Does Europa Universalis 4 have multicore support?

[tornadospud]

Hi just a simple question, does EU4 have multicore support? Just want to double check as a quick test through windows task manager showed only one of my core being used to 100% capacity and the game is still lagging, any answer is
appreciated

Thank you, Jack

 

[Makavcio]

If taskman shows constant 100% on one of the cores/threads, it usually means that there's some kind of a bug. Only things like video converters and test apps are capable of achieving that. Even if your pc is lacking, you shouldn't be getting 100% load on any of your cores. Post your problem in the support section.

 

[swm]

No, and as far as I know EUIV will only ever use one core, because multithreading something like this is very hard and will result in more bugs than it's worth.

 

[MadDjinn]

No, and as far as I know EUIV will only ever use one core, because multithreading something like this is very hard and will result in more bugs than it's worth.

nah, it's just 'hard' to multithread. But it's very worth it. This game in particular would benefit from it due to all of the ingame systems running constantly and needing many different items to update every game month.

 

[unmerged(88013)]

If taskman shows constant 100% on one of the cores/threads, it usually means that there's some kind of a bug. Only things like video converters and test apps are capable of achieving that. Even if your pc is lacking, you shouldn't be getting 100% load on any of your cores. Post your problem in the support section.

Not necessarily. If the main() game rendering loop is running on core 0 and it's struggling / only just hitting the target frame rate then it's possible. Otherwise, yeah, normally it should be calling out to select()/sleep() or some other yielding function until it's time to render the next frame.

 

[heliostellar]

No, and as far as I know EUIV will only ever use one core, because multithreading something like this is very hard and will result in more bugs than it's worth.

Well CK2 is multi-threaded now.

 

[zyphial]

No, and as far as I know EUIV will only ever use one core, because multithreading something like this is very hard and will result in more bugs than it's worth.

Actually that's totally wrong. Well, EU4 wont truly be multithreaded - you're absolutely right - but about multithreading in general you're way off.

There's a problem in computer science right now that isn't going to go away any time soon. The properties of microchips (specifically the interaction between impedance and frequency) tell us that multithreaded is the only way to go forward without a radical change to the way computers work. Unfortunately, the object oriented programing paradigm - the most holy sacred cow in computing - is horrendously implemented for multithreaded applications in all major languages. Because every major company is really only using C-family or derivatives (Java), that's all that's being taught and all that will be taught (I don't even know if there's a language designed for DDD). This woozy of a combo gets magnified by the fact that every class on CS will hammer into you that OOP is the only possible means of organizing your data and anything else is stupid and wasteful. This leads to the conclusion that "multithreaded is buggy and hard" which reinforces the single-threaded mindset in a nasty negative feedback system. Without derailing the thread, I suggest you look up what's called "data oriented design" or "data driven design" - there's lots of awesome youtube videos on the concept and implementation. A game like EU4, with so many concurrent tasks that can be run in parrallel, would be perfect for it. Well, EU5 anyway - because rewritting EU4 to be data oriented would be like rewriting the Encyclopedia Britanica in encrypted polish.

In answer to the OP, I believe EU4 has extremely limited multithreaded support. Because the vast majority of the workload is run on one core, it will undoubtedly run better on a system specialized in individual core strength (most intel chips, older/lower-core AMD chips) and upgrading your CPU can actually be detrimental (newer CPUs often sacrifice individual core speed to gain extra cores or faster inter-core operations). I could be wrong, though, and it might just be one core.

 

[elmarcel]

zyphial is pretty much on the money here.

I really wish I had it installed right now, to give a quick profile, but anecdotally the loading (at startup) is multithreaded but the playing the game is not. A thing you can do is give EU4 it's own core to work on, and if you have something else running in the background that takes up some CPU (notoriously, your browser with some tabs such as gmail/twitter), put that on another core. I do that using process explorer, a free download, right click on the process, and set the processor affinity. Don't know if you can do it in the task manager.

I disagree that eu would be harder or easier to multithread then other games. A huge chunk (probably most) of time is spend in the renderer, and at the moment opengl doesn't do multithreading and for DX it's not that easy. If you're just talking about the game simulation, there's a huge coupling between the different countries, as each country could potentially effect any other country on any given day.

 

[swm]

Actually that's totally wrong. Well, EU4 wont truly be multithreaded - you're absolutely right - but about multithreading in general you're way off.

There's a problem in computer science right now that isn't going to go away any time soon. The properties of microchips (specifically the interaction between impedance and frequency) tell us that multithreaded is the only way to go forward without a radical change to the way computers work. Unfortunately, the object oriented programing paradigm - the most holy sacred cow in computing - is horrendously implemented for multithreaded applications in all major languages. Because every major company is really only using C-family or derivatives (Java), that's all that's being taught and all that will be taught (I don't even know if there's a language designed for DDD). This woozy of a combo gets magnified by the fact that every class on CS will hammer into you that OOP is the only possible means of organizing your data and anything else is stupid and wasteful. This leads to the conclusion that "multithreaded is buggy and hard" which reinforces the single-threaded mindset in a nasty negative feedback system. Without derailing the thread, I suggest you look up what's called "data oriented design" or "data driven design" - there's lots of awesome youtube videos on the concept and implementation. A game like EU4, with so many concurrent tasks that can be run in parrallel, would be perfect for it. Well, EU5 anyway - because rewritting EU4 to be data oriented would be like rewriting the Encyclopedia Britanica in encrypted polish.

In answer to the OP, I believe EU4 has extremely limited multithreaded support. Because the vast majority of the workload is run on one core, it will undoubtedly run better on a system specialized in individual core strength (most intel chips, older/lower-core AMD chips) and upgrading your CPU can actually be detrimental (newer CPUs often sacrifice individual core speed to gain extra cores or faster inter-core operations). I could be wrong, though, and it might just be one core.

You're not wrong, but to defend my CS-student honor I'd point out that I was specifically talking about EUIV.

 

[-Malovane-]

Yeah, this game would benefit significantly from multithreaded optimization. It's amazing - it's been more than a decade since multi-cores hit the shelves, and programmers are still stuck on single-thread. I'd actually suggest using GPU power to model economies more realistically in this type of game, but that would probably be asking too much.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I disagree that eu would be harder or easier to multithread then other games. A huge chunk (probably most) of time is spend in the renderer, and at the moment opengl doesn't do multithreading and for DX it's not that easy. If you're just talking about the game simulation, there's a huge coupling between the different countries, as each country could potentially effect any other country on any given day.

I didn't see him claim it would be easy, just that EU is the type of game that would benefit from it particularly well.

Apparently even programming for 1 core in EU isn't easy lol .

 

[gnome109]

Well CK2 is multi-threaded now.

It always was, they just multi threaded start up

 

[jdrou]

Everything PDS has done after EU3 Divine Wind has been mutilthreaded AFAIK. CK2, EU4, last HoI3 expansions, etc.

 

[zyphial]

Everything PDS has done after EU3 Divine Wind has been mutilthreaded AFAIK. CK2, EU4, last HoI3 expansions, etc.

I believe that's the case, but I'm also fairly sure that multithreaded in the case of Clauswitz = 99% 1 core, 0.5% core 2, 0.5% core 3 or similar.

 

[jdrou]

I believe that's the case, but I'm also fairly sure that multithreaded in the case of Clauswitz = 99% 1 core, 0.5% core 2, 0.5% core 3 or similar.

Actually from what I see on my old dual-core (i7-640M) right now, it looks pretty balanced sometimes while the game is actually running; only when minimized it changes to 99%+ usage on 1 core and almost nothing on the other.

 

[A-150]

how many seconds does it take for month to go by in your peoples games? And please tell me the number of cores you have.

i have an AMD Athlon II 645 Quad-core and the game crawls at 35 seconds a month. 1st day = 5 sec, every other day =1 sec
Only 1 of my cores is maxed out (>90%), another is at 20%, the last two 10%. And total CPU usage by EUIV is around 30%

Is there anything i can do besides buying a new dual-core?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

how many seconds does it take for month to go by in your peoples games? And please tell me the number of cores you have.

i have an AMD Athlon II 645 Quad-core and the game crawls at 35 seconds a month. 1st day = 5 sec, every other day =1 sec
Only 1 of my cores is maxed out (>90%), another is at 20%, the last two 10%. And total CPU usage by EUIV is around 30%

Is there anything i can do besides buying a new dual-core?

~4 seconds early on (bit more), 6-8 late on speed 5. I have 8 cores, but the build is only a bit over a year old and it's probably offloading decently onto the graphics card.

 

[swm]

Slightly less than 4 seconds per month early on. Still around 4 seconds per month as late as 1740 (no convenient saves later on). Though this isn't constant. If two AI superpowers go to war late game the game will slow to a crawl just due to the number of armies pathing constantly.

I have 4 physical cores hyperthreaded to a total of 8 virtual cores with a very decent graphics card. EUIV consistently maxes out one of my cores at full speed, but very rarely uses a meaningful amount of a second core.

 

[grommile]

how many seconds does it take for month to go by in your peoples games?

Early game, about 15-20 seconds zoomed in (including end-of-month bookkeeping and Ironman autosave time), on a quad-core AMD Fusion A6-3620 at 2.2GHz, using the integrated graphics. I have turned off the following graphics features in settings.txt: draw_sky, draw_bloom, draw_hires_terrain, draw_citysprawl, draw_reflections.

This is sensitive to what's going on, though.

 

[kubas246]

As far as I know EU4 is not using more than 1 core. This is huge problem of this game. No matter how many optimizations they will try to do game will still have performance problems. Even HoI2 after beta updates used many cores and EU4 (game that is 8 years younger and still updated) don't. Shame on you Paradox!
I hope they will "fix" it and add multicore support. If you have CPU that have very good single core performance (Intel's i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge or newer) then game will run good, but if you have some older CPU (Athlon II, Phenom II, Intel C2Q/C2D, etc.) then game runs slow.