Shogun 2, 26 threads, 1 core?

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tomstulich

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Apr 7, 2012
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I am trying to reduce load times for Shogun 2. I was toying around with the performance monitor and noticed that whenever the game is loading Core_0 hits the ceiling (%proccessor time) while the other 3 mostly do nothing. I've also noticed that when loading the number of threads for the proccess jumps from 25 to 26. I am assuming that this means that only 1 thread is used for the loading proccess and thus only 1core can proccess it.

Are all Video games like this? Are 6 core proccessors not for gaming?

The game says it's optimized for Intel. I have AMD Athlon II x4.
Perhaps the programming is more efficient for intels?
I am assuming Intel's "2 threads per core" means each core acts like 2 cores.
 
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BF3, Dirt 3, Resident evil 5, Civ V, Metro 2033, ect can all use as many cores as they see.

Starcraft 2, skyrim, showgun 2, ... are multi core that max out 1 core even though they can use multiple.

It all is dependent on the game coding.

Also Intel's 2 threads per core means that they can schedule 2 cores worth of coding into one core. they call this Hyper Threading or HT. Some games that max out one core but use multiple can actually cause a slow-down due to the core itself already being maxed out on the one core but trying to do more in the meantime.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20

Crysis, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Dragon age, all slow...
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I have a SSD. It peaks about twice at 450mb/s (pointy mountain on graph) during a 50 seconds loading screen, according to performance monitor.
Is a video game ever going to use 6 cores though?
 
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Makes sense. Using more threads does not mean you become more parallel. I've seen games that use 60+ threads that don't scale beyond a single core.

For example, if you have two tasks that can be completed in any order, it makes sense to use two separate threads. This ensures that if one thread is pre-empted by the OS [which can happen for many reasons, such as a cache miss], the second thread can still do some work until the first thread is ready to run again. In this case, only one thread runs at a time, but it prevents you from having to have the entire process come to a halt while, for instance, data is being loaded from the HDD into RAM.

I'm going to say it again, and again, and again: It is not easy to code programs in such a way where you have more then a handful of totally independent operations going on at the same time. As a result, you have very limited scaling. Sure, certain individual components of a program may be massively parallel [Rasterization comes to mind], but the individual components are not so easily made parallel. Hence, limited scaling.

Everything that can be easily made parallel is already being moved to the GPU, since the GPU is a much better architecture for handling such tasks. Most of the enhancements in the DX11 API was moving such workloads off the CPU in the first place.

In short: You are not going to have games running seemlessly across 8+ cores anytime soon, if ever.
 
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BF3, Dirt 3, Resident evil 5, Civ V, Metro 2033, ect can all use as many cores as they see.

Starcraft 2, skyrim, showgun 2, ... are multi core that max out 1 core even though they can use multiple.

It all is dependent on the game coding.

Also Intel's 2 threads per core means that they can schedule 2 cores worth of coding into one core. they call this Hyper Threading or HT. Some games that max out one core but use multiple can actually cause a slow-down due to the core itself already being maxed out on the one core but trying to do more in the meantime.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20

Crysis, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Dragon age, all slow down on a faster cpu with HT.

Bulldozer cpus inhereted the same traits as its thier version of HT, but compensate with faster clocks than phenom II.

This is why generally the 2600k and BD is not recommended for games. doesn't mean they won't work, just not as efficient in the "maxed out one core" games.

They do show favor in the multi-core friendly games, BF3, Dirt 3, metro 2033, ect.
 
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Solution



Will a dual core with a larger cache help? Something like:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115220
I think my athlon has 2mb...
 
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Motherboard: Asus M4A89GTD PRO
CPU: AMD Athlon II x4 3.1GHz 2MB
GPU: Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7970
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
12GB DDR3 RAM 1333MHz
SSD: Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SATAIII
 
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you shouldn't have any troubles with that at all, although the athlonII is a little weak compared to the phenom II.

I've downloaded the demo and I'll see what I get for level loading. Q9550, 6Gb, GTX470, so not a slouch but not in the same league as some of your components.
 
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Does the demo include the benchmark?
 
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Is the %Processor time counter @ 100% for only one core in performance monitor?

 
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This game says "Enhanced for Intel", I wonder if that means there's certain things it can only do with Intel CPUs. I ordered the Phenom II quad black edition, next motherboard is going to be Intel since they seem more popular.
 
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Your processor does not have the Intel Smart Cache, the 1 core it's using is only getting 3MB of L2 cache. That must be why the others got such fast load times.
 
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