News Intel Shows Game Developers How to Optimize CPU Performance for Alder Lake

[Admin]

Intel releases a new Alder Lake development mS8pa498vo36d7ekoK5NmUe, relating to optimizing game code for Alder Lake's hybrid core architecture.

Intel Shows Game Developers How to Optimize CPU Performance for Alder Lake : Read more

 

[TerryLaze]

Intel releases a new Alder Lake development mS8pa498vo36d7ekoK5NmUe,

Did you just suffer a stroke and fell onto the keyboard?
Or is this some intel serial code.

 

[hotaru251]

Did you just suffer a stroke and fell onto the keyboard?
Or is this some intel serial code.

must be new.

Intel can't name stuff w/o gibberish in it anymore.

 

[JamesJones44]

My guess is a fraction of the games out there will ever use this for real optimization. What I bet likely happens for most games given most can't really use a large number of high performance threads, is either they do nothing and let the default scheduler do the work or the throw it in 0A mode and call it a day. It's a nice option to have though, I'll just be surprised if it's used by most games.

 

[Chung Leong]

My guess is a fraction of the games out there will ever use this for real optimization. What I bet likely happens for most games given most can't really use a large number of high performance threads, is either they do nothing and let the default scheduler do the work or the throw it in 0A mode and call it a day. It's a nice option to have though, I'll just be surprised if it's used by most games.

Most of the work will be done at the engine level and a lot of it can be automated. While running uncomplicated code that doesn't branch all over the place, the Gracemont cores can probably perform nearly as well as the Golden Cove cores. When you notice that the small cores are suffering many pipeline stalls on a given thread, you promote it to the big cores.

 

[salgado18]

Oh, great! Now game developers not only have to work their mass off to make a highly threaded game (definitelly not trivial), but also have to consider different CPU configurations, as if there were two distinct processors - or only one, in 6C-0c configs. Thanks Intel, your catch-up improvization will make programmers life a lot harder.

 

[TerryLaze]

Oh, great! Now game developers not only have to work their mass off to make a highly threaded game (definitelly not trivial), but also have to consider different CPU configurations, as if there were two distinct processors - or only one, in 6C-0c configs. Thanks Intel, your catch-up improvization will make programmers life a lot harder.

This has been a thing ever since the ps4 came out, devs have a lot of experience by now using only one APU for performance and the other one for background/helper threads since the lag between the two APUs is pretty high.
It should be pretty trivial to move this same concept over to alder.

 

[hannibal]

It is intel... 80% of computer have intel cpu. Of course the developers optimize the tasks for intel cpus!
If this would be AMD you would have to wait optimizations many years, if ever. Just look the win11 situation... that is luckily getting better... soonish...

 

[TerryLaze]

It is intel... 80% of computer have intel cpu. Of course the developers optimize the tasks for intel cpus!

No they don't because they don't need to, either for intel or AMD, they are good enough to run unoptimized code.
Devs only optimize for systems that would otherwise be unable to properly run the software, in other words consoles, and now with consoles becoming strong enough maybe they will stop optimizing all together other then for PR reasons on special occasions. This has ben the case for applications as well for years, there are extremely few that are optimized in any way beyond what the compilers do on their own.

 

[hannibal]

For Alder lake they have to optimize or the game may not work properly and Intel's big market share means that they will make optimizations, or they lose bigger part pf their customers.

 

[TerryLaze]

For Alder lake they have to optimize or the game may not work properly and Intel's big market share means that they will make optimizations, or they lose bigger part pf their customers.

None of the console games in the last years have worked properly on any CPU other then by mistake, all of them always have accounts of stutter and frame drops and missing graphics and whatnot that show up randomly even on systems that used to play them well.

 

[dalek1234]

What a mess Intel has created for game developers with this big.LITTLE, not to mention MS having to deal with this design too.

 

[hotaru.hino]

My guess is a fraction of the games out there will ever use this for real optimization. What I bet likely happens for most games given most can't really use a large number of high performance threads, is either they do nothing and let the default scheduler do the work or the throw it in 0A mode and call it a day. It's a nice option to have though, I'll just be surprised if it's used by most games.

This would only affect those that make compilers and such for the game engines. And even then, all the compiler has to do is have the game either ping the CPUID or test if the instruction exists first, then sets which code path to take.

What a mess Intel has created for game developers with this big.LITTLE, not to mention MS having to deal with this design too.

And it's something Microsoft has dealt with before. Even ignoring the fact they've had a lot of development time on ARM silicon with big.LITTLE, they've had to deal with quirks from other CPUs several times before.