I'll be the first to admit that I know very little about engine design and especially as it relates to multi-core processors. However, it seems to me that SoaSE is perfectly suited to game-level multi-threading. I mean, each stellar object could be a thread. Since the objects (gravity wells) don't directly interact, you wouldn't have to worry about timing issues. All the objects in a gravity well could be 'children' of that thread. I know I'm mixing some programming terminology, but I hope I'm getting my idea across. When each gravity well (and everything in it) does its updates, just send it to whichever core has a shorter queue of tasks.

Allow me to raise this thread from the dead...


Carbon016,

Reading your posts on this thread, I'm fairly positive you couldn't achieve a stronger appearance of an arrogant, opinionated, ignorant pr!ck if you spent the next decade practicing.

In theory, you're right. If all you are ever going to do is play games, then you are better off with a Dual. But, really. Is that all you do? You watch any movies? Do any code? Multitask AT ALL with your computer?

Calling "gamers" who purchased a quad core "idiots" just makes you an idiot, when you use such callous statements with a broad brush. No, scratch that. It makes you a shortsighted, ignorant idiot.

Not only that, many of your "factual" statements are complete bullsh!t.

I'm going to save time, and quote you directly here:

1) "You do realize that no games currently utilize or require four cores"

YOU do realize that you don't know sh!t-all about what you're talking about, right? With 20 seconds on Google, I found a list 4 MONTHS prior to your quote above regarding games that can use 4 cores:
Bioshock, Company of Heroes, Crysis, Far Cry 2, Half-life 2: Episode 2, Hellgate: London, Lost Planet, MS Flight Sim X, Portal, Sup Com, etc etc... there's twice as many on that list as I wrote here.

2) "Yet even the latest Source games like Team Fortress 2 only utilize the second core for sound."

Spoken like a non programming tool. Do you have any idea how many CPU cycles audio processing can take up?

3) "If you buy a quad-core and do not work with quad-core optimized software like rendering video or CAD you have more money than you have brains, end of story."

This is YOUR opinion, and since you've already shown that you have a loose grasp of the facts, your opinion is about as useful (and lasting) as a tray of ice cubes in hell. For what it's worth, if you average out the cost per core, you get more for your month buying a Quad than a Dual.
Oh, and you should have said " ... rendering video, or CAD, or QUITE A FEW NEW GAMES COMING OUT you have more money than you have brains, end of story."

4) "the only reason someone would buy one is because they bought into hype."

Well, wait. Is that the only reason, or is the reason you mentioned above a reason? You're contradicting yourself, in the same post... same paragraph, really. Well, since your sentence structure is akin to that of a gorilla pounding both his ham fists onto a keyboard, and you don't use paragraphs, that's kind of a moot point.

5) "you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

Lol.. I actually laughed when YOU typed that.

6) "Like has been stated earlier in the thread, the quad will be useless now and useless in the future"

Stated by you, I might add. I'd like to reference my above comment regarding your opinion and ice cubes in hell again.

Ya know.. I could go on and on about your bullsh!t advice, but instead I'll just suggest people should NOT listen to you at all, and go read the forums at Toms Hardware, AnandTech, [H]ard|OCP, and the myriad other tech sites.

Hell, a 30 second "Q6600 vs E8400" Google search is better than listening to you spout your BS. You'll get some of the few actual "facts" you babbled on this thread, and half as much of your sh!tty elitist, know-it-all attitude.

-SS

I'd rather not. There's no need to dig up an old thread just to insult another poster and argue something that was dropped long ago.

I wouldn't want to reply and give someone a stroke anyway. That's a whoooooole lot of rage there.

Will we ever get this expansion with multi-core support?

Since Diplomacy is the last expansion and since we haven't heard a peep from Ironclad since the last patch was released over a month-and-a-half ago, I wouldn't count on it.

raised from the dead... again.

 

i saw plenty of these kind of posts. i have been searching for 3 hours for a definitive answer.

 

i have a quad core processor. *running at 3.3ghz*

i have dual video cards on crossfire (yes, AMD all the way) *512gb x2*

i have 6gb of memory. *DDR3 1333*

i am familiar with computers and how they work, but i can't seem to grasp why it would be so hard to have the game use more than the one core. i look at my displays with Rainmeter(sent from the Gods in LCARS fashion) and see 25% of my total cpu being used by SINS... a few times it will jump to 27%-28%. but that is it.

 

I am also running the mod "Sacrifice of Angels: for entrenchment" and downloaded a map that is supposed to depict the entire milky way in the star trek universe. i play for an hour. everything is fine. i play for 3 hours, it starts slowing down. on my 5th hour, the game is running at 5 fps and pauses every 4 secs for 7secs. and becomes unplayble. needless to say, the map has 257 planets. 38 stars. and more than 5 hours gameplay...

this is running at full settings.

when running at minimal, i can only get to about 7 hrs, and it starts doing the same thing...

 

 

not to mention, while doing this, the game will mini dump every 30 mins, usually right after an auto save. even turning off auto save changes nothing.

 

i can't make sense of it, and franky, i am bored with playing on tiny maps with an hour gameplay at most...

 

has there been any progress since the last post?

 

yours truly, munkycheez

 

*edit* *added specs to system description*

@munkycheez

I am using the new 1.2 patch, Ive been playing some games testing them with my mod that doesnt add new thngs, but only changes things within the game.  I continually have issues with the game pausing and slowing down after about 3 hours.  it drives me crazy that the game does this.  I was under the impression that the new patch was going ot fix this problem but I see that was all untrue.  I cant see it being the mod since its not adding anythng new to the game. I have even run the mod in dev mode just to make sure eveything is good.  I see nothing in the logs.  The part I really dont undertand is that I play test this on a map that is only 44 planets and still have this issue.  makes no sense at all.

I also have a Quad Core, 3.2Ghz with 8 gigs of ram, and a GTX 480 card.  pc screams, the game does not.

Sins refuses to use all my CPU power and I only have a 2.93Ghz dual core CPU. It usually uses 100% of CPU1 while occasionally dropping down to 50% CPU1 and 50% CPU0. It won't use most of both. Even when CPU1 is being hammered, the other one is doing almost nothing.

 

I find this interesting. I'm using the same mod, but the Diplomacy version. Right about 7 hours in for me as well, the game starting freezing for about 1.5 seconds every 4 seconds. I have 3 manual saves for this game, the one right about 6:30 in runs smooth. The one at 6:45 in, runs smooth. The last one at 7:05, freezing and chopping. Very little could have occurred in the game in that amount of time to cause such a drastic reduction in performance.

My system isn't as powerful as yours, and I'm playing on a large map made by me that has 2 stars and 90 planets. Me and 7 AIs with large fleet sizes.

Windows 7 (reduced/removed unnecessary processes)

Intel Wolfdale E7500 2.93Ghz Dual Core

4GB G.Skill (made for gaming, forgot exact stats)

MSI TwinFrozr 1G OC (NVIDIA GeForce 250GT PCI/E x16 1GB)

A game not designed for multithreading will never be. It need to be re-written from scratch.

 

Next generation engine based on Direct3d 11 engine (who is multithreaded) will bring a lot more multicore optimisation. But dont ask for SoaSS to become multithreaded by magic, it will not happen.

 

 

 

but if you use a mod with a bigger map and the game slow down, it can be 2 things in my opinion

 

1. AI algorythm become too complex to be executed in a real time manner. 

2. Memory usage get too large. 

 

Both of these scenario are beyond the original game cpu, memory and gpu budget. 

Apologies in advance, but I simply have to get my $0.02 in.

As the poster above me has mentioned, DX11 is supposed to be the Threaded revolution for games, and while the hype would truly suggest this, let me comment on why I find it an inaccurate prediction.

First, the DirectX API does the majority of it's processing on the GPU, not the CPU. Unfortunately, it has been made clear by previous posters that the Video Card/GPU are not the Bottleneck that is experienced by SINS players.

Second, multithreading isn't really all that big of a deal. In fact, SINS is already multithreaded.

Let us make a distinction between Virtual Threads and Physical Cores.

A Thread is a path of execution, (usually) maintained by the CLR - the virtual environment all of your managed programs run on. It's maximum possible speed is equal to one Core. There can be hundreds of threads running at once, each doing a separate task, all operated by one Core at a time. (The cores hop constantly between threads, dumping their cycles and continuing through the thread pool)

A Multi-Threaded application can do more than one task simultaneously, which was a huge deal when it came out. But even SINS already has this now.

Here's the problem: a program working as hard as it can on a Quad core 2.6 GHZ PC could only possibly use 2.6GHZ worth of processing power at one instance, whether the burden is assigned to a single core at a time or split among all of them (25% each, which is what SINS does in this situation now).

A Multi-Core game (application) would have the capacity to use more than the possible processing power of one core at a time. This is where the programming gets tricky, as you're programming to maximize the efficiency of a Physical Object (A Core) while you're interacting with it through the CLR (Threads). Throw DirectX on top of that and you might as well give up.

My friend, per your report of 1/4 CPU usage, please see my above reply.

But honestly you can't really say how well or poorly SINS performs by itself with the latest patch, as you're using a mod that others are reporting issues with as well.

 

Who's to say what the culprit is with that much Ram(DDR3 no less) and a 3.3 Quad chilling in the background. Is that one of the new i5's?