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DCS not multi-threaded?


Callsign.Vega

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Actually, quite a few these days.

 

Battlefield 5 uses 12 of my 14 cores and Star Citizen uses all 14!

 

Star Citizen doesn't really exist so it doesn't count.

 

I mean, of course a tech demo that was announced a decade ago is going to use all fourteen.

 

But Battlefield 5 is literally the only legitimate game that's going to use all of them.

 

And I'm curious what you could possibly be complaining about. You spent enough on your computer to be able to trade it in for very reliable car.

 

I run the game on an I5 6500 3.2 ghz, and a GTX 1080 and it runs like a dream both in VR and in normal screen modes.

 

Part of me thinks you made this thread just to start a conversation about your computer hardware. And power to you, but no one here is going to be anymore impressed than the friends I'm sure you can afford quite a few of.

 

Computer software has been moving very slowly for a while, honestly likely because it's in a great place and has been for some time. And it's not going to make any sense for software developers to develop for hardware like yours until the average consumer can afford it which won't be for a while. You should know that already.

 

The average consumer these days has a 780-980 equivalent. Most really special features of your hardware won't be used to any significant degree until people are buying the same setup for a quarter of what you likely paid.

 

"I have a 14 core Intel CPU clocked at 5 GHz.

 

Turning items on like mirrors and visibility range over low/medium really tanks the FPS. But my CPU us barely being used as is my 2080 Ti.

 

Is the main game engine still only single thread? Such a shame for going on 2019."

 

The more I reread this, the more disgusted I get, and annoyed that you asked a question you didn't really care about the answer for just to brag about your new computer to a bunch of strangers. If your FPS is fluctuating so much that you can actually notice it (which I doubt, you're probably just staring at an FPS counter rather than playing the game) then just use VSYNC or the Nvidia proprietary equivalent. It'll even out your fps and keep it to a decent number. But I don't believe you'll find any sympathy for the fact that you're usually at 300 fps but sometimes it drops to 225. It feels disingenuous.


Edited by fergrim
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ED have already said they're planning on moving towards a client-server architecture when running locally.

 

When they finally do this, it'll be the point they'll be able to split more things over more cores.

 

Proper multi-threading is a difficult problem to handle though when it comes to games and their ilk, where you simply cannot block while waiting for thread completion.

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All I saw was 14 core and the word overclock.....

 

If you need to render 8k video editing and saving , then maybe.

 

I would buy 14 cores to get rid of the need to overclock.

 

And yes there is still no guarantee that any overclock is stable.

 

My cpu uses all cores no problem.

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I find DCS uses four cores quite well.

This is what I and most people have.

Indeed pre-Ryzen (not that long ago) Intel was quite happy for that to be the consumer standard.

For more you had to look to workstation and server CPUs at the cost of frequency.

Big core counts will become the mainstream with time (thanks AMD) and software will follow suit.

 

Likewise don't expect to utilise the ray tracing capabilities in your GPU across all titles anytime soon.

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Great multi-core support will come. Great product, great modularity, absolutely love the game. I think overtime they will get the improvements down that better utilizes more cores. Gaining a few FPS here and there will be awesome and make the experience better.


Edited by CAmastersgt

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Eventually multi-threading support will come. This has been DCS's biggest embarrassment throughout it's recent history. Great product, great modularity, but at some point nobody looked forward. It will come because it is overdue and much needed. Rarely does hardware outclass software, it is usually the other way around with hardware trying to catch up with developer ideas.

 

 

If they build it, it will come.

 

 

Except it IS multithreaded already. Also, cores are not flat multipliers. You do not get 4x FPS if you have 4x as many cores. It isn't that 'nobody thought ahead' it's that 'it doesn't work the way you think it does'. Seriously, do some research on the dozens of conversations in here and you might learn WHY it's the way it is and WHY changing it gas not been a priority.

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Except it IS multithreaded already. Also, cores are not flat multipliers. You do not get 4x FPS if you have 4x as many cores. It isn't that 'nobody thought ahead' it's that 'it doesn't work the way you think it does'.

 

 

^ this

 

zhukov knows what he is talking about.

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Yep you are getting it. Keep at it.

 

4xFPS with 4x FPS is CRAZY. Doesn't work like that.

 

Eh... better implementation of multi-core was the term I was looking for (Might have been the 3AM sleepies getting to me). Seeing all the comments it appears that it should be PRIORITY #1 or even #2. Even though it is a great product that we love, there is room for improvement. Gaining a few FPS here and there is awesome and worth it.

 

Reading dozens of conversations on here is not doing research. although entertaining. LAME!

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Why wouldn't ED charge for major base code / performance upgrades? It would totally make sense, it's a sustainable way to do things and customers would be very happy to pay just to see their new shiny hardware squeezed to every bit.

 

ED have already said they're planning on moving towards a client-server architecture when running locally.

 

As stated above, there is a lot of work going on to improve performance, but as we are working on the house we live in its more difficult and a bit slower going. Other games will release a new version every year but also charge you 80 bucks while they are at it. We will get there, and performance when within specs is really good, but of course, can always be better.

 

As it came up earlier - the engine works just fine now on the average system used by the player base. ED has maintained appropriate improvement schedules as far as engine developments to improve the product as a whole while keeping the base simulation free (which has important marketing ramifications). At the heart of the issue is large swaths of the player base are not regulars in the forums, and flight simulators as a genre include players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars building moving simulators in their bedroom for game play - not something your average Battle Field of Cities Skylines players do. As a result, yes, you get guys like the OP who could buy my car or their system, as well as players running on $500 builds.

 

Star Citizen doesn't really exist so it doesn't count.

 

The more I reread this, the more disgusted I get, and annoyed that you asked a question you didn't really care about the answer for just to brag about your new computer to a bunch of strangers. If your FPS is fluctuating so much that you can actually notice it (which I doubt, you're probably just staring at an FPS counter rather than playing the game) then just use VSYNC or the Nvidia proprietary equivalent. It'll even out your fps and keep it to a decent number. But I don't believe you'll find any sympathy for the fact that you're usually at 300 fps but sometimes it drops to 225. It feels disingenuous.

 

Okay the Star Citizen part was funny... (the rest of the quote keep going down)

 

Except it IS multithreaded already. Also, cores are not flat multipliers. You do not get 4x FPS if you have 4x as many cores. It isn't that 'nobody thought ahead' it's that 'it doesn't work the way you think it does'. Seriously, do some research on the dozens of conversations in here and you might learn WHY it's the way it is and WHY changing it gas not been a priority.

 

You guys should have seen the rouse when he said "multi-threaded" and not "multi-cored" … I still have to explain to clients that putting that expensive PCIE-NVME SSD in their 4 year old mother board doesn't mean they'll see blazing data speeds. Plenty out there think that because it says "gaming" on the box it's better and worth the extra $100, let alone when posting the OP failed to mention any of the other hardware components that could easily be a bottle neck. I still remember the days when "Gigahertz" was a buzz phrase and people would buy computers with expensive processors and garbage components that could never utilize the power.

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Yep, agree. Even I have been guilty of stating multithreaded over multi-cored.

 

IMO always better to build your own computer, and usually far cheaper and with some well thought out plans can get a superior rig for what you want it to do.

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Yep, agree. Even I have been guilty of stating multithreaded over multi-cored.

 

IMO always better to build your own computer, and usually far cheaper and with some well thought out plans can get a superior rig for what you want it to do.

 

Assuming you actually know what you're doing. Building a PC physically is pretty easy (funny because that's what scares people away) but anyone who watched The Verge's disaster of a PC build is painfully aware there are plenty of "experts" who don't know their foot from a hole in the ground. The problem is people who buy really expensive and "technical" sounding parts thinking they all just work together - kinda like buying a CPU with the most cores, most GHz, and most cost - thinking it will reign supreme over all others (and probably installed in a budget mobo…)

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Assuming you actually know what you're doing. Building a PC physically is pretty easy (funny because that's what scares people away) but anyone who watched The Verge's disaster of a PC build is painfully aware there are plenty of "experts" who don't know their foot from a hole in the ground. The problem is people who buy really expensive and "technical" sounding parts thinking they all just work together - kinda like buying a CPU with the most cores, most GHz, and most cost - thinking it will reign supreme over all others (and probably installed in a budget mobo…)

Yep, there is far more to it than a LEGO operation and clasping it all together. Point well made.

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I do hope for (and the devs have said they’re working on) some multithreaded/multicored optimization coming at some point, mostly because as the level of the simulation in-game expands to include (hopefully) larger scale battles with more units (maybe dynamic campaign) we can only expect that the limitation on performance will be the CPU... and it looks like single-core performance isn’t increasing fast enough to keep pace.

 

I feel like the ultimate “end game” of DCS immersion is high fidelity, high FPS VR in a game world that mimics an actual battlefield, and for that to be achieved we will definitey need more optimization.

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Depending on the stuff you throw in the map, missiles, radars, AI's, these would vary, but in pure idle, basically with minimal draw calls, no movement of any kind, time passing:

 

The proportions are: Thread 1: ~70% - Thread 2: ~29% ... so those other threads around 10 more are less than 1% total IIRC.

 

It's a huge pity out there that these terminologies are so confused and badly contextualized. The marketing doesn't help at all, infac they fuel it. As soon as someone hears multi-core, they think the workload is split by 50% so if it's 2, 25% each if it's 4 cores, etc, that just not how it works, in any program, there's going to be a lot of variations, there will always be one thread that will be the main one, and if it's important it'll be the bottleneck that would slow the whole thing down.

 

I did this in earlier threads, way back many months ago. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=201530&page=8

 

zS5p5HO.png

 

 

 

 

Improvements are no doubt being made, just not fundamental ones because of the limitations and challenges that were mentioned many times, and this is nowhere near a rigorous test, it's not a comparison of a previous version with the new.

When the game is strained and uses those parts of the code that may be causing (depending on scenario, lots of missiles = lots of missle tracking/physics code) slowdowns but were optimized would ofcourse run better after the fact, these minor improvements in the efficienty of the non-core engine code are quite hard to identify for an average user without any tools and/or purposeful benchmarking plays.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actually, quite a few these days.

 

Battlefield 5 uses 12 of my 14 cores and Star Citizen uses all 14!

 

TLDR of those "other discussions about DCS CPU performance":

 

Don't use the Task Manager for anything serious or detail. It is a half-faux view of averages. There are many many threads in DCS.exe but we simply say "dual-threaded" because of the major two, the others are taking less than 1% of CPU time (I forgot exactly)

 

Battlefiled 5 probably has even more threads, to see the details of those woud take utilities like Windows Performance Recorder/Viewer part of the Windows SDK, it's mainly a developer tool.

 

The threads are constantly jumping between cores because that's normal operation, and it may differ from CPU to CPU depending on firmware/southbridge/drivers/OS scheduling.

 

It's "not" using all 14 Cores in practice, technically it is, it is using them but in a way that it doesn't do any good, the threads are jumping from one core to another so fast that when you see it in our human time which the Task Manager uses it's all averaged out and it makes an appearance as if those 14 cores are constantly being used, it's false, the graph is false, it's a generated average that does not exist, it's false data.

 

Once a thread jumps to another core, ... nothing happens, it's still as if it's on the same core, no gain, no loss, this is simply how the CPU operates to fit everything on the available cores as efficiently, and as you might imagine, when things get more constrained it would do more jumping if we think about it, the jumping is the attempt to fit all the holes with work IMO, and all this jumping when CPU is being maxed out gives even a bigger impression of "utilizing all cores" - There is also a "favourite" behavior in which a busier thread is favoring one particular core and doesn't easily jump off it.

 

The jumping may be just an apperance it self too, but this is just my quick theory right now. The threads do not always take same amount of processing power, the HW/OS uses sophisticated scheduling which decides all of this jumping, which is meant to save on power and other things, and is probably where the marketing "LOAD BALANCING" comes from which is a total scam as we can see, but in reality a thread may complete it's momentary job and go to idle and after it starts again, it may start on a different core, but because it's so fast it appears as if it's jumping, I kinda thought of this right now, which I didn't at the time of those threads.

 

The last part may not work like that at all, but at least it gives you an idea that things under the hood can be and are far different in detail.

 

Picture the CPU as a this big straight railway. Each CPU is it's own railway track, so not double, but 16-tracked railway for example, all the tracks have 300 km/h top speed limit, and all your threads are trains going at 300 km/h, when a thread jumps your train here switces to a neighbouring track, it's now riding on a different track and not riding on the previous one, and it's still going 300 km/h, not much of a change at all as all tracks are equal and no weight of the train was split to multiple tracks, it's same train with same number of carts, it's still weighing down and occupying one of the tracks as before.


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I do hope for (and the devs have said they’re working on) some multithreaded/multicored optimization coming at some point, mostly because as the level of the simulation in-game expands to include (hopefully) larger scale battles with more units (maybe dynamic campaign) we can only expect that the limitation on performance will be the CPU... and it looks like single-core performance isn’t increasing fast enough to keep pace.

 

I feel like the ultimate “end game” of DCS immersion is high fidelity, high FPS VR in a game world that mimics an actual battlefield, and for that to be achieved we will definitey need more optimization.

 

The end game is clear, it just a bit of a journey to get there and to get it done right. I'm also thinking that flight sim's and especially combat one's when everything is synced, arty, aircraft gun's firing all over the map my many is extremely difficult to get right now and for the future.

 

I'm not a coder, just thinking of just that makes splitting up the code very hard to gain performance when everything still needs to be synced up at the end. I believe the big jump and possibly the easier "In terms of multi core for a combat flight sim" Will be the separation of the graphics engine to simulation. Client/Sever approach, just locally on your pc.

 

"mimics an actual battlefield"

 

You can see this now! (Within reason) Take a look at what Drexx has setup here with DDCS. Drexx build his own sever engine to save the state of the game and this also updates the captured airbases on the map by blue and red.

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I hope we still can fly DCS in 20 years. ED has a great and loyal community and there is no serious competition on the horizon. If a rewrite of core mechanics is necessary to get more performance they should do it. I think VR could be a game changer in the next 5-10 years. The development can't be for free, but people are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for hardware, so it should be really no problem to support the development of a performance improved version. Take a look at Star Citizen. People are spending $100-$1500 for a single space ship which has no function compared to a F-18 for $80.

So I'd support the development and optimization of DCS 3.0 VR :-)

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I hope we still can fly DCS in 20 years. ED has a great and loyal community and there is no serious competition on the horizon. If a rewrite of core mechanics is necessary to get more performance they should do it. I think VR could be a game changer in the next 5-10 years. The development can't be for free, but people are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for hardware, so it should be really no problem to support the development of a performance improved version. Take a look at Star Citizen. People are spending $100-$1500 for a single space ship which has no function compared to a F-18 for $80.

So I'd support the development and optimization of DCS 3.0 VR :-)

 

Ditto.

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DCS not multi-threaded?

 

If a rewrite of core mechanics is necessary to get more performance they should do it. I think VR could be a game changer in the next 5-10 years. The development can't be for free, but people are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for hardware, so it should be really no problem to support the development of a performance improved version

 

if you take finance classes or run a business, you learn it doesn’t work like that.

 

it doesn’t matter how much the customer spends on “other” products, it only depends how much they spend on “your” product.

 

if they charged 10x more for DCS, they could do a lot more development and optimization.

 

but for $79? that only pays for about 1 hour of work.

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The more I reread this, the more disgusted I get, and annoyed that you asked a question you didn't really care about the answer for just to brag about your new computer to a bunch of strangers. If your FPS is fluctuating so much that you can actually notice it (which I doubt, you're probably just staring at an FPS counter rather than playing the game) then just use VSYNC or the Nvidia proprietary equivalent. It'll even out your fps and keep it to a decent number. But I don't believe you'll find any sympathy for the fact that you're usually at 300 fps but sometimes it drops to 225. It feels disingenuous.

 

I think your taking this a bit personal, almost like getting pissed when you see someone with a yacht. I do agree the post comes off the way you describe, but people put hardware in their sigs all the time. I’m not sure the difference.

 

That said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want your game of choice to utilize your hardware effectively. Coding for a variety of hardware has always been a challenge for PC devs, some do it well, others don’t. When they don’t, it’s fair ground to bitch, especially for a game with relatively high reqs.

 

I actually think DCS, for all its complexities (and limitations), utilizes hardware pretty well. I don’t swing it around on forums, but I spent some money on myself over the holidays and upgraded from a 6700k/1080ti to 9900k/2080ti on a custom loop, and the difference is substantial. Now, that is going from high end hardware to the highest possible consumer grade, and as I said, there’s a significant upgrade. Not just in fps, but in fidelity. I play almost exclusively VR, at 1.5 pd, msaa at 4x, all view distances/eye candy maxed, it is smooth as silk dropping to 45ish only in congested MP scenarios, running VA, vaicom, srs, and tacview. Still some distracting occasional issues, clouds popping, stuff like that. Network issues are another matter. They are generally minor though, and scenery/lighting, models, gauge readability all very much imporived (I could not run any msaa on the 1080). I barely play anything else.

 

If I play track IR at 1080 or 1440 then yes, the difference will not be as significant. I don’t know why people are pretending like BF5 is a shining example of hardware utilization. I applaud their pioneering RTX features, but on a 2080ti at 2100/8000 the game still runs better in dx11 than dx12. Single player is jaw dropping beautiful, but performance hit is too high in MP. In DCS, I’ve been dropping msaa to 2 depending on what/where I’m flying but otherwise settings stay the same.

 

FWIW, I would have no issue with paying for substantial engine upgrades. DCS has massive potential to grow over time, not just in its current form, but to a full battlefield sim. The amount I’ve spent of peripherals, mods to those, mounts, modules, terrains, etc., I would drop $50 on on an engine upgrade in a second.

just a dude who probably doesn't know what he's talking about

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the issue about multi-threading, (multi-processing is the more correct term here, as DCS is already multi-threaded) is that it is required to support a larger population than, say, single processing.

 

example, if you have a program with 2 processes running, 2,3...14 core CPUs can run that program and work fine, but when you develop a 8 process program, and decide to run that on a 4-core CPU you will run into problems (deadlocks, latency, racing, asymmetry) not to mention the overheads needed to adapt the program to a lower core count.

 

thanks for clearing this up. But aren't the i5 and AMD Ryzen (almost) all quad cores? That should be the starting point for development. I would be happy to pay my share for DCS development.

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I would offer up some money as well. To date, my 6700k @ 4.6hz and 980ti hydrocopper were barely adaquate in VR. I just upgraded to 2080ti with waterblock and although frame rates are better, it still drops into the low 30s when flying in areas with lots of objects like Dubai. Unfortunately single thread clock speeds haven’t increased significantly enough to warrant a cpu upgrade too.


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