Does Europa Universalis 4 have multicore support?

[zyphial]

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.

Actually the Phenom II outperforms many of the newish AMD single cores and many of the Intel cores if overclocked... in fact, older CPU's had faster cores, we're only just now exiting the phase where CPU's had to sacrifice core speed for multicores...

Also, that's not how multithreading works. You can't just wave a magic wand and suddenly support multiple cores. You have to design your engine from the ground up to be multithreaded with a threadpooling and inter-thread messaging system OR multiprocessed with an interprocess messaging system (unless you consider a 99%/1% distribution "multicore"). There's little chance that EU4 is going to be rewritten from the ground up to support multithreading/multiprocessing, let alone efficient multithreading (eg, Data Oriented Design). We can hope, sure, but it's unreasonable at this point in EU4's life to expect the devs to do that.

 

[Skyaway]

If you wonder your CPU performance, I have to say: CPU before Sandy Bridge need update.

 

[Jephery]

I would hope that they have an internal development branch where some poor sucker gets to implement multithreading for the Clausewitz Engine.

That is generally how these things go.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

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.

HP Pavilion dv7t-6100, 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2310M Processor (2.1 GHz, 3MB L3 Cache), bought Sept 2011. Dual core. Getting old.

How do you tell whether it uses both cores equally?

During the first ten minutes of play, I get three to four days per second... then the fan turns up to medium, the computer slows down to 1-2 days per second, after fifteen minutes or so, the fan switches to a loud, top-speed hum and then it plays 2 seconds per day. I read a book or watch tv while the game is on at that point. Alternatively, I shut the machine down and do something useful for a half hour then start the game up again.

 

[1alexey]

It is sad that people belive that "multi-cores" are panacea.

Every single GPU is "multi-core" for last 2 decades, and GPUs are actually far better at raw number crunching than CPUs are (because they are designed to be such in the first place), and are already long used for revelant tasks.

In fact, "multi-core" CPUs changed close to nothing, since technically even computers with Pentium I had at least 1 CPU and 2-4-8-more different graphical processors.
Also, huge claster computers for scientific research were there before 90s, and there were multi-processor servers present again, far, far before consumer multi-core CPUs ever hit the deck.

The fact that things are still not there yet, suggests that it is not that simple to design applications that are useful in real world to be:
1. Easilly scalable with number of cores.
2. Have low development cost.
3. Be easy to develop and maintain.

EU4 could`ve benefited from better multi-core support, but would you pay extra $20-40 for that? I sure wont, I have a 6-year old laptop with 2 cores, that is running EU4 fine.

 

[Jephery]

The difficulty with GPU computing is the communication time between the CPU and the GPU. If you aren't just feeding data into the GPU to be processed and have the result output directly to the screen, and instead trying to get data back from the GPU, its very difficult to optimize, more so than relatively simple CPU multithreading. Also there is no single standard for GPU computing - you would have to write different code for both AMD and NVidia cards.

People have already mentioned why games don't use multicore CPUs very well - object oriented design sucks for multithreading and most game engine code is object oriented. You have to rewrite the engine to lay out all the data just right (data driven design) to get the most out of multithreading.

 

[1alexey]

The difficulty with GPU computing is the communication time between the CPU and the GPU. If you aren't just feeding data into the GPU to be processed and have the result output directly to the screen, and instead trying to get data back from the GPU, its very difficult to optimize, more so than relatively simple CPU multithreading. Also there is no single standard for GPU computing - you would have to write different code for both AMD and NVidia cards.

People have already mentioned why games don't use multicore CPUs very well - object oriented design sucks for multithreading and most game engine code is object oriented. You have to rewrite the engine to lay out all the data just right (data driven design) to get the most out of multithreading.

Actually the difficulty of GPU computing is not very different from multi-processor application, but I do agree with you, the problem is designing for multi-core is less convenient, thus higher development cost.
OOP/OOD is not about performance, it is about development cost saving, so it is hardly a surprise you have to use different approach for high-performance.

But what you did miss out, is that I pointed out that multi-core, at least multi-CPU developement is decades-old, but simply not worthy of the efforts. Unless your company want`s to be something like EA(or who was it?), and lose money on a game that sold something like 5 million copies.

But for tasks that require multi-cores and are worthy of costs, techniques and approaches are long developed. Long-before consumer-end multi-core CPUs.

 

[Jephery]

Actually the difficulty of GPU computing is not very different from multi-processor application, but I do agree with you, the problem is designing for multi-core is less convenient, thus higher development cost.
OOP/OOD is not about performance, it is about development cost saving, so it is hardly a surprise you have to use different approach for high-performance.

But what you did miss out, is that I pointed out that multi-core, at least multi-CPU developement is decades-old, but simply not worthy of the efforts. Unless your company want`s to be something like EA(or who was it?), and lose money on a game that sold something like 5 million copies.

Some companies have been pretty successful at it. A good example is Guild Wars 2, off the top of my head.

 

[1alexey]

Some companies have been pretty successful at it. A good example is Guild Wars 2, off the top of my head.

Yes, and some go default because they focus on technology way more than on game-play.

 

[Jephery]

Yes, and some go default because they focus on technology way more than on game-play.

Though in the case of Guild Wars 2 the technology was required to support the gameplay they wanted.

 

[1alexey]

Though in the case of Guild Wars 2 the technology was required to support the gameplay they wanted.

And in case of Heartstone or farmwille no kind of horribly complicated tech is needed.

In games, the "tech" aspect is not that important, unless you manage to mess it up, royally. Every simgle console generation was won by cheaper to manufacture and make games for console, while more expencive ones were commercial failures.

In terms of power, last generation of consoles would rank up like this: PS3->Xbox->Wii, while the commercial succes was absolute reverse, Wii->Xbox->Ps4, an similar thing happened in generation before , with PS2 raining supreme.

All I have to say, is that development cost is supremely important for a good game, far more than technology, which, includes utilising more CPU cores better.

 

[Johan]

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

Yes. Ai, music and quite alot of mechanics is spread over various cores.