Will Rome II use all cores effectively?

[The Awesome Boy]

Will Rome II use all cores effectively? If say I have a six core processor?

[Crazyeyesreaper]

considering Shogun, Medieval, Rome, Medieval 2, Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2 all use 1 core its unlikely it will use cores effectively if CA solves this problem awesome but its highly unlikely.

[boxleitnerb]

Empire and all newer titles use 2 threads.

[alexanderswift]

I'll be really disappointed if they don't optimize better than in S2.

[The Useless Member]

Please. I have 6 idle cores!

[Gralachthule]

Will Rome II use all cores effectively? If say I have a six core processor?

No. DirectX is still single threaded apart from some minor parallel parts and the main "fetch" phase is still in one critical section, which means you'll still have one core that is probably going to bottleneck your GPU. There's nothing CA can do about that.

[DavidtheDuke]

considering Shogun, Medieval, Rome, Medieval 2, Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2 all use 1 core its unlikely it will use cores effectively if CA solves this problem awesome but its highly unlikely.

Eh? It does not use just one core. I watched the thread charts once. At least on my 2600k.

[boxleitnerb]

DX11 supports multithreaded rendering:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...4&postcount=28

Also the game logic itself should be able to run on multiple threads. Pathfinding, animations, AI, physics etc.

[Gralachthule]

DX11 supports multithreading. Also the game logic itself should be able to run on multiple threads. Pathfinding, animations, AI, physics etc.

DX11 supports multithreading in some limited form; you cannot split the phases that ultimately need the most processor power. "Multithreading" can sometimes be very misleading since a programm can be multithreaded and still have a workload of 100% and 3 times 5 % on a quad core.

But this probably only a problem if you zoom in, like in Shogun 2. Even Empire had the AI in a different thread if I remember correctly.

[TheRomanRuler]

Speaking of cores, dos it matter do i have 3 or 4 cores?

[boxleitnerb]

Wouldn't it be possible to distribute said calculations for the units across separate threads? Surely, you should be able to parallelize quite well with thousands of men on the battlefield.

[Bendit]

I really hope Rome 2 can use at least four cores efficiently. I was very disappointed to find the same old CPU bottleneck with melee in ETW, NTW, S2TW and FotS.

[OCWife]

Wouldn't it be possible to distribute said calculations for the units across separate threads? Surely, you should be able to parallelize quite well with thousands of men on the battlefield.

Yes, but it may actually make it slower! The overhead of starting separate threads may make it overall slower. There has to be lot of testing and optimization to determine the optimal threads to use for an application. More is not always better.

Furthermore, even if parallelization improves overall throughput, it may be at the sacrifice of response time. For applications like games where you want response time to be as real time as possible, the higher throughput may not be worth it. Whereas, for applications such as video encoding or scientific calculations, throughput is more important.

Current games in general do not require a lot of CPU threads. A six core processor for gaming is a waste, unless you are multitasking - that is, for example, playing game while surfing web while encoding video in background.

People often mistakenly think that more cores = faster or better. Or using more cores will make your game faster. But that is often not the case.

[boxleitnerb]

That are some good points that you make. But I still can't get around that I have at times only 20fps in Shogun 2 with an 2600K@4GHz. What should people say who have processors with lower clock or less IPC? And now imagine having double the amount of men on the battlefield in Rome 2. Do we all need an Intel Haswell with 2 threads at 6-7 GHz or an AMD FX at 10GHz to maintain 30fps?

There quite a few current games that show very good scaling with up to 4-6 threads. You have to be CPU limited of course, but that is self-evident.

[OCWife]

That are some good points that you make. But I still can't get around that I have at times only 20fps in Shogun 2 with an 2600K@4GHz. What should people say who have processors with lower clock or less IPC? And now imagine having double the amount of men on the battlefield in Rome 2. Do we all need an Intel Haswell with 2 threads at 6-7 GHz or an AMD FX at 10GHz to maintain 30fps?

Well, Rome 2 has new engine, so hopefully they have learned to do things better. But, I think it is unrealistic for the OP to expect the game to use all six cores, unless he is running 3 instances of the game for some reason.

[GM207]

Then why when I play the previous Total war games I can play with over 40,000 men on the battlefield with hardly any lag, and when I play Rome 2! with 8,000 troops on the battlefied it gets sooooo laggy that the FPS drops below 12 FPS, even moving the camera is very laggy!
And the heck are we all spending crazy money on PC componants try to make out Total war experience more enjoyable! to get this kinds crap?
I cant play Rome 2 now even if I wanted to cz of the massive lag this is rediculous, seriously CA?
Guys is there a fix for bottlenecking? here are my specs
i7 3930 K prosessor
AMD HD 7970 GPU graphics card
16GB ram

[Ostrogoth]

There is no fix for it dear necromancer. Deal with it or get a better gpu.