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An interesting insight into the issue of draw calls on the PC

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#62
Colt .45 killer said:
I have a hard time believing how many people are still running less then 4 cores!
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Believe it.

As of September this year, this is the breakdown of ACTIVE steam users:

Code: 
6.16% are still using only one core.

47.44% are using 2 core CPU's.

1.32% are using 3 cores.

43.5% are using 4 cores

1.45% are using 6 cores

So, more people are using dual core CPU's today than are using 3 or more cores combined.

Single and dual core CPU's still account for over half of all CPU's (53.6%) used for gaming on Steam.

It's not as bad as it seems though, considering the fact that an entry level Sandy Bridge Pentium G620 (sells for $72.99 on ebay) performs within ~5-15%
of AMD's top offerings in most games today.

In something like RO2 that hammers 1 core a lot they may even beat AMD's top offerings.

As code improves (we hope) and becomes more multithreaded the multi-core CPU's will really shine, but that is only the case in a handful of games thus far. Civ5 is probably the most multithreaded game out there.
 
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#65
PUTZ said:
DX11 does wonders!
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It definitely can.

Civilization 5 Tech Interview - What DirectX 11 is good for

(worth noting, since this interview - as I understand - both AMD and Nvidia have incorporated all the multithreaded features into their drivers)

In the case of Civ 5, in addition to DX11 they also built the entire engine from the ground up for multithreading, splitting off as many parts of the engine as they possibly could into separate threads.

How Civilization V built its empire on multithreading:

"Civilization is a CPU intensive game and the architecture for the fourth version of the game could not scale with current and future hardware platforms. Understandably version five required a rethink. In short, one of the areas the game designers addressed was the decoupling of internal systems such as artificial intelligence, physics, rendering and so on. That decoupling enabled them to ensure that there was thread safety without using locks. Intel Threading Building Blocks (Intel TBB) was used to scale with tasks and the need to use locks, and the risk of creating of deadlocks, was avoided by ensuring that major systems communicate through message passing."

2K Games took a lot of flak for their shaky release of this game, but IMHO they deserve a lot of credit for developing it right, daring to try new things and working through the teething problems that implies, rather than resting on their laurels and doing something tried and true.
 
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#69
PUTZ said:
We are looking into it. It isn't a job of the moment, though. It will take some time. But, if all goes well, we'll be much better off for it.
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Keeping my fingers crossed this will happen.

Worth noting, the original DeusEx from 2000 was based on the Unreal 1 engine. There have been a host of aftermarket DX9 and DX10 renderers for that engine one of which I recently used when replaying Deus Ex.

It would seem to me that if the game community can write a DX10 renderer for the Unreal 1 engine, it might not be as difficult as it first seems to write a DX11 renderer for the Unreal 3 engine. In fact, according to the Wikipedia page for the Unreal 3 engine, this already exists. If that is the case, it's probably just a matter of changing scripts to reference the DX11 DLL instead of the DX9 DLL, and then doing some bug testing just to make sure it doesn't break anything.

Actually, since this is an official release and not an at home hack, you'd probably need to rewrite the graphics options menu as well to detect which DX versions are available, and give users the option to chose which one they want, so there is a little more work to it...

Then, you might also opt to add more DX11 only effects (like tesselation, and advanced DOF) not available in DX9. This would take more time to do, and test out.

As someone who is not in the industry, I may be oversimplifying things, but this comes more out of anticipation than anything else. As I understand the Valve QA process for steam distribution can slow updates and patches down a good bit as well.

From a pure CPU utilization perspective - however - it would be awesome to test out DX11 even without graphical improvements, as for those of us not on an overclocked Sandy Bridge 2500K or 2600K, this ought to have some real performance benefits.

It won't be perfect, as the Unreal 3 engine in and of itself is not very well multithreaded - as I understand - but at least the draw calls will be distributed over multiple threads, leaving the main game thread more space to breathe on one core.

It's too bad there isn't any relatively low cost silver bullet to reduce server side load so we can see lag free 64 player servers with currently available server hardware, as even the new top end Sandy bridge based XEON's are marginal for 64 players due to rendering mostly being in one heavy thread, and most people running servers don't have these. DX11 won't do anything for the server side of the equation, as all it does to reduce CPU use is distribute draw calls to multiple threads, and the server doesn't issue draw calls :p
 
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#72
PUTZ said:
Well, we already tessellate the terrain in Gumrak. :p
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Nice, I was not aware of this. I've actually never played this map. The server I frequent seems to be on a Fallenfighters/Spartanovka/Grain Elevator/Zab's House/Red october Factory rotation.

they have also disabled tanks due to a problem with 64 player server load, and the now fixed (i believe) tank AI problem. I should check out some of the other maps though.

PUTZ said:
You are oversimplifying things a little bit, but you aren't far off the mark. But when you change references in the code, lots of little gremlins can come out. When that happens, we have to do a pretty in-depth QA, and that's not a simple process. :O
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I'd imagine. I'm used to hacking this stuff at home, and if something is buggy, I either deal with it or reverse my change. It's something quite different when you have a commercial release going out to tens or hundreds of thousands of clients (I have no idea how many copies have been sold now). I am personally in QA, but not the software kind, (I'm in Medical Device manufacturing) so I have no clue how this process works.
 
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#73
So, today, a console can push more draw calls than a PC.
This is a combination of DX, drivers and windows internals and if it isn't fixed then in X years when the next generation of consoles is released they will simply leave the PC in the dust because it won't be able to match them in draw calls which means less things on the screen, less subtle details and less quality in the game.
Combine that with better tools on the consoles and,well, you can see why people are concerned about the future of PC games.
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In the event of the release of next generation of consoles and the rumors about how underpowered they are, I dedided to necro this thread just to laugh at the article from the OP.
 
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