Better use of Intel Hyperthreading please

[D4n]

I'm surprised the game is only running on 3 threads or so instead of balancing the load across all 8 threads. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

[Fab]

Aint many games that do that

[Flagrum]

I'm surprised the game is only running on 3 threads or so instead of balancing the load across all 8 threads. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

Two, afaik. One for sim logic and one for sound. But perhaps it has been gotten better with EDGE and DX11? Afaik, DX11 allows the program to hand over much more workload to the GPU and I would suspect that DX11 itself uses multithreading to some extend in order to archieve this.

 

But in general, yes, one could probably develop a sim utilizing multi-core CPUs which could perform better than DCS now.

 

But the keyword is "can develop". I.e. doing it from scratch - programming multithreading applications is not simple and even immensely complex if you really want to make best use of the multi-threading concept. "Updating" DCS to multi-threading would be most likely much more costly (time and thus money wise) than re-doing it from scratch. And now consider how many man-years of development time has gone into DCS already ...

Edited March 20, 2016 by Flagrum

[cichlidfan]

I'm surprised the game is only running on 3 threads or so instead of balancing the load across all 8 threads. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

 

Not according to ED.

[D4n]

Not according to ED.

 

What do u mean, where did they state that they don't think so?

[paulca]

As someone who worked in electronic financial trading applications I have studied threading models quite a bit, trying to achieve single or double digit micro-second processing time.

 

Layman: Wouldn't doing 8 things at once be faster?

Reality: Not if they are competing for resources.

 

Consider being in work, doesn't matter what it is you are doing really. Now lets say 8 different people bring you things to do. If they all just added a job slip into a pile and you went through them in order... how would that compare to you trying to do them all at once? In reality you would need to stop, switch jobs, work on it for a wee while, then stop, switch, work, stop, switch and so on. Which would be faster? In this example YOU are the resource the jobs are competing for.

 

When there are competing resources the threads have to be managed and communicate via signals and locks. Threads have to suspend and wait while another uses the memory or resource they want to use. The more threads you have the more time this locking and signalling takes. Signals and locks often form competing queues. They cause the hardware to suspend and context switch executing processes to service another. All these suspending threads and context switches cost time, quite a lot of it in fact.

 

The complexity of development also increases massively. The probability of a bug causing memory corruption or a CTD also increase massively.

 

An example is making toast with a toaster. If the toaster does 2 slices and takes 2 minutes to toast them. If you have 10 slices to toast would it be faster to toast 2 at a time and wait, doing them in sequence or to keep stopping the toaster and swapping the slices every few seconds? If it takes you 10 seconds to swap slices you should be able to work it out that it will take far longer to keep switching the slices than to do them sequentially.

 

Besides, DX provides only a single event thread. So anything and everything that requires a DX operation has to be pushed onto a event queue and wait until DX gets to it. Having more threads putting stuff onto that queue will just bottle neck the whole thing and actually decrease performance and increase lag.

 

In short, multi-threading is only faster is a limited set of cases.

[cichlidfan]

What do u mean, where did they state that they don't think so?

 

Right here. From Wags.

 

Better use of multiple GPUs (CPU multi-threading is not being pursued as it will provide little if any gain)

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2256929&postcount=1

 

Your welcome.

[BiBa]

...doing it from scratch - programming multithreading applications is not simple and even immensely complex if you really want to make best use of the multi-threading concept. "Updating" DCS to multi-threading would be most likely much more costly (time and thus money wise) than re-doing it from scratch. And now consider how many man-years of development time has gone into DCS already ...

FSX is older than DCS and yet there are Add-Ons who can ladle out all cores like FSPS “Xtreme FSX PC”. It has been designed keeping in mind the thousands of possible hardware configurations. This special software analyzes your computer hardware in depth (CPU, GPU, memory, hard disc speed and etc.) and while reading all of your current hardware, it will do special calculations about the tweaks that need to be applied. It sets a number of documented and undocumented tweaks to the correct values that is optimal for your PC. Just execute it and enjoy it with the maximum frames and smoothness you can get from your PC without changing any of your FSX sliders.

 

Monitering my ressources during the FSX simulation, it spoons out up to 95% of all my 6x 3.2Ghz cores! If that’s possible with FSX, then that should also goes for DCS too. With every DCS new update the FPS performance is worsening. On the long term it will be unavoidable to braze this weak chain together, so better start with it right now.

Edited March 21, 2016 by Biba

[SkateZilla]

I'm surprised the game is only running on 3 threads or so instead of balancing the load across all 8 threads. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

 

 

2 Threads

-1 For Simulation Engine

-1 For XAudio Sound Engine

[D4n]

I guess then I'll have to balance my other background processes to less loaded other threads/cores manually in task manager... (or is there a smart free program to do this?)

[sobek]

I guess then I'll have to balance my other background processes to less loaded other threads/cores manually in task manager... (or is there a smart free program to do this?)

 

Not particularly free unless you use FOSS, but it is called operating system. ;)

Edited March 23, 2016 by sobek