How Long Before Games Can Use 6 or 8 Cores?

[muujig612]

Hi you,

After doing some research on my new build, I noticed 4 core AMD CPU's are almost equally priced as 6 core AMD CPU's. Under $150USD, which is way cheaper than the decent Intel quad-core CPU.

So, my question is how long before games can saturate/use 6 or 8 cores? When will gamers need 6 or 8 core CPU's?

As I understand, currently games can use 4 cores only.

Thanks!

 

[Bill Reinhardt]

Not long, give it a year or so.

 

[jaguarskx]

It will take time. Longer than 1 year for many games to use 6 - 8 cores. There are a few games right now that can utilize 6 or 8 cores, but they are not optimized yet since Intel's quad core CPUs generally provides better performance. I would say in approximately 4 years (3 years optimistically) games will be optimized to run on 6/8 cores. Right now and in the near future the load will only be spread across 6/8 cores. So while 6/8 are being used the load on each core is subsequently lower and in the end basically provides the same performance level.

 

[gamerk316]

I've made my thoughts on this topic perfectly clear: It's not going to happen. Game design does not lend itself to a lot of threads each doing significant amounts of work. The only game to really scale beyond two cores is Crysis 3, where the devs stated they offloaded work from the GPU, and as a result, you have a game where you need a fast i5 MINIMUM to play well, regardless of your GPU setup. You will not see many (if any) other studios go that route.

You also have other concerns as you increase thread count:

This is WoW. Notice how its using 26 threads?

Also notice how only one of them is doing significant work?

What's happening is a classic case of "overthreading". By using too many threads [likely, something needed to be done a bunch of times, and each instance sprouted a new thread], you have a situation where none of them end up doing any significant amount of work. And each one is fighting for exclusive access to a CPU core. As a result, the CPU will be spending a significant amount of time doing nothing but switching between threads, rather then doing any meaningful work.

Coincidentally, you can see periods in the CPU queue where NO work is being done. Likely the result of those CPU threads tripping on eachother. Here, you'd be better off with just 2-3 threads.

Which is why I keep saying, as a software engineer, that you aren't going to see games on PC's start to move toward more cores. I could maybe see Physics branching off and becoming a dedicated third thread, but current implementations are more focused on moving Physics processing onto the GPU. Your prototypical game is still going to be using 2-3 cores for the vast majority of the work, with lesser amounts of work being done by the other cores in the system.

 

[MEC-777]

With the new xbox one and ps4 both using APU's with 8 relatively weak cores, will that not drive some game dev's to start utilizing more multiple cores? And will that not make it easier to port to PC if [gaming] PC's are now mostly boasting at least 4 core CPU's?

4 core CPU's have been around for quite some time now. In the last couple generations, single threaded performance hasn't come leaps and bounds... It makes sense to me that the logical step would be to start using more cores.

Just thinking out loud...

 

[muujig612]

Guys thank you for your answers,

So, should I buy a quad-core or spend a little more extra and get 6, maybe even 8 core?

Thanks

 

[logainofhades]

I wouldn't go below an FX 6300 as it is a great price/performance chip. Lately, newegg has had them at the same price as an FX 4300. FX 8320 is also a nice chip if willing to spend more.

 

[mohit9206]

So where does this leave people who buy or have recently bought the cheaper Pentiums and Core i3's for gaming ?

 

[logainofhades]

So where does this leave people who buy or have recently bought the cheaper Pentiums and Core i3's for gaming ?

These systems won't be as capable going forward. Fortunately they have the option to upgrade to an i5 or i7 in either Sandy or Ivy form.

 

[Dasmit]

Next year probably for new games, old game franchises like WoW will take a while. BF3 is already showing big difference.

 

[muujig612]

I bought the FX6300 with Gigabyte 970 MB, 8GB dual channel RAM (1600Mhz but running at 1333Mhz unless I manually tune them) and 1GB HD7770 Ghz Edition pretty happy with the performance but lately my screen sometimes just becomes grey with some horizontal lines on it during gameplay which forces me to restart my PC. Were AMD systems were this unstable? or is it my SSD Kingston Hyper X 60GB?

 

[MEC-777]

I bought the FX6300 with Gigabyte 970 MB, 8GB dual channel RAM (1600Mhz but running at 1333Mhz unless I manually tune them) and 1GB HD7770 Ghz Edition pretty happy with the performance but lately my screen sometimes just becomes grey with some horizontal lines on it during gameplay which forces me to restart my PC. Were AMD systems were this unstable? or is it my SSD Kingston Hyper X 60GB?

What CPU cooler are you using?

You'll want to first check your CPU and GPU temps while under heavy load (such as whatever you're doing when this occurs (gaming?)).

Once you figure that out, let us know.

Both CPU and GPU temps shouldn't go much over 70*C.

 

[gaborbarla]

Some games already claim to use 6-8 cores such as Metro Last Light. I believe Bf4 is also quite efficient at using CPU resources. With the new 8 core consoles released this year, the games will have to start taking advantage of multiple cores to maximise the consoles abilities. This will translate onto PCs as the PS4 and the Xbox One are basically PCs.
Gabor

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

Will it be easy for them to do this? No, of course not. This isn't audio encoding where you can just literally run a process for as many songs/cores as there are. But ultimately they will not have a choice. With the new consoles using 8 cores running at less than 2 gigahertz developers must find new ways to approach this. Just like when the Sega Saturn or even the PS3 came out, they are set up very differently. I am sure there are others that are good examples. Heck the Saturn came out before multiple cores of any kind were anywhere near PCs; and yet just like all consoles it doesn't take long for them to figure out ways to squeeze more and more out of the hardware, generally with the best looking games coming out near or at the end. Plenty of examples of this abound. There is just no way this won't happen.

 

[MEC-777]

Supreme Commander can use up to 16, X-Rebirth up to 26, BF4 up to 8 (with Mantle).

BF4 is not using Mantle yet. It is still somewhat un-optimized on the PC version. They will, however, be releasing a Mantle update patch some time in the near future.

 

[logainofhades]

I would be concerned on what power supply is being used. Also make sure your graphics driver is up to date.

 

[Fredrik Aldhagen]

Hi you,

After doing some research on my new build, I noticed 4 core AMD CPU's are almost equally priced as 6 core AMD CPU's. Under $150USD, which is way cheaper than the decent Intel quad-core CPU.

So, my question is how long before games can saturate/use 6 or 8 cores? When will gamers need 6 or 8 core CPU's?

As I understand, currently games can use 4 cores only.

Thanks!

Keep in mind, an AMD FX CPU is not equivalent to an Intel CPU with the same number of cores. The FX-4300s is something like a low end i3, FX-6300 somewhere in between i3 and i5, and FX-8350 somewhere in between i5 and i7 (although sometimes worse than i5).

Also, stay away from any Bulldozer CPUs (those with a 1 as a second number, for example 4100, 6100...) as its an older technology with worse performance than the Piledriver ones (with a 3 as second number)

 

[JOOK-D]

Hi you,

After doing some research on my new build, I noticed 4 core AMD CPU's are almost equally priced as 6 core AMD CPU's. Under $150USD, which is way cheaper than the decent Intel quad-core CPU.

So, my question is how long before games can saturate/use 6 or 8 cores? When will gamers need 6 or 8 core CPU's?

As I understand, currently games can use 4 cores only.

Thanks!

Keep in mind, an AMD FX CPU is not equivalent to an Intel CPU with the same number of cores. The FX-4300s is something like a low end i3, FX-6300 somewhere in between i3 and i5, and FX-8350 somewhere in between i5 and i7 (although sometimes worse than i5).

Also, stay away from any Bulldozer CPUs (those with a 1 as a second number, for example 4100, 6100...) as its an older technology with worse performance than the Piledriver ones (with a 3 as second number)

Yeah, that's pretty on point. Though the FXs are unlocked unlike many of the i5s, so you can get a decent performance gain if necessary.

To answer the OPs question, I'd say 1-2 years as we start to see more and more console ports coming to PC. If it's a lazy direct port I'd assume that it would run better the more cores there are, not that quad cores would run it badly though. Even with current games the FX series run single-threaded games just fine, just not quite as well as the intels in some cases.