO like this that was clearly aiming to be supported for the better half of a decade or more, the absence of proper multi-core support is baffling. Especially when they made their own engine, and MUST have discussed this at some point. They have promised DX12 support though, which should make multi-core easier to implement, and will definitely improve the game's performance on all platforms as a result. It's just a question of when at this point. Certainly sad having to wait, knowing this game could run significantly better if it had been programmed well from the start.

Wifeaggro13

Pretty sure Zos coded it to take advantage of four cores . There is a way to divert some GPU to your cpu though outside zos though. I remember finding a third party program that did it for age of conan

orbenjcb14_ESO

For what it is worth, I am a programmer, if the framework for multi-core CPU usage was available, it would not only apply to quad core machines, it would scale with any number of processors. Take Crysis 3 or Battlefield 1, when I play them, I use all of my cores, regardless of any issues. If the game was designed to have so may characters on the screen at the same time and they planned to offload all of the player data to the CPU, they should have realized that taking advantage of those with multi-core processors would be advantageous and make the game run much smoother.

SirAndy

There's a setting in the user settings file that allows the use of multiple cores. Can't remember the name of the setting right now.

On my box (8 cores, 4 physical, 4 virtual) ESO uses all 4 physical cores when running ...

Darethran

essi2 wrote: »

Apparently DX11 is "inept" at utilizing multicore CPUs, so maybe this will get better if ESO is ported to DX12.

But still, just like with 32bit and 64bit, just moving the code from one framework to the next doesn't do anything unless you specifically code for it, be that RAM optimization or CPU Core optimization.

Ooh, ooh! I get to type a big ol' post!


Direct3D 11 isn't even close to inept. It's woefully inadequate. The closest that can be done is to explicitly program in the use of Driver Command Lists. These are horrible for several reasons.

1. They require the GPU to have a software scheduler (less efficient draw calls). Only NVidia's post-9000 GPUs (so 200 and newer) have a software scheduler. This is especially detrimental for well-parallelized games, as well as games using Direct3D 9 and older.

2. The performance increase is, at best, ~+80% when scaled across eight cores (IIRC, could just be four cores).

3. Implementing them is so convoluted and pain-stacking, that the graphics driver developer (I.E, NVidia) has to do an extreme amount of driver nittty-gritty just to get DCLs working properly in a game. And this has been done for nearly every game that uses DCLs.


Contrast that to Mantle/Vulkan/D3D 12, that have a draw call performance cost of around 1/10th of that of D3D 11, and 1/20th of D3D 9's draw call cost, the most parallel D3D 11 renderer can't even begin to touch a shoddy renderer that utilizes the newer APIs.

The newer APIs can also scale damn near linearly across cores. Got eight cores? Your compy's draw call ceiling went up from 50k draw calls in Vulkan (or mantle/D3D 12, but I'll just use Vulkan as the example) to 380k draw calls. Whereas with D3D 11 with command lists will top out at around 10k draw calls.

To get an idea of how poor the revisions of Direct3D have been, the draw distance in Bethesda's RPGs has stayed the same since Oblivion. Loading more than 5 ugrids (5x5 cells) just slaughters performance through the increased draw calls. And Oblivion is from 2006. More than 10 years on, and Fallout 4 has the exact same draw distance.

Developers could use a robust static batching method, that adds/removes objects to/from a couple of large vertex buffers, whenever the engine spawns/disables them, but that's really only decent enough for games with low draw distances and low polygon density, as it's a software task. Morrowind is a stellar candidate, for example. It could also be used in bigger games in a conservative fashion (run only on grass, bullets, swords, particles, boots), but it won't provide that much of a difference. Some, but not much.


Aside from implementing a parallel renderer, there's really not much else that the client does. Havok's more recent versions are parallelized as far as I know, and audio is one of those embarrassingly parallel tasks. There's little else going on, as the rest is handled by the server.

AI? Server's job.
Handling buffs/debuffs/stats? Server's job.
Quests? Server's job.
Transferring players across areas? Server's job.
Player, object and NPC positions? Server's job.

Etc. etc.


So aye. If we are to get remotely decent performance, we need a renderer using Vulkan (not D3D 12, since the latter is tied to Win10). The good news, is that if we do get Vulkan, the game is currently designed around a limit of, I'd wager, 10k draw calls. If we get Vulkan, the engine could expand the draw distance a few times over, add all the flashy particles and zergy encounters, and we'd still be lightyears ahead in performance.

Octopuss

I don't normally necro, but does anyone know for certain (or had ZOS ever commented on that) how many cores can the damn engine make use of?

Rohamad_Ali

Octopuss wrote: »

I don't normally necro, but does anyone know for certain (or had ZOS ever commented on that) how many cores can the damn engine make use of?

No they haven't . It was a fiasco just to get them to graduate to DX 11 . We have players here still on pcs running Windows 7 with duel cores .

Octopuss

Fiasco in what way?
I read it's not even "true" Dx11, but Dx10 with some wrapper over it.

The performance is definitely absolutely ridiculous and I am puzzled why they chose not to do some radical optimizations. That would go a long way.

fred4

Duel cores only work in Bergamo, on PC EU . Anywhere else performance is crap.

Betheny

Octopuss wrote: »

I don't normally necro, but does anyone know for certain (or had ZOS ever commented on that) how many cores can the damn engine make use of?

The game will use every single core...at 1% or 2%...while at same time jump on a single core and jam it to 100% non-stop so the game chokes.

Rohamad_Ali

Octopuss wrote: »

Fiasco in what way?
I read it's not even "true" Dx11, but Dx10 with some wrapper over it.

The performance is definitely absolutely ridiculous and I am puzzled why they chose not to do some radical optimizations. That would go a long way.

That is the fiasco . It is DX 10 with 11 overlay . The DX 9 support was dropped and a bunch of players flipped out .

Octopuss

Oh. lol