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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

> Apparently we now think 64 cores is ‘lower core count’. What a world we live in.

64 cores is a high-end gaming rig. Civilization VII won't run smoothly on less than 16.

Civ 6 really doesn't utilize cores as much as one would think. I mean it'll spread the load across a lot of threads, sure, but it never seems to actually... use them much? E.g. I just ran the Gathering Storm expansion AI benchmark (late game map completely full of civs and units - basically worst case for CPU requirements and best case for eating up the multicore performance) on a 7950X 16 core CPU and it rarely peaked over 30% utilization, often averaging ~25%. 30% utilization means a 6 core part (barring frequency/cache differences) should be able to eat that at 80% load.

https://i.imgur.com/YlJFu4s.png

Whether the bottleneck is memory bandwidth (2x6000 MHz), unoptimized locking, small batch sizes, or something else it doesn't seem to be related to core count. It's also not waiting on the GPU much here, the 4090 is seeing even less utilization than the CPU. Hopefully utilization actually scales better with 7, not just splits up a lot.

> 16 core CPU and it rarely peaked over 30% utilization, often averaging ~25%. 30% utilization means a 6 core part (barring frequency/cache differences) should be able to eat that at 80% load.

As a rule I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the stuff Civ 6 is doing can't be parallelized at all, but then for that remaining 10% you get a 16x speedup with 16 cores. And they're underutilized on average but there are bursts where you get a measurable speedup from having 16 cores, and that speedup is strictly linear with the number of cores. 6 cores means that remaining 10% will be less than half as fast vs. having 16 cores. And this is consistent with observing 30% CPU usage I think.

My rule is more like I’d be willing to bet even odds that this could be sped up 100x with the right programmers focused on performance. When you lack expertise and things work “well enough” that’s what you get. Same for games or enterprise software.

That's what we get in a market dominated more by the need to release before the competition rather than taking some time to optimize software. If it's slow, one can still blame the iron and users who don't upgrade it.

If only 10% of the workload can be parallelized, then the best case parallelization speed up is only 10%. That doesn’t line up with the GP’s claim that Civ6 benefits from more cores.

They referenced the upcoming Civ7 (which does include 16-core chips on their highest recommended specs), not Civ6.

I can't help but think that this sounds more like a failure to optimize at the software level rather than a reasonable hardware limitation.

That's the usual case when vid3o g4mes are "CPU limited". One has to just look whether the game does anything high-level that other games didn't do 10 years ago. Reasonable hardware limitations related to the CPU have normally to do with complex physics effects or unusually large crowds of NPCs. (Many games are CPU limited even for fairly small crowds because their engine isn't optimized for that purpose.)

> vid3o g4mes

Why do you type it like that?

Usually people do this to avoid automatic censorship systems. HN certainly has censorship in place, but I'm not aware of any that targets discussion of video games.

Old habit. I'm a kid of the 1990s, and we were convinced there wasn't anything cooler than a) video games and b) replacing letters with numbers. It retrospect, we might have been a little biased.

Well, just for future reference; if you're a kid of the 90s, you're well into your 30s now.

It's weird/juvenile to be typing a phrase in a manner similar to a preteen, well after 20+ years have passed. Especially in the middle of an otherwise normal message/conversation.

We thought that was dorky, skiddie shit even back in the 90s. It was even more stale by the time Piro and Largo turned it into a personality trait.

Though I think this guy just did it the way a 2000s kid would say "vidya gaems".

I mean, to some extent maybe.

A surprising number of video games have at least one 'master switch' statement for at least one important aspect of the game logic that has to evaluate on a single thread to maintain some level of 'coherency' while operating at any given frame rate.

The challenge with using threads without careful control of or understanding of the underlying system hardware is that you can wind up with various quirks (Every computer I had from 2000-2010 had this weird 'judder' with HL/TFC/HL2 and explosions, didn't matter the sound card type, CPU brand, or Video card brand,) at best or a rats nest of logic bugs at worst (i.e. the pains of coding multithreading.)

If Civ 6 is any guidance, 64 or 32 won't make a slight difference. The next step calculations seem to run on a single CPU and thus having more CPUs is not going to change a thing. This is a software problem; they need to distribute the calculation over several CPUs.

Civilization VII won't run smoothly.

Only recently I managed to build a PC that will run Civ 6 smoothly during late game on huge map

What are the specs?

Tangentially related, but I need to go check a18 civ 6benchmarks. The experience on my a15 with small map sizes was surprisingly good.

It's not latest and greatest, 12900K + 64GB DDR4. But even when 12900K came out(2021) Civ 6 was already 5 years old

Still nothing to sneeze at!

civ6's slowness is purely bad programming. No excuses to be had.

[citation needed]

all high end "gaming" rigs are either using ~16 real cores or 8:24 performance/efficiency cores these days. threadripper/other HEDT options are not particularly good at gaming due to (relatively) lower clock speed / inter-CCD latencies.

As the GPGPU scene trajectory seems dismal[1] for the foreseeable future wrt the DX, this seems like the best hope.

[1] Fragmentation, at best C++ dialects, no practical compiler tech to transparently GPU offload, etc

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