You should know that the game is also very slow on an Intel Core i7 975 processor, although much better than on my old Phenom 9500 (which really was unplayable slow).

The biggest problem is, that even with multicore CPUs you cannot use that CPU feature although the game is advertised as multicore. The game simply does use one single thread for most of what happens in the game...and thus any modern multicore CPU simply is almost idle but has one core maxed out - and Sins slow as hell. Graphics cards don't help either. I've got a nVidia GTX 295 but it's pretty much idle.

It's a shame what they did, but it looks like you don't need to write about it. If you want, you could write an email to support, but should not expect any help on this problem. If the game doesn't run although your machine is way over required specs, return it. I'm pretty sure there are laws against such things in almost every country.

Indeed that is what I am considering. I've got almost 18 months of warranty left and it's illegal to advertise product properties which are not available. Furthermore there are more than a dozen bugs in the game which are not being fixed but hurting my game experience. If nothing happens, I'll probably keep playing until Blizzard finally manages to provide me with a good replacement game and then I'll get my money back for this one. Well...might not sound nice, but they didn't play nice either, and if they won't fix it, that's the best I can do in return. If they fix it, well, I'll happily keep this copy and even purchase entrenchment.

Screet

It's possible that Sins chooses one of the cores to run on and that other programs could be running on that same core.  I suggesting clearning off one of the cores for no program other than Sins itself and to set Sins to have high priority.

I've pretty much concluded that Sins is just a CPU hog.  If they ever make a Sins-2, they will need to make it truly multi-core.

This game is only advertised as being multicore. The game does only use one thread, thus it's not possible for sins to make use of more than one core.

However I do fail to understand why you're not experiencing massive slowdowns on medium sized or larger maps in single player mode. I've had sins on two very different machines installed and it's been showing that problem on both systems. Does your system also show permanent maximum CPU load while the game is paused?

Even with a Core i7 975 I have to reduce speed to 1x many times while playing a medium sized map, especially when battles occur and still notice bad FPS.

Screet

Do you get Sins to use 64% CPU or 64% CPU load at all? 50% for sins would equal a 100% CPU load on your dual core. I do get 12-13% CPU load on my 975 and that means it's 100% CPU load on a single core. Opening the task manager, it's also easy to see. Sins only does use one core at constant maximum load, even when the game is paused!

That's also what tech support says. They use one thread for loading textures, one thread for loading sounds and one thread for everything else. The very bad news is, that they don't want to modify that.Funny thing is that a harddrive that went asleep does cause the game to pause until the drive did spin up and the worker thread for loading did finish.

>>From a previous email: "We've mentioned several times on the forums dating starting back to 2007 that Sins is multithreaded in 3 areas. The main thread, textures, and sound. We have verified in several tests over the last few years that they are indeed working as intended and we won't be adding new multithreading options. The following is a very brief description of why.
 
There are fundamental reasons why the majority of RTS's cannot use multithreading in the same way an FPS, MMRPG, Racing, Shooter or Fighting game can and it has to do with several factors including determinism, synchronization, network architecture and simulation vs rendering. The slowest part is basically the simulation (physics, AI, gameplay etc) and since RTS's do not have free reign in this area the only areas open to multithreading are the nondeterministic areas (user input, audio, rendering etc). Rendering is usually the worst of this category but it isn't even close to a bottleneck in Sins so we didn't need to add it as a separate thread. In other words if we added all sorts of new threads for say particles, ship rendering, planet rendering, and whatever other rendering components you can think of, it wouldn't make a dent in the overall cost of running the game - i.e., you wouldn't see much difference. Sound and textures needed to be threaded because they need to be pulled off the h.d in real-time. Not doing so would have been a bottleneck and the lag would be atrocious.<<

Looks like they also do not want to invite programmers to fix that code for them or make this an open source thing so that players finally could have a working version of sins. It's pretty much a shame. If they at least would make AI decisions multi threaded, they surely could gain very much without having to do complex changes.

Screet

mine is a T7350 dula core at 2.0 ghz each. 64% is the TOTAL load i get when running Sins. that means each processor is running at 32%. then again it is a gaming laptop

i didnt make anything up. i told you what it says on on my computer. it says Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7350. and last i checked 64 divided by 2 equals 32. i know my total load is 64% and each core is 32% because i have a drive monitor and a cpu meter telling me what the processor activity is. unless my computer is lying to me *sarcasm*

Not going to happen.  Software companies guard their source code like Coke guards their recipe.  Most people in the company don't even get enough source code to do a full build.   And even if they did, multithreading is something you have to plan for in the pseudocode.   To multithread an existing app, 99% of the time that would require a complete rewrite.  But yeah, you would think the AI would be multithreaded.

bxturtle,

SINS does use an additional core to do "texture-caching", but my understanding is that's where multi-core support ends.