AotS: need more CPU cores, and if only all GPUs supported Async compute...

[Elixer]

Interesting words from the Ashes of the Singularity devs...

The reason I bring these things up is because when you build things (and destroy buildings) it actually deforms the terrain in real-time and that is very very expensive (and it gets more expensive the bigger the map and more players you have). So anyway, this is coming for everyone who has 6 cores or more in the not too distant future and everyone else (4 cores or more) eventually (Skylake can do some interesting things actually and if Async compute were more widely available on GPUs we could offload it there but I digress).

With rumors of zen having >4 cores, wonder if we will finally see intel CPUs for the mainstream that will also have >4 cores?

## AMD vs. NVIDIA ##

Version 1.2 is also has a lot of updates to the benchmark and adds a specific CPU benchmark as well. With AMD and NVIDIA both introducing new video cards roughly the same time and Ashes being one of the go-to benchmarks, we are trying to keep an eye to make sure no one is doing anything odd to bump up the numbers.

Each company has their own strategy with their new card that is worth discussing here.

NVIDIA’s 1080 is extremely powerful but also expensive. AMD has taken a different route with their 480 which is to have it much less expensive. You could, in fact, put two 480s in your box for the price of a single 1080 (you could actually do 3). Needless to say, the argument is going to come down to which runs faster: an NV1080 or 2XAMD480s.

Oh, and in a previous post, they also say that 8GB VRAM should be the norm.

http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477906/page/1/

Yeah, I know lots of people look at AotS as mainly a tech demo, but, it still sheds light on where game devs are trying to take things.

 

[Silverforce11]

It is a tech demo. You read their post mortem on Gamasutra, it's quite clear they were paid a small amount of $ to make a next-gen scalable RTS engine for Stardock to create their future titles with. They achieved it in record time, so they have left over time/$ to actually make a game too.

This is why when the devs said their sales and income resulted in them considering Ashes of the Singularity a success, you have to take it with the context that it is. The income is a bonus.

As for Stardock, it's niche sci-fi games, but Sins of Solar Empire, Gal Civ etc are both commercial hits, these games really benefit from DX12 since bigger battles result in major CPU chokes.

 

[Bacon1]

It is a tech demo. You read their post mortem on Gamasutra, it's quite clear they were paid a small amount of $ to make a next-gen scalable RTS engine for Stardock to create their future titles with. They achieved it in record time, so they have left over time/$ to actually make a game too.

This is why when the devs said their sales and income resulted in them considering Ashes of the Singularity a success, you have to take it with the context that it is. The income is a bonus.

As for Stardock, it's niche sci-fi games, but Sins of Solar Empire, Gal Civ etc are both commercial hits, these games really benefit from DX12 since bigger battles result in major CPU chokes.

It wasn't extra money, it was just they had a small budget to begin with.

They had to create a reuseable engine, but also create a game to go along with it. Because it was such a crazy idea for the tech involved, they limited the budget to make sure it didn't become a major money sink.

Designing an RTS on a very limited budget

To put Ashes' budget in perspective: Supreme Commander 1.0’s reported budget was 9 times bigger and GPG started with the Dungeon Siege engine base.

The reason the initial budget for Ashes was so small was because it was such a high-risk project. The industry is littered with “a bridge too far” games, ranging from Strike Commander to Jurassic Park: Trespasser.

When it came time to design the game, we had to keep our budget in mind and Oxide invented a number of ingenious technologies that dramatically reduced the cost of making the game (which we’ll get into shortly).

From a design point of view, we had to be very careful with our resources. For example, myself along with the other Oxide founders, are engineers. That meant that the art for the game would need to be contracted out either to Stardock proper or to third-parties and it had to be done in such a way that wouldn’t kill our budget.

Some examples of where we reduced our budget included:

• Focus on the sand box game (skirmish)
• Limited animation (units are inorganic, don’t walk)
• Limited map assets (e.g. no fighting in cities)

What we lacked in art assets, however, we made up for with gameplay features. The goal was to have a game with “good bones” to build from.

If the game was successful, we would have a new IP built on an engine that has an indefinite lifespan ahead of it. A 64-bit, core-neutral engine with “real” lighting won’t get dated any time soon. We could build on that – as long as the base game succeeded in having “good bones”.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/..._and_Oxide_Games_Ashes_of_the_Singularity.php

As for why beefy CPUs are great in DX12:

The difference between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 is very easy to explain: On DirectX 11, all your threads in your game can talk DirectX at once but DirectX 11 only talks to the GPU one thread at a time. By contrast, on DirectX 12, all the threads in the game can talk to the GPU at the same time.

In theory, a 10-Core Intel Broadwell-E, for instance, could do 10X the performance in DirectX 12 than in DirectX 11 -- provided the video card was fast enough to keep up.

And for all the people who will inevitably come in here to say that its nothing more than AMD sponsored:

2. The benchmark

Because we were going to be the first to use Mantle (and DirectX 12), we needed to make sure that we didn’t end up with arrows in the back due to bugs in the API or driver issues. Thus, the benchmark was born. The idea behind the benchmark was to help identify and track progress of the APIs, the drivers, and of course our own engine progress. As part of this venture, Microsoft, AMD, and NVIDIA were all given direct access via Perforce to our code repository so they could make their own custom builds to try out different optimizations.

Looking forward to what they come out with for 1.2 and what was causing the 1080 to not render properly.

 

[Mercennarius]

Glad I have a 24 thread machine with 8GB of VRAM then

BTW Ashes is a pretty sweet game for those that haven't played it yet.

 

[sm625]

I seriously cannot imagine even Intel going with only 4 cores max for its mainstream 10nm parts. At that point, the extra two cores would only add 5-7% more size to their die, which would probably end up being less than 100 mm^2 if it were only 4 cores and still might end up less than 100mm^2 even with 6 cores. Even Intel isnt that greedy. But then again they could always prove me wrong.

 

[Mercennarius]

I've posted this before but i'll post it again since it seems relevant here. My dual X5690 (12C/24T) computer running the AOTS benchmark a few months ago:

As you can see the benchmark looks to be using about least 18 of my 24 available threads during the benchmark.

 

[TheELF]

I've posted this before but i'll post it again since it seems relevant here. My dual X5690 (12C/24T) computer running the AOTS benchmark a few months ago:

As you can see the benchmark looks to be using about least 18 of my 24 available threads during the benchmark.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-threa...e-the-same-moving-from-one-process-to-another
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=240423
http://superuser.com/questions/678666/windows-8-1-process-migration-limits-cpu-frequency-scaling

You can use process explorer or process hacker to see the actual threads a program runs.

 

[Mercennarius]

https://www.quora.com/What-is-threa...e-the-same-moving-from-one-process-to-another
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=240423
http://superuser.com/questions/678666/windows-8-1-process-migration-limits-cpu-frequency-scaling

You can use process explorer or process hacker to see the actual threads a program runs.

Are you implying that Ashes is not using 18 threads on my computer?

 

[Yakk]

Dev have already posted their Oxide engine can scale up to 16 cores.

Aots itself is a great game with the best non-cheating AI I have seen in any strategy game, bar none.

What I think hurt the game commercially is the developers didn't contract out graphics and internally they were overloaded with projects so it's missing a bit of eye candy. At least voice overs are should be coming this week!

 

[Mercennarius]

Dev have already posted their Oxide engine can scale up to 16 cores.

Actually the Devs have stated the game can use as many cores/threads as it needs. It is not limited to 16 cores/threads.

 

[Yakk]

Actually the Devs have stated the game can use as many cores/threads as it needs. It is not limited to 16 cores/threads.

Nice engine update! Guess these guys weren't satisfied with using "just" 16 cores.

 

[Mercennarius]

Nice engine update! Guess these guys weren't satisfied with using "just" 16 cores.

The engine was never limited to 16 cores.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Are you implying that Ashes is not using 18 threads on my computer?

It is very possible that it is not. Just because a core is utilized does not mean it is a new thread. The CPU will balance and move threads as it sees fit.

 

[Mercennarius]

It is very possible that it is not. Just because a core is utilized does not mean it is a new thread. The CPU will balance and move threads as it sees fit.

Except this game is widely known to use many threads and the devs have said many times the engine will scale with as many threads as it needs.

 

[Yakk]

The engine was never limited to 16 cores.

Whatever, it was a couple weeks/month back. You can search Steam forums for dev source if you want.

 

[Mercennarius]

Whatever, it was a couple months back. You can search Steam forums for dev source if you want.

The game used 18+ threads on my system as early as November last year when the game was still in Alpha. The Devs said even back then that it was not core limited and the engine scaled with what resources it had available.

From December 2015:

You can always ask the devs your self on the AOTS forum if you want a direct answer. But having done extensive benchmarking with the game since it was in Alpha last year I can say it has never been core limited on my system and scaled with what resources were needed.

 

[Headfoot]

Whatever, it was a couple weeks/month back. You can search Steam forums for dev source if you want.

Mercennarius posts a screenshot of a dev saying it will scale to as many CPU cores as you have. Also he's shown screenshots of his rig before. Your proof is "you can search Steam forums for a post I think I might've seen some time in the past, maybe"

I know who I'm going to believe...

 

[Yakk]

Mercennarius posts a screenshot of a dev saying it will scale to as many CPU cores as you have. Also he's shown screenshots of his rig before. Your proof is "you can search Steam forums for a post I think I might've seen some time in the past, maybe"

I know who I'm going to believe...

Ok fine... here's a link back in February while the game was in developement :


http://steamcommunity.com/app/228880/discussions/1/412448158151767714/#c412448158154366508

 

[Mercennarius]

Ok fine... here's a link back in February while the game was in developement :


http://steamcommunity.com/app/228880/discussions/1/412448158151767714/#c412448158154366508

Clearly looks like something with his setup or software was preventing the engine from using more than one CPU. I never had this issue in the game have seen 18+threads in use as early as November last year.

 

[Yakk]

Clearly looks like something with his setup or software was preventing the engine from using more than one CPU. I never had this issue in the game have seen 18+threads in use as early as November last year.

Mellified Man is a developer on the project so he should know what is happening, at least in part when he said "Ashes of the Singularity currently tries to use up to 16 threads with 1 thread per core. From your screenshot this looks to be working as intended."

Maybe the engine was also being worked on by others for testing. At any rate it looks like they achieved what they were aiming for.

 

[Mercennarius]

Mellified Man is a developer on the project so he should know what is happening, at least in part when he said "Ashes of the Singularity currently tries to use up to 16 threads with 1 thread per core. From your screenshot this looks to be working as intended."

Maybe the engine was also being worked on by others for testing. At any rate it looks like they achieved what they were aiming for.

Taken from the thread you posted the Dev later clarifies by stating:

Taken with his previous statement that would mean 16 cores with multithreading would be up to 32 threads. So possibly he meant it was limited to 16 physical cores and 32 logical cores. But I never heard that on the official forums. Either way, the graph posted on that thread clearly looks like the game is not utilizing the 2nd CPU so I suspect something else was preventing him from using more than 16 threads. Even on my setup the game loses some multithreading efficiency when using the 2nd CPU but it still scales to around 18 threads for me.

 

[TheELF]

Are you implying that Ashes is not using 18 threads on my computer?

I'm just asking you to confirm it,task manager shows the average usage of each core over a period of 60 seconds...
Process hacker will show you the threads in (almost) real-time.

 

[Mercennarius]

I'm just asking you to confirm it,task manager shows the average usage of each core over a period of 60 seconds...
Process hacker will show you the threads in (almost) real-time.

I'll try to remember to test this for you this evening when I get home. Will be good clarification for everyone.

 

[dogen1]

I've posted this before but i'll post it again since it seems relevant here. My dual X5690 (12C/24T) computer running the AOTS benchmark a few months ago:

As you can see the benchmark looks to be using about least 18 of my 24 available threads during the benchmark.

Only 21% loaded..

 

[digitaldurandal]

Except this game is widely known to use many threads and the devs have said many times the engine will scale with as many threads as it needs.

The fact that you don't understand that this does not necessarily mean that every core with usage you see equals a thread is not my problem. You are equating the dev statement with something slightly different. It is still possible that your GPU is holding back the performance and that the game has no need for x threads and is really running at x-1 where x is the number of cores you see used but it has just moved one of the threads to another core to balance.

What I said was just because you see usage on a core does not mean it has its own thread, you cannot simply look at performance in task manager and count the number of cores with usage to determine the threads. That statement stands.