Hacker News Reader

Comment by Merad | Hacker News Reader

"Gaming = single threaded" really hasn't been true for a while now, at least in the arena of AAA games. My gaming desktop has a Core i7-4790k (4 core/8 thread), and I can remember several games offhand that were loading all 8 HT cores at 75+%.

View on HN

No, most games are single threaded, even AAA ones. You might get this impression from a vocal minority though, "vocal" in the sense that they're the ones landing on your radar, while the technical details of other games do not.

(you could argue for ps3 of course, But there it's not a choice)

I don't know enough about games but if that's true, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One have 6 to 7 cores just idling most of the time? Why did Sony and Microsoft put 8 core CPUs in their consoles instead fewer cores with higher clockspeed if that's the case?

they use extra cores for live video recording and fun like that, also console games are usually run in a vm on the console these days so it's giving the OS some spare space too (contact lists/chat, achievements, etc.). Also it gives games the possibility to run on more cores if you're AAA and want to leverage them.

if you are disagreeing with my broad-ish statements about two very different platforms please explain how I am wrong instead of just downvoting.

You are wrong because games released in the past few years are heavily multithreaded. The only game recently that I've seen not be multithreaded is Battletech. The latest Total War series are heavily multithreaded. As far as the cores go on consoles, game developers try to use all of them all the time, and in general there's only one core that is half dedicated to doing OS / interaction / video recording tasks.

I checked a few sources and you are right. turns out I was in a bubble there.

This is not true. If nothing else a lot of the work done by a game engine pipeline is actually handled by the OS or device driver (GPU, audio, and network) and scheduled in a different thread. So even a “single threaded” game would benefit from 2-4 cores.

confirming that there's definitely a trend towards separate threads for audio, but the rest, especially networking, depends strongly on the engine

No... it’s made concurrent by the OS anyway. If you tell OpenGL or DirectX or Vulkan or whatever to render a vertex buffer, what actually happens is it is added to a queue and returns immediately. An OS-provided thread asynchronously processes that queue and actually spends a fair amount of resources, on a different hardware core, scheduling the hardware to do what you asked. Same for audio and network. This is regardless of what concurrency the game is written to exploit.

Great, the 2011 i7 has more than one core.

it's still true, the sweet spot just moved to 2 cores instead of 1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com