NEWS: Real Virtuality going Multicore!!

[txalin 2]

I was going to open a new thread, but i think my issue will fit very well here.

First of all, my system specs:

Intel Core I7 860 2.8Ghz Box Socket 1156

Asus P7P55D Socket 1156

HIS Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5

OCZ DDR3 PC3-15000 1866MHz Platinum 6GB

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA2

Logitech g25

Win xp pro 64 bits edition

Game run smooth, about 60 fps with everything on very high at 1680x1050 except postprocessing that i have disable. But, even when game runs smooth i found an strange "issue".

I have installed an app on my logitech panel that monitors every single core of my cpu, memory and network, and when i start arma2 ( only with -nosplash on shortcut) i noticed that only one core uses 100% of utilization, and the others uses about 10-20% of their capacity, also this 100% start on the beginig of loading and finish when i have the main menu on my screen. Same problem when i load Chenarus or any other islands.

After making a few more test like -cpuncount on shortcut i dind't found any improvements on this "issue", so i think i have three options:

1º) HDD Bottleneck: Maybe the first core start to access to my hdd and the other ones cannot access due to bandwith usage of hdd. Cannot confirm this point as i didn't monitor the hdd usage but i will do it using everest or similar

2º) "Bad" optimization of the game: Maybe the game is not well optimized for the multicore support. I mean, it uses multicore, but not all the available power of the each thread on the cpu.

3º)OS problem: Maybe it's related with winxp, i can't do any other test as i didn't have any other app that have multicore support, maybe i need to install crysis to test it.

Has anyone encounter this problem here? If yes, can you please tell me your OS?

Thanks and sorry for this little offtopic

PD: Btw, if you look carefully to this image:

http://www.bistudio.com/images/stories/blogs/developer/a2_multicore_header.jpg

You can clearly see that the last core is heavily used but the others one are at, more or less, 30-40%, that the same "issue" that i found

Edited November 24, 2009 by txalin

[johncage 30]

support and integration are two different things. people seem to confuse the two.

[rekrul 7]

ArmA already generally uses less than the 2048 it may be allocated on 32bit systems so there's more to it than simply re-compiling, the only immediate (probably slight) advantage is additional x64 instructions. I'd guess that the problem with using memory to save HDD access is that you still need to be able to turn in respectable performance in 1GB so without rewriting everything multiple times for different RAM budgets your methodology is irrevocably linked with, and largely focussed around, how that first GB is utilised.

Yes and no. After a while, my memory usage on Arma2 is close to 2048. If they compile a x64 version and can't access the PBOs it has dumped to memory for whatever reason, they could simply make a virtual temporary ramdisk that utilizes large parts of the remaining physical memory (or stick to 2048 by default so the computer illiterate don't get problems, and make the more advanced users define it with a -maxmem parameter) and use that. Since a ram-disk offers leaps when it comes to performance, this is a simple solution that shouldn't be to difficult to do, considering you can do it with 3rd party software.

I'm not suggesting that it requires 4GB minimum either, I'm suggesting that they utilize existing high-end HW. It's like FarCry - the HW requirements for max settings might not even be available when they go gold but a year later you can run on max. We have the same thing here, except waiting and upgrading doesn't "help". (Ofcourse it helps, but the limitation has now moved from the HW to SW.) That's where the frustration lies.

[Defunkt 431]

Well after I made that post it also occurred to me that having ArmA throw more memory at performance is only going to end up as an exercise in file caching. So I decided to look into what adjustments can be made to Windows own caching and have resolved to experiment with SysInternals' cacheset (and similar) and the LargeSystemCache setting.

[nicolasroger 11]

to txalin:

go reread the news. They explain why having all you core maxed out is useless performance wise.