When SOE says it's only optimized for 2-3 cores they mean it.

PlanetSide 2 CPU Utilization on a i7-3930k OC 4.2 GHz and GTX 690


The i7-3930K has 6 Cores with 2 threads per core so 12 CPUs are shown by the OS. At 19% CPU utilization the game is only using 2.28 (0.19 * 12) of the total cores. The game is almost always CPU bound with this hardware. The only time I'm ever GPU bound is when I'm in the middle of nowhere alone.

As you can see most of the CPU processing is taking place on a single core with other threads spread out on other cores. SOE has stated that the game is only optimized for 2-3 cores and this information supports that statement.

I think 97% of the playerbase knows this already

Notice that 1 really busy core? That's why I can only play this game smoothly in massive battles on my 3570k and not my FX-8350. Thanks for those sweet DX9 features Sony!

I don't think anyone ever doubted it, so where's the point?

Although I don't believe anyone would ever optimize anything for 3 cores, since 3 core CPUs never worked properly and propably never will.

Well good. Now the other 3% knows.

Ideally you would want to optimize for any number of cores/threads but the single threaded nature of rendering makes that really hard. What it looks like is they have one main thread that does the bulk of the work and has to run on the same main thread. The other tasks seems to be just randomly spread across various threads on other cores.

I am hoping the optimizations they do for the PS4 for it's multiple-core chip will carry-over here sooner rather than later.

DX9 has nothing to do with it. The game has 1 main thread that everything runs through with secondary threads processing other information on the side, but those are only used on occasion. They need to break it out into multiple threads.

Way back in beta we were having a discussion about what this 1 thread really is. [Cyclesmchurtz] <-SoE privately responded to me in a rather long message with this important bit in it.
"The person who talked about DX9 later in the thread is pretty much correct. We can only do rendering processing in a single thread. It's not the ONLY thing going on at the moment and it will be less and less other stuff as we stabilize the other threads and can spread the work out better."
Considering the thread he is talking about is where we were discussing what this 1 thread issue is that should about sum it up.

Second Edit....
The stuff I quoted was in response to this part of a forum post.
So what's on the core that is always hovering around 75% and is it the source of the FPS bottleneck? I haven't seen any comments around here about why we are so focused on 1 core in the year 2012 and it would satisfy my curiosity greatly to get some comments from the devs, or links to comments from them. Anybody care to point me in the right direction?

They should add the Playstation 4 Game Release in the Roadmap, this way we'll know when we'll have the "MAGIC FIX"

Yeah, and then we'll find out that it's going to be exclusive as part of the referrals program...

DX9 is a red herring - its not the cause of this problem. DX9 is limited in multithreading the RENDERING of the game, but that's not really where the bottleneck is. The rendering in this game is actually quite efficient it seems to me. Rendering just means feeding the GPU with data to draw images. What really bogs down the system is underlying logic of the game - of which I assume that keeping track of so many mobile entities is one of the biggest factors (which is consistent with the wild FPS swings we see from a deserted base to a big battle with a hundred players present). In short - having DX10 features wouldn't hurt, but it won't fix the performance problem either so yelling about it as if that should be the top priority is based on a misunderstanding. I think its as simple as a lot of people skimming info about DX10, seeing that it "supports multithreading" and then confusing multithreaded rendering with multithreaded gamecode (not to mention that the game IS already multithreaded... there are just degrees of multithreading, its not a on/off situation).

So yea - what is needed is improved multithreading. That isn't as easy as it sounds though. Any interactive application is hard to multithread because data X relies on data Y so one has to wait on the other to finish before the other can calculate. That places purely logical restrictions on how much you CAN multithread some processes, and that is why no game can ever be perfectly multithreaded. PS2 is probably especially hard even compared to games in general because it has so many entities in play.

In reality it is a very time-intensive process of splitting up processing threads where you can (requiring a lot of code to be rewritten and making that code significantly more complex from a logic-standpoint), as well as finding areas where you can apply smart "tricks" to make "unmultithreadable" code at least partially multithreaded by solving the same problem with a different methodology - and that just requires a lot of experience and creativity on the part of the coder. That - and of course you can also work on just making the code more effective overall - solving the same problems with fewer CPU cycles. That helps diminish the load even if you can't multithread, and sometimes that is all you can do. All of the above are very time-intensive and probably cost a lot to perform if you also have to factor in that you need to re-test and quality-assure everything again from a technical perspective.

The only thing that gives me some realistic sense of hope that this will ever happen on a large scale is that SOE stands to gain a lot if they can sucessfully launch PS2 on the playtaion4 - as they seem intent to do. The PC community is nothing compared to the hordes of casuals on consoles who would flock to a MMO-FPS (a still largely untapped niche on the consoles - I am actually amazed that we haven't seen TONS more MMOs in general on consoles). Don't expect a miracle. This game will never utilize 100% of your multicore CPU - it probably isn't possible from a purely logic-perspective. We can hope for significant improvements though, because it HAS to significantly improve if the game is to run on the PS4. The PS4 has 8 medium-speed cores as compared to a typical gaming PC's 4 comparatively much faster cores, and they simply HAVE to leverage that multicore advantage if the game is to run at a satisfactory speed. I have to assume that SOE talked to the coders and that they said "yes it can be done if we pour enough resources into it". If not then SOE has made a big blunder - but I have to assume they are smarter than that (all jokes aside).

-Stigma

Adding more cores to processors was a gimmicky way to sell more processors. Its not SOEs fault. it was just a bad idea. These processors weren't intended to improve gaming performance.

So what you're saying is all of this decreased rendering distance and all of that model animation slowing that they've done indicates that the issue isn't related to not being able to feed the graphics card data fast enough?

I admit to not knowing much at all in the software world. I'm just calling out what I see and what an SoE employee mentioned. Other things that make me feel right in my suspicion? The game already has other threads for other things. Either way I dislike Sony for their laziness or cheapness.

Congratulation on posting something everybody already knew since the devs admit it themself months ago?

It is absolutely SOE fault
- tech is reaching its physical limits, new generations of hardware yield diminishing returns and parallelization is the easy way out of this box
- migration to multicore arch didn't happen today nor yesterday, writing on the wall is there in plain view and has been for years.

gigahertz wars were as bad. Remember craptastic overheating P4s, running higher clocks than P3s, being in fact slower than said P3s? IIRC power goes with square of frequency and that makes cooling a non-trivial problem.

It's very ignorant to say that a whole company and everyone who works there is cheap and lazy, especially when you don't work there and don't know anyone who works there. I'm pretty sure that the people who work on making this game perform better are working just as hard for their monthly paychecks as any other hard working individual.

It must suck to have wasted all that money on a 3930k when a 2500k would get you double the frame rates, sitting comfortably on 5GHz on air... Reverting to my 2500k was the best decision I ever made when I saw the performance plummet in PS2 using an i7... Just a shame it means I didn't see any performance increase in all the other games that -are- properly optimised

64 bit didn't happen yesterday either, but games are still hardly optimized for it. 8 to 16 bit was huge. 16 to 32 was incredible. 32 to 64 was, umm, well at least we can use more ram?

The cost to actually take advantage of both cores and bits rises exponentially while the cost to make tech with them rises at a flat rate.

How much does it cost to go from 4 to 6 cores? about the same as going from 2 to 4 cores.

Meanwhile on the programming side the cost to utilize 6 cores is a hell of a lot more then the cost to utilize 4 cores.

Then you will also see diminishing returns at the same time.

Therefore, it was a cheap tactic used to sell processors even while there were few meaningful advances in tech

Same issue. I have an i7, 4 cores. But get limited by CPU all the time, yet my cpu is only at 20-30%. Pretty silly really, I hope the playstation patch helps.