Arma 3 && Multithreading!!

[Dingo8 1]

Exact opposite is true. Define CPU instensive maybe?

I did some raytracing with HT turned off and on and observed a performance gain of around 10-20% when it was on. By CPU intensive I mean all threads/cores were utilized 100% by the renderer.

Take a look at this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyper-threading-core-i7-980x,2584-8.html

Of course some programs do have issues with it, as I mentioned, but that doesn't mean there aren't others that do benefit from it. In an earlier version of Arma 2 HT seems to have caused a slight loss of performance on my system, but I guess they fixed the issue since then, as now I can't find a difference anymore.

Edited May 16, 2012 by Dingo8
Added link for more info

[dmarkwick 261]

Exact opposite is true. Define CPU instensive maybe?

Speaking personally I find hyperthreading helps when rendering from Lightwave, Maya, Vue, Nuke etc.

[batto 17]

Speaking personally I find hyperthreading helps when rendering from Lightwave, Maya, Vue, Nuke etc.

I think for parallel application (with more threads than CPU cores) that wait for disks often and accesses a lot of memory (=> cache misses => memory latency), which might be the rendering case, it is good. Loops that run 99% of time and read and modify small shared state may suffer because of increased synchronization cost (and no additional CPU time). But this goes beyond my smartness TBH.

Edited May 16, 2012 by batto

[PuFu 4600]

Hyperthreading is a gimmick. A lot of people I know with HT processors end up turning it off because of stuttering/performance issues anyways.

oh, showing off your lack of knowledge, again?

when talking about stuttering and performance issues you refer to A2, or some other games that haven't been coded to read correctly the HT cores? Besides, using 1.60 or any of the post 1.60 beta patches, there is no difference when running with HT on or off. The said "fix" worked just after the release of the first generation i7s HT CPUs (9xx series), before BIS took those into account.

That said, if you feel HT is a gimmick, how come i have close to 40% faster render times on a older generation i7 970 (6c/12t) than on the latest i7 3820 (4c/8t) - both running @4ghz clock, or the LGA1155 2600k?

Do you base your affirmation on hands on product experience? I doubt it...

Exact opposite is true. Define CPU instensive maybe?

Rendering software. Encoding software. Physics computing. Archiving software etc etc etc.

Case of point, my own software usage, where HT pays of big time: 3ds max (vray renderer), AE, PP etc.

[Tonci87 163]

oh, showing off your lack of knowledge, again?

when talking about stuttering and performance issues you refer to A2, or some other games that haven't been coded to read correctly the HT cores? Besides, using 1.60 or any of the post 1.60 beta patches, there is no difference when running with HT on or off. The said "fix" worked just after the release of the first generation i7s HT CPUs (9xx series), before BIS took those into account.

That said, if you feel HT is a gimmick, how come i have close to 40% faster render times on a older generation i7 970 (6c/12t) than on the latest i7 3820 (4c/8t) - both running @4ghz clock, or the LGA1155 2600k?

Do you base your affirmation on hands on product experience? I doubt it...

Rendering software. Encoding software. Physics computing. Archiving software etc etc etc.

Case of point, my own software usage, where HT pays of big time: 3ds max (vray renderer), AE, PP etc.

You are right pufu, I tried tuning off HT to see if Arma will benefit from it. Result: My overall PC Performance was poor compared to HT on and rendering Videos in Vegas constructing something in AutoCAD or simply unzipping large files took ages. No difference in Arma

[.kju 3244]

As far as I remember arma disables/goes around HT automatically.

Earlier you had to use -cpuCount=4 to do it, but its set/detected automatically now.

[gossamersolid 155]

oh, showing off your lack of knowledge, again?

when talking about stuttering and performance issues you refer to A2, or some other games that haven't been coded to read correctly the HT cores? Besides, using 1.60 or any of the post 1.60 beta patches, there is no difference when running with HT on or off. The said "fix" worked just after the release of the first generation i7s HT CPUs (9xx series), before BIS took those into account.

That said, if you feel HT is a gimmick, how come i have close to 40% faster render times on a older generation i7 970 (6c/12t) than on the latest i7 3820 (4c/8t) - both running @4ghz clock, or the LGA1155 2600k?

Do you base your affirmation on hands on product experience? I doubt it...

Rendering software. Encoding software. Physics computing. Archiving software etc etc etc.

Case of point, my own software usage, where HT pays of big time: 3ds max (vray renderer), AE, PP etc.

Where did I say ALL people turn it off or NOBODY gets an advantage from it. I'm talking from a gaming point of view. MOST games either don't use it anyways or they might have issues. One of the people in my community had microstutters in TF2 when he had HT on. He turned it off and voila, no issues anymore.

I forgot that you are always right on everything...

[PuFu 4600]

Where did I say ALL people turn it off or NOBODY gets an advantage from it. I'm talking from a gaming point of view. MOST games either don't use it anyways or they might have issues. One of the people in my community had microstutters in TF2 when he had HT on. He turned it off and voila, no issues anymore.

Then you should have said so. But even then, most of the issues are related to old drivers version, unmanaged windows updates or obsolete bios revisions. For instance, i never had any issue with TF2 on any of my I7s (and i have/had at least 1 from each of the 3 desktop generations).

I forgot that you are always right on everything...

Most of the times i am, thank you. But that is because when i post something i actually have knowledge about it, first hand experience.

[Panda_pl 0]

Of course some programs do have issues with it, as I mentioned, but that doesn't mean there aren't others that do benefit from it. In an earlier version of Arma 2 HT seems to have caused a slight loss of performance on my system, but I guess they fixed the issue since then, as now I can't find a difference anymore.

Parallel computing seems to benefit from HT.

In case of CPU intensive tasks that cannot be split (or software that has main thread that is most demanding) HT will hurt performance.

If you want actual numbers I have noticed 1.5x faster calculations with HT off on an i5 650 when doing CFD (single thread task).

The gain is not 2x as you would expect since apparently the CPU cache and memory seem to be the bottleneck in this case. I expect it's similar in games.

Rendering does not suffer from lack of synchronization between cores, since the order in which the buckets render is not significant for the result. In case some other application it becomes a complex chalange and having to set flags and watchdogs decreases the performance gain.

I am of opinion HT is not good for gaming.

[igneous01 19]

It has nothing to do with them not wanting to do it,

One word for you: Concurrency.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163744.aspx

Go read about it and the pitfalls of multi-threaded apps. There are certain programs that can make use of multi-threading quite well but they tend to be programs where they are working on large amounts of data and that data is not needed by the other threads.

With games and a lot of other types of programs they have to put locks on certain data and memory, to make sure that one thread does not overwrite another threads work. Then you have to have some management overhead. All of that eats away at performance. And all of those other threads are waiting on the others for data. What is left is the type of multi-threading performance we have today.

this was a really good read, thanks for sharing this.

[Dingo8 1]

Where did I say ALL people turn it off or NOBODY gets an advantage from it. I'm talking from a gaming point of view.

When you write "Hyperthreading is a gimmick", it's easy to interpret it as a blanket statement alleging that hyper-threading is completely useless for everyone.

oh, showing off your lack of knowledge, again?

We're all human, PuFu, and we can all make mistakes and lack knowledge on some topics. Why don't we keep this civil and inform each other in a friendly way?

[PRE 1]

From this thread I didn't get a positive yes or no---Will Arma 3 make use of hyperthreading? Seems like people kind of disagree on this, from my web browsing I'd say the "majority" say gaming in general does not make use of hyperthreading. My questions to those here who know alot more than me on this subject is...If you were to upgrade your cpu today, wouldn't you go ahead with the i7 (about 100$ more than an i5) which supports hyperthreading? It can't hurt right? You can always disable hyperthreading if performance issues arise?---is that easy? I'm not trying to divert this thread to system requirements I've already read that one. Thanks.

[Dingo8 1]

You can always disable hyperthreading if performance issues arise?---is that easy?

Yes, you just have to reboot and change a BIOS setting.

[Leon86 13]

From this thread I didn't get a positive yes or no---Will Arma 3 make use of hyperthreading? Seems like people kind of disagree on this, from my web browsing I'd say the "majority" say gaming in general does not make use of hyperthreading. My questions to those here who know alot more than me on this subject is...If you were to upgrade your cpu today, wouldn't you go ahead with the i7 (about 100$ more than an i5) which supports hyperthreading? It can't hurt right? You can always disable hyperthreading if performance issues arise?---is that easy? I'm not trying to divert this thread to system requirements I've already read that one. Thanks.

well you can never be 100% sure, but I'm confident in a no, arma 3 will not be able to benefit from hyperthreading. so the extra $100 is not worth it, just get the i5.

[Panda_pl 0]

From this thread I didn't get a positive yes or no---Will Arma 3 make use of hyperthreading?

Arma 2 was made to tolerate it but I doubt it benefits from it.

I don't know of a single game engine where having hyperthreading is actually beneficial.

About gaming IN GENERAL:

There were claims that BF3 would efficiently run on 6 cores but... link

The screenshots show CPU usage that is kind of typical for games: they might use the n-th thread once in a while but "There's no performance difference between a quad core CPU with Hyper-Threading and a similarly clocked dual-core chip" since, well, multiple cores are used less efficiently (the load is lower one each core).

It can use 6 cores or more, just not very well.

[Sevenz 10]

Arma 2 was made to tolerate it but I doubt it benefits from it.

About gaming IN GENERAL:

There were claims that BF3 would efficiently run on 6 cores but... link

The problem with the test you're showing is that its a "gpu limited scenario".

Even at 2ghz/4 cores they don't get any performance change so its not surprising that between 3.3 ghz/4 cores and 3.3ghz/2 cores there is no difference.

They should have done it with lower resolution to create a "cpu limited scenario" like in this

and here you would have seen that the third and fourth cores give more performance when it needs it in bf3.

[cnickcj 0]

I thought a server , had input from many user , which to me means threads or input from a external core plus the number of users , to me this is multithreading but looking from outside of the box . Also this is not a one way thing as the server has to also send instruction and receive them also from many users , if looked at as the whole system being many thread/cores talking to the main thread/core , there is multithreading for AI .

Pr sniper had a point about splitting the map into 4 , but as most people only have four core cpus i would say splitting the map into two , where one core does most of the which for its section , while you still maintain the main thread on its own core , that is the thread which does all the main calculations in regards to position , state and all other things that are calculated by that thread .....

A example would be , can you play two of the same games on the same pc but on different screens ? yes you can with virtual box or what ever its called , so i could have input to the same two games at the same time , how could i play half of each game ?..

Multithreading is not impossible , but may be harder than the normal way programmers have learnt to program , but i have been told it is difficult ....

[SnowSky 12]

after reading that all - i just thought, devs might implement something like that:

while (!allNeededThreadsFinished)

{

for (idx = 0; idx < FinishedThreads.count(); idx ++)

FinishedThreads[idx].DoStupidCalculationsSoPeopleSee100PercentCPUusage();

}

to be honest, from little I had to do with MultiThreading I'm glad I don't need it much for my applications. Doing workerthreads and gui thread is simple and there are not so much side effects for my applications (as they are very small), but If I imagine of what complexity games are built on, I'd have to puke if someone would tell me that I shall modify even just a single line.

Some people here sound to me like the result, the fluid game as we feel it, is irrelevant and the only thing that counts, is the usage of the cores.

I'm sure the developers will do their best to optimize the engine :)

- my 3,1415926535897932384626433832950288 cents

[On_Sabbatical 11]

+1 SnowSky,

Mutithreading is not an easy thing to play with,and it's not how you imagine it: it's not like 2 hands can lift 20 kg easier than 1 hand,it's more like parking 2 cars of 5 m length in 10 m spot !

[Covert_Death 11]

yes it is a difficult process to do BUT it is necessary at this day and age. 4 core CPU is the AVERAGE nowadays for gaming rigs, with 6-8 being the norm in the very near future. we have gotten to a point in time where we have maxed out what a core can do so we add more to get that added horsepower. its hard yes but its mandatory that companies work WITH these multi-core CPU's and code so that all of them can be used.

its just a part of staying relevant and sticking with the times, its not always the easiest thing to do but it is necessary

[rufor 1]

BF3 has far smaller maps (many of them even have cloned trees made of a few planes as opposed to Arma 2, where every tree is a detailed 3D model and unique) and to the best of my knowledge its AI is very primitive compared to Arma 2 (it's not even available in multiplayer). If you run Arma 2 on a map the size of BF3's, get rid of AI, lower the view distance to match BF3, your framerate will jump pretty high. Apples and oranges.

How did you come to the conclusion that Arma 2 is less optimised for multi-threading than BF3?

Because BF3 uses all my cores, ArmA uses 3 and a few on 10%. BIS needs to rewrite their engine to scale better, otherwise I won't buy any of their products after ArmA3.

[Bee8190 10]

Because BF3 uses all my cores, ArmA uses 3 and a few on 10%. BIS needs to rewrite their engine to scale better, otherwise I won't buy any of their products after ArmA3.

I don't own BF3 but read the Dingo's explanation again. I'm sure BI developers could make it happen but we don't want BF3 AI and corridor sized maps do we? :)

[dmarkwick 261]

Because BF3 uses all my cores, ArmA uses 3 and a few on 10%. BIS needs to rewrite their engine to scale better, otherwise I won't buy any of their products after ArmA3.

I doubt that will be BIS's motivation to "use all cores", more likely it will be any genuine advantage and practicality that decides this. As such, we're not exactly experts in this to make that assessment by simply watching a Windows core monitor.

[rufor 1]

I don't own BF3 but read the Dingo's explanation again. I'm sure BI developers could make it happen but we don't want BF3 AI and corridor sized maps do we? :)

Thats where skill comes in, their minds are set into singlethreaded AI for some reason. And by the way, Frostbite II can handle ArmA sized maps.. so I'm not sure what you're talking about. BF3 uses atleast 50% usage on all cores in hard 64 player multiplayer on a Armoured kill map(Which is really big for Battlefield) and then ArmA uses 2 cores, and a couple on 10% in a massive 50v50 PvP.

There is a clear difference there mate. I believe Bohemia lacks programmers, otherwise they could have already been rewriting part of their engine to match todays standards.

[Scoggs 1]

Thats where skill comes in, their minds are set into singlethreaded AI for some reason. And by the way, Frostbite II can handle ArmA sized maps.. so I'm not sure what you're talking about. BF3 uses atleast 50% usage on all cores in hard 64 player multiplayer on a Armoured kill map(Which is really big for Battlefield) and then ArmA uses 2 cores, and a couple on 10% in a massive 50v50 PvP.

There is a clear difference there mate. I believe Bohemia lacks programmers, otherwise they could have already been rewriting part of their engine to match todays standards.

Wait... So if it currently uses at least 50% with all cores on a map smaller than 8 Square KM what do you think it would do on a 75 Square KM map, much less 300 Square KM. So no... FB2 cannot handle Arma sized maps. Well I guess it could if you took out most all of the buildings, disabled destruction and had no AI.

BTW, I'm not saying that Arma couldn't use Multithreading better.