Multi-threading in FTM

[podcat]

you could have posted in the dev diary and asked but anyway, yeah overall speed is faster so playing a month will go faster, but also the lag will be less as well, although not completely gone on max speed in endgame. On max speed the game basically tries to run as fast as possible ignoring everything else which is why it gets a bit choppy.

we have done a few more updates since the DD and its about 40-45% faster over latest SF patch in 1944.

 

[Darkrenown]

It's not hidden, we had a DD all about it

 

[Darkrenown]

He's onto us!

 

[podcat]

this is why Kallocain tells us not to sticky things. nobody can see sticky threads

p.s there is a sticky with a list of all the DDs, the one you are looking for is called "no free lunch in the bunker" but the performance numbers have been much improved since then (was about 25% there which is closer to what you get early game right now. the big win is late game when there are many units to process and continuous updates of intel levels from radar and units moving about)

 

[podcat]

You guys have stickied threads ??? Holy crap! Where are they! But yeah seriously. Only question i have is the max threads it will be able to support. i have an 8 core processer so will it harness all 8 of them?

didnt know people already had 8 cores :S most I tested is quad core. its built to be scalable so it will use each core, however it might not use every hardware thread (hyperthreading) because it often has worse effect on overall performance due to ruining caches for this type of stuff. There is no upper limit on number of cores it uses, but gain will be much smaller going to 8 cores from 4 cores than going from 2 to 4 for example because of the organizational overhead. btw I discussed this already in the dev diary thread about threading

 

[podcat]

yeah I knew they were out there. I just didnt know people actually bought them yet. unless you are a programmer that compile a lot of code you will struggle to actually use even most of a quad core processor

 

[Darkrenown]

SF saves won't work in FTM anyway.

 

[podcat]

SF saves won't work in FTM anyway.

yeah this. it might not crash but we have added enough changes that they wont work properly anymore. make sure you finish your campaigns before the release and start fresh then

 

[podcat]

Yeah the i7 is just a quad core with hyperthreading. Most people don't know that there are only four physical cores instead of eight.



I hope everyone does this out of common sense. Then again this is humanity...

yeah expecting lots of bug reports because of this. Between patches we try really hard not to break old saves and put effort into it, but between expansions it cant really be done.

about the i7 - the hyper threads are pretty limited, its not as good as having a separate core at all. most of the MT code in FTM will run per core instead of per hyper thread because the memory usage patterns makes HT less than ideal.