[EG] AMD CPU's performance get "massive boost" as devs optimize next-gen game engines

[*NixUser]

source

Matt Higby, creative director of Planetside 2, tells us how game engine optimization on PlayStation 4 will ultimately benefit PC gamers using AMD processors:

"The big challenge with the PS4 is its AMD chip, and it really, heavily relies on multi-threading. We have the exact same kind of Achilles heel on the PC too. People who have AMD chips have a disadvantage, because a single core on an AMD chip doesn't really have as much horsepower and they really require you to kind of spread the load out across multiple cores to be able to take full advantage of the AMD processors."

"Our engine sucks at that right now. We are multi-threaded, but the primary gameplay thread is very expensive. The biggest piece of engineering work that they're doing right now, and it's an enormous effort, is to go back through the engine and re-optimise it to be really, truly multi-threaded and break the gameplay thread up. That's a very challenging thing to do because we're doing a lot of stuff - tracking all these different players, all of their movements, all the projectiles, all the physics they're doing."

"It's very challenging to split those really closely connected pieces of functionality across in multiple threads. So it's a big engineering task for them to do, but thankfully once they do it, AMD players who've been having sub-par performance on the PC will suddenly get a massive boost - just because of being able to take the engine and re-implement it as multi-threaded."

"I'm very excited about that because I have a lot of friends, lots of people who are more budget minded, going for AMD processors because nine times out of ten they give a lot of bang for the buck. Where it really breaks down is on games with one really big thread. Planetside's probably a prime example of that."

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*Note: Both Playstation 4 and XBox One basically use the same AMD computing unit with some tweaks on each side. This means that all console ports enjoy the full benefits as mentioned in the article.

 

[Ibra]

That's why I'm like Intel CPUs. They are doing great job without optimizations.

Also if you saying that AMD CPUs are better, you are wrong because you don't give any credit to developers which give 60% performance to AMD.

Any salient point you could have made was quickly lost with the inflammatory intent of your post. Thread crapping will not be tolerated. And that will cost you time off.

As for the rest of you, I'll note that I deleted 3 replies to the flamebait. But not a single one of you reported it. You are making yourselves part of the problem.

-ViRGE

 

[SiliconWars]

That's why I'm like Intel CPUs. They are doing great job without optimizations.

You like that your 4+ thread cpu is only using 1 thread in most games?

Also if you saying that AMD CPUs are better, you are wrong because you don't give any credit to developers which give 60% performance to AMD.

What?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Its ironic since the FX series is dead and AMD will go back to 4 core APUs as their best desktop CPUs starting with Kaveri.

Also its work in process. So only estimates.

 

[Hitman928]

What this doesn't say, is that intel chips, at least those with over 4 threads should see a boost as well, though probably not as much as 6-8 core AMD chips just because they need that many threads to perform well. Really, this is good news all around, except for people on less than 4 threads (possibly even less than 4 physical cores).

 

[Shakabutt]

Good news for me and my fx 6100 snail, its not a bad cpu (and for 50 bucks it was a good upgrade) but i always envied and longed for them core i5 chips.

Planetside 2 is probably the only game i can't/refuse to play since the cpu bottleneck is so bad, i mean really really fucked up when even at 4ghz i can't mantain 30fps in big fights.

 

[SOFTengCOMPelec]

Speaking slightly in the longer term. but probably even medium term, and to an extent now.
We seem to have reached the end of the line, as regards, single core performance, especially as regards to Intels best offerings, but as they catch up (single core speed wise) AMD and Arm.

Barring major technological invention, it seems we can expect very little % increase in single core performance these days, e.g. 5% per year.
And even that 5% is probably diminishing all too quickly.

Therefore in order to move forward, we are going to have to go multicore (as regards SOFTWARE).

So it's not really an Intel vs AMD vs Arm thing, it's more "the laws of Physics", as regards practicable cpu design, of single core performance.

So software is probably going to have to go multicore as much as possible, if it wants to achieve the highest possible computing performance, such as what we want/need for the best/latest games.

So optimization for AMD, is much needed, for ALL cpus anyway, as far as I can see.

 

[Durvelle27]

Speaking slightly in the longer term. but probably even medium term, and to an extent now.
We seem to have reached the end of the line, as regards, single core performance, especially as regards to Intels best offerings, but as they catch up (single core speed wise) AMD and Arm.

Barring major technological invention, it seems we can expect very little % increase in single core performance these days, e.g. 5% per year.
And even that 5% is probably diminishing all too quickly.

Therefore in order to move forward, we are going to have to go multicore (as regards SOFTWARE).

So it's not really an Intel vs AMD vs Arm thing, it's more "the laws of Physics", as regards practicable cpu design, of single core performance.

So software is probably going to have to go multicore as much as possible, if it wants to achieve the highest possible computing performance, such as what we want/need for the best/latest games.

So optimization for AMD, is much needed, for ALL cpus, as far as I can see.

This +2

 

[ShintaiDK]

Problem is still Amdahls law. And we are barely starting to work on some of the basic issues with locking, that TSX helps on. So multitheading will be the same minimalistic benefit. We can already see games that support 4 threads, that is not much faster compared to using 2.

 

[KingFatty]

Will the new consoles really force developers to recode their approach? I would expect them to optimize for multi-core only as much as necessary, and nothing more. Once they reach acceptable performance on a console, why would they have any motivation to further optimize for multi-core? So maybe put all the basics on one core, and then just put physics on another and end there? Sort of like the approach used in Starcraft 2, that uses just two cores and fails to optimize for six cores?

 

[PPB]

That dev hit the nail with the "multicore engine but heavy reliant on 1 thread game" thing. You will see most of modern multithreaded games still rely on 1 high load thread, and if you happen to hit 100% in that core usage, then you start to become CPU limited. What they should look foward to is to even the loads between threads so this doesnt happen, or happens to a lesser extent.

Battlefield 3 is a prime example of this, I can see the work spread over my 6 threads, but either the first or the second one are +90% load all the time, while the last ones dont go over 30%.

 

[SOFTengCOMPelec]

Problem is still Amdahls law. And we are barely starting to work on some of the basic issues with locking, that TSX helps on. So multitheading will be the same minimalistic benefit. We can already see games that support 4 threads, that is not much faster compared to using 2.

That dev hit the nail with the "multicore engine but heavy reliant on 1 thread game" thing. You will see most of modern multithreaded games still rely on 1 high load thread, and if you happen to hit 100% in that core usage, then you start to become CPU limited. What they should look foward to is to even the loads between threads so this doesnt happen, or happens to a lesser extent.

Battlefield 3 is a prime example of this, I can see the work spread over my 6 threads, but either the first or the second one are +90% load all the time, while the last ones dont go over 30%.

Will the new consoles really force developers to recode their approach? I would expect them to optimize for multi-core only as much as necessary, and nothing more. Once they reach acceptable performance on a console, why would they have any motivation to further optimize for multi-core? So maybe put all the basics on one core, and then just put physics on another and end there? Sort of like the approach used in Starcraft 2, that uses just two cores and fails to optimize for six cores?

Sadly for gaming, all your points are good, and there will probably be severe limits, to what can be achieved with multi-threaded code, even highly optimized versions.

Some computing tasks (e.g. Weather prediction, and other 100,000++ node massive super computer programs) benefit greatly from having huge numbers of cores.

But I think there is some room for improvement, as regards many of the existing games.

Maybe we will see future games, with new concepts, which especially exploit/use multi-core processors. Especially if we have 8/16/32/64 or whatever cores, in standard cpus, at some point in the future.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

It's incorrect to imply that only AMD will get a boost here, any CPU that is multi-core will see benefits.

The main reason AMD is mentioned by Higby (and this is just my speculation) is that most consumer AMD CPUs, especially those actually in use by gamers throughout PS2s history so far, generally lack the punch per core needed to play Planetside 2 at a decent frame rate. Where as most people with Intel i5/i7 CPUs didn't suffer as badly because of the strength per core.

He's right in saying in this respect the consoles have benefited PCs by moving towards higher number of CPU cores, it's something we've already seen in the PC space and as always we're waiting for the consoles to catch up.

None of this would be an issue if developers did a good job to begin with, there was nothing stopping SOE from making the PS2 engine better optimized for multi-threading out of the box, it's just harder and therefore more expensive, so in this regard consoles adopting 8 cores was a way of forcing their hand.

I predict we'll see the same issues in another 7-8 years, PCs will have probably moved to way more cores, maybe 16/32 and the old games designed for 8 cores (because that's what the consoles use) will be poorly optimised for better platforms.

It's not until the number of cores gets large do I think we'll see a move towards coding for n cores, where n can be any value. I just don't think games in this console generation will be coded for n cores, again it's too much work to write a dynamic system when they know the console hardware is fixed for 8 years and they can get away with saying "fuck you PC guys".

 

[PPB]

It's incorrect to imply that only AMD will get a boost here, any CPU that is multi-core will see benefits.

Will see benefits if it wasnt CPU bottlenecked already. That was the case with AMD in PS2. Intel, not so much.

None of this would be an issue if developers did a good job to begin with, there was nothing stopping SOE from making the PS2 engine better optimized for multi-threading out of the box, it's just harder and therefore more expensive, so in this regard consoles adopting 8 cores was a way of forcing their hand.

Lazy programming gonna be lazy. They passed by with that crappy engine of theirs in the PC thanks to the single threaded power in Intel's CPUs. But now if they want to extend the moneygrab to PS4, they need to start doing the work they didnt for the PC in the first place. If they did things right the first time, no rework of the engine would have been necessary, saving them $ and hours of recoding.

 

[inf64]

Its ironic since the FX series is dead and AMD will go back to 4 core APUs as their best desktop CPUs starting with Kaveri.

Also its work in process. So only estimates.

You expect AMD to drop FX line in 2014 completely? So no more PD based FX43xx/63xx/83xx/9xxx? You are dreaming I'm afraid. They will use the same PD core in Warsaw SKUs which are basically the same thing as current Opteron 6300 series (MCM of 2 8T PD dice). So they will keep producing these cores for server SKUs and yet somehow you believe they will drop FX line completely in 2014. No logic in that whatsoever.

 

[fixbsod]

Ok is noone realizing that this statement is being put out by a software developer that is owned by Sony Online ?? So Sony chose AMD for it's console and now a software developer at one of its studios is praising AMD. This is not news and just some stupid PR crap -- IGNORE AND MOVE ON.

 

[Aikouka]

None of this would be an issue if developers did a good job to begin with, there was nothing stopping SOE from making the PS2 engine better optimized for multi-threading out of the box, it's just harder and therefore more expensive, so in this regard consoles adopting 8 cores was a way of forcing their hand.

I don't think it's wise to simply say the developers didn't do a good job. Usually, when issues like this arise, it simply comes down to a single question, "is it worthwhile to fix it?" Prior to development for the next-gen consoles, the ROI was probably not worth it. If I had to guess, their intended target demographic wasn't really comprised heavily of AMD users, so they probably didn't care. To be clear, "they" are the people that make the decisions (software lead, etc.), and "they" may be those devious bean counters.

 

[Mushkins]

Ok is noone realizing that this statement is being put out by a software developer that is owned by Sony Online ?? So Sony chose AMD for it's console and now a software developer at one of its studios is praising AMD. This is not news and just some stupid PR crap -- IGNORE AND MOVE ON.

Dont forget the inflammatory headline. Planetside 2 might get "massive boost" on AMD CPUs after they completely redesign the engine. That's not some magic promise that all developers are going to be doing it, it's just one game and one company. AMD CPUs are still going to fall behind, and Intel CPUs will gain similar benefits from the same optimizations.

 

[Ventanni]

It's not a PR move, it's a business move. If Sony wants to bring Planetside 2 to the next generation consoles, they're going to have to redesign their game engine to more equally distribute the workload across the 6 usable Jaguar cores. PS2 is already a heavily threaded game, but like the developer said, it's primary gameplay thread (the one that causes all the performance issues) is largely just a single thread. They may also be looking into tapping the compute potential of the GPU here as well.

Until now, PS2 has relied on beefy single thread performance for the primary game thread, and having seen and played PS2 side-by-side with a Phenom II-970, the performance difference is quite staggering at times between it and my 3770k. If they can get that primary gameplay thread distributed more equally across the cores, it should have dramatic effects on framerate. For those using FX cores, it should bring noticeable performance improvements.

Note, it should also bring noticeable performance improvements for Intel chips as well.

 

[Gikaseixas]

FX series is dead

Just like your famous Nostradamus moment (there will be no APU in the PS4 or Xbox)?

IMO if this will enable AMD to compete with Intel, it will only be a fight with i5 CPUs since i7 ones will also benefit, making things stay the almost same...

 

[mrmt]

Just like your famous Nostradamus moment (there will be no APU in the PS4 or Xbox)?

To be fair with Shintai, nobody predicted that AMD would go for "low double digit" margins in these huge chips. I remember people scoffing at the notion that Nvidia didn't really wanted the console chips, but with margins like these, who besides AMD would?

 

[Jovec]

Sorry, but no.

"Old school" processor/asm optimization died with the Pentium. Modern processors employ too much OOE and other IPC tricks to allow for hand optimization. What's left is threading and cores, or more specifically multi-threaded rendering since basically every game in the last decade is multi-threaded. Which means that whatever gains AMD sees Intel will also see. And any CMT core advantage AMD has over HT cores is mostly countered by Intel's much higher IPC.

There was a time when a 3D game engine could only be programmed by a select few. Now, even the most junior game engine programmer should be able to produce something 3D based. The original attempts at multi-threaded rendering by Carmack on Quake3 resulted in negative scaling. Now, it's a feature among most, if not all, of the top games and engines, and in the future it should be quite commonplace. We are not there yet though, which makes Intel > AMD for gaming still.

 

[SiliconWars]

To be fair with Shintai, nobody predicted that AMD would go for "low double digit" margins in these huge chips. I remember people scoffing at the notion that Nvidia didn't really wanted the console chips, but with margins like these, who besides AMD would?

Thankfully the guys at AMD can see beyond their margins and realise that with both console wins with near-identical hardware, they have completely sewn up the gaming market for the foreseeable future. While having to do next to nothing. Every game developed on AMD hardware, optimized to run on GCN and as many CPU cores as possible over the next 5-8 years. Every game Nvidia needs to optimize.

Nvidia has been completely outmanoeuvred. It's total genius and would be worth giving the silicon away for free, but they actually got MS and Sony to pay dev costs on top. The cost to Nvidia will be immeasurable, far more than anything they can get from their "margins".

 

[Exophase]

Sorry, but no.

"Old school" processor/asm optimization died with the Pentium. Modern processors employ too much OOE and other IPC tricks to allow for hand optimization.

You're not too familiar with coding on PS3 and XBox 360 are you..

Even on the highest end ARM processors which have reached decent OoOE using ASM or at least intrinsics is necessary to get the best performance out of SIMD. Some even still feel the same way about SIMD coding on x86, for instance x264. But that's mostly just about getting the actual instructions utilized competently (or at all) and not about hand scheduling instructions.

 

[mrmt]

Thankfully the guys at AMD can see beyond their margins and realise that with both console wins with near-identical hardware, they have completely sewn up the gaming market for the foreseeable future. While having to do next to nothing. Every game developed on AMD hardware, optimized to run on GCN and as many CPU cores as possible over the next 5-8 years. Every game Nvidia needs to optimize.

Oh, I don't think they really care about margins now. It's more about survival. That's why they are offering margins far lower than everyone else.