Improved multi-threading in Clausewitz engine?

[KiwiNoob]

I know that its already been said that there will be no 64 bit engine which is fine because it wont make any difference but I'm wondering if there has been any work on the engine in HOI4 to allow it to better utilize multiple cores?

Or are there any plans in the near future to look at improving performance through better multi-threading?

Things do tend to slow down a lot towards the mid-late game (EU4/HOI3) so would be nice

 

[LordOfWar16]

You need to keep into mind that everything needs to be calculated in an precise order. Even if you threw 8 cores at the problem you probably wont gain much since most of them will idle while they wait for other cores to finish their tasks before they can complete theirs anyway.

 

[KiwiNoob]

Everything only needs to be calculated in order if your program is written in a way that requires them to be calculated in order. The idea of multi-threading is specifically to make sure many parts of the program and many of the calculations can be done concurrently.

Besides - even if the core of the engine stays single threaded many of the things it does could be multi-threaded which would have a significant impact.

 

[Axe99]

The word is (from a video on HoI4 many moons ago) that multi-threading support is much improved. The specific example we saw was loading, which was the fastest I've seen a PDS game load (including when I fire up ancient PDS games no this machine). HoI4 loaded through to the menu quicker than greased lightning.

On the benefits of multi-threading, there's a bunch of ways to make it work better. Some engines have elements that parcel off different parts to different cores depending on usage. Good multi-threading definitely improves the speed of processing.

 

[KiwiNoob]

Which video? Do you have a link?

I know that they said they improved the load times by simplifying the weather modelling but don't remember hearing anything about MT.

 

[Axe99]

One of the earlier ones, I'm afraid it was a looooong time ago (early this year I think, but probably Jan/Feb/Mar - well before the press event, and could have been late last year) and I don't have time to go through the vids right now to find it. From memory, the comment was by Podcat on a thread discussing the video (ie, we were talking about it loading quickly, and Podcat commented the engine's much better at MT). Sorry I can't remember better, and my apologies if I'm misremembering (but I'm fairly sure about this one).

 

[MajorHeartfire]

EU4 does get slow, but it also has a lot more going on after sooooo many expansions. There are far more nations in EU4, and far more calculations. HOI4 is a wargame - plain and simple.

 

[Shavanna]

The word is (from a video on HoI4 many moons ago) that multi-threading support is much improved. The specific example we saw was loading, which was the fastest I've seen a PDS game load (including when I fire up ancient PDS games no this machine). HoI4 loaded through to the menu quicker than greased lightning.

On the benefits of multi-threading, there's a bunch of ways to make it work better. Some engines have elements that parcel off different parts to different cores depending on usage. Good multi-threading definitely improves the speed of processing.

can the loading speed really be improved by hyperthreathing? isnt that dont by the ssd compared to the hdd (= the hard drive?)?

 

[Axe99]

can the loading speed really be improved by hyperthreathing? isnt that dont by the ssd compared to the hdd (= the hard drive?)?

All I remember on the vid is we saw them fire up the game, and the loading speed was greased lightning - crazy fast compared to the PDS load speeds we're used to from Clausewitz engine games. You're right in that loading will also be dependent on the read speed from type of hard disk is in place (and possibly write speed if there's some caching going in, which I think there usually is with Clausewitz games, but that's a 'wet finger in the air' thought - if you hear different from anyone that sounds more confident, they're probably right ), but there's still processing going on. You're right in that an SSD may also be an element though, but at the time I'm pretty sure that we were told there were multithreading improvements and it helped with load speeds.

 

[CyberianK]

can the loading speed really be improved by hyperthreathing? isnt that dont by the ssd compared to the hdd (= the hard drive?)?

Most games do lots of extracting of compressed files during loading.
So thats a CPU heavy process and it also benefits from multithreading but its not really a matter of mt programming as its just a call of some unzip app that should be hopefully multithreaded anyway.

 

[KiwiNoob]

I hope you are right and there have been (big) improvements because end game does get quite painful in EU4/HOI3 where you actually cant speed the game up.

Would be nice to hear from the horses mouth what progress has been made though.