Can games utilize several threads yet?

[varis]

With the Ryzen CPUs with 12 logical cores being available we're back to the old question, are there any games that can actually benefit from that?

Previously it has seemed that a bunch of big name games could have utilized multiple cores, possibly up to 4. Note that just running several threads for a game is not sufficient to distribute the load - the game would have to be carefully designed and optimized to utilize several cores. I would think that the big budget productions - if management is aware of the issue - continue to push the envelope here to fully utilize 4 cores and beyond, but I very much doubt that we will see this in your average game at Steam sales.

Perhaps for titles like GTA, DOTA and COD, you'd go for at least 4 cores to get the best performance, but how about Rimworld or Kerbal Space Program? Smaller titles simply don't have the budget to recruit expensive developers with skills for parallel programming, and in any case are too busy to concentrate on the more work-intensive performance optimizations. An exception could be if smaller titles license engines that support several cores, but that indeed would be the exception.

I would think there is little benefit in having more than 4 cores to be seen over the course of the next 5 years or so, although certain titles could show higher framerates (assuming CPU is the bottleneck for you), they would be only a small minority.

For a good but slightly outdated discussion on the subject see http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2366834/games-threads.html

 

[emgiezet]

Lot's of developers scale the thread concurency up to 4 cores because it's avarage for gaming PC's. When the avarage rise thanks to Ryzen release. Developers will take advantage of that. On the other hand running that much concurent threads in a game is hard to implement for developers itself.

Cheers!
Max

 

[varis]

Is there a relationship to DirectX? One review found out that DX12 games run better in parallel while older titles showed little difference past 4 CPUs.

 

[Viking2121]

There are a few games that will scale past 4 threads, although its not anything to brag about really. I know Battlefield 1 will scale even past 8 threads, but again its only a few % thats hardly even worth going out getting a 6 core i7 or Ryzen.

2 ways you can look at this, are you going to be streaming, video recording, video editing? Ryzen or any CPU with many threads will help your performance if you record in x264 software/CPU encoding, it will take as many threads as it can depending on your preferred quality, which x264 will look better at 60 fps at high res than NVENC or Intel Quick Sync. The 1800x starts to look good compared to even intel's enthusiast line.

Another way you can look at it, are just going to game? Don't care to stream, don't really care for recording much gameplay? NVENC or Intel quick sync will look good but typically needs real high bit rate to get rid of the ugliness that can be seen from high motion gameplay but you don't take a huge hit in performance with lower end or low thread count CPU's. If this is the case, I'd recommend the i5, or an i3 in certain cases.

I picked the i7 5820k for my needs 6 cores and 12 threads, I found that my old i7 3770s with its 8 threads were holding my graphics cards back in a few games that I really enjoyed such as GTA5 and Battlefield 1 and among other things, I typically like to record gameplay and to be honest, Nvidia's NVENC is the most problematic thing ever with sli and a few games it don't like, so I like the software x264 encoding.

Now recording Battlefield 1 with x264 at ultra settings at 1080p and recording with a lossless preset with D3DGear at 100,000 bitrate, all 12 threads are around 80% utilized, without recording I set at around 60% CPU utilization. No way I could do that with an i7 3770s.