How are games doing with multi-threading?

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Fulano5321

Fulano5321

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Aug 10, 2015
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The most recent games I've played are only using about two cores of my i5 4590.

Age of Wonders III had the highest usage, getting to about 65% usage, but only on occasion. It usually stayed around 40% otherwise.

I'm not a super cutting edge gamer, I tend to wait until games are $5-10 before I actually buy a new one.

But I still wanted to know to help me plan for future upgrades, are there games currently out that actually use 90% of a CPU with 4+ cores?
Thanks!
 
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ScrewySqrl
depends on the game. some are CPU bound (Warcraft especially) other tends to not tax CPUS and are bound by the GPU (Battlefield, especially, tends to get about the same FPS whether you use a intel i7 or AMD FX, if they have the same gpu). most games are somewhere in between. but using 90% or even 50% of cpu is not an indicator of being CPU Bound.
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Fulano5321

Fulano5321

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I know they say they use more cores, games have been saying they use 4 cores for a while...
But my question is when you run the game does it actually use 90% of your CPU?

EDIT:
Yes, it's obvious it's not going to do 100%, but it's odd that people get hung up on that typo in the text and ignore the original question. I meant 90%, so I edited the post to hopefully not distract others.

There's a big difference between being able to access four cores and actually being able to use 4 cores.
 
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Fulano5321

Fulano5321

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Thanks, yes, I'm aware of that. I made a typo. Though I think the main limitation won't be the other hardware so much as it being very difficult to balance the instructions in the four threads.

My question was how often games will use 90% ish of the CPU.
 
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ScrewySqrl

ScrewySqrl

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depends on the game. some are CPU bound (Warcraft especially) other tends to not tax CPUS and are bound by the GPU (Battlefield, especially, tends to get about the same FPS whether you use a intel i7 or AMD FX, if they have the same gpu). most games are somewhere in between. but using 90% or even 50% of cpu is not an indicator of being CPU Bound.
 
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Fulano5321

Fulano5321

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Hmm, I could see RTSs still maxing out the CPU, makes sense.

Yes, if the game isn't very good at multi-threading it will max out at whatever it's able to use, like Heroes of Might and Magic 5 still maxes out my i5 at 25% usage because it's only a single core game and seems very inefficient at it's CPU usage.

From what I've seen it seems using multiple cores is still a crazy complex process. It's interesting that many upcoming games don't do more than just shift the AI to the extra cores. It's definitely a big load off the main thread and would be an AI programmer's dream to have a full core to use, but it be great to see better usage of multiple cores in more games.

Then again DX 12 using multiple threads would be a game changer too, even if it's bad at it.

Thanks for adding more to the conversation. :)
 
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