PC Hardware 7dtd

[SylenThunder]

Has nothing to do with "Rushing" the Developers, morose at what point in a games developmental life does it finally progress from the drawing board to a stable product ready for market consumption. This game in particular has seen it's fare share of trading hands and has been in Alpha testing for what 3 years now?

 

 

Like I wrote in my previous post, I'm hoping the game is ready for market release before the year 2030.

Wow the misinformation here.

 

Unless maybe you mean the Console port, which isn't the game we're talking about here.

 

7 Days to Die has always been owned by The Fun Pimps. It has been in development for about 6 and a half years.

Average game development time for an original title that isn't pulling the Engine, Assets, Characters, or story from a previous title is between 5 and 7 years.

At our current pace, we should see the game fully finished before 2022.

It should also be noted that no other AAA studio with 10x the number of developers would touch a project as complex as this one is.

 

 

As for the cores, my old i7-3930k with 6 Physical + 6 Hyper-threaded cores gets all 12 of them used by Unity when I fire up the client. Definitively tracking the actual cores being used by the client is a little daunting, however I am able to see all of them being utilized via tools like GLZ when I am running the client.

[Kalen]

You actually spent 500$ on a CPU that is absolutly bored because 4K?

 

Eh, I had the money....

[bobrpggamer]

It's been more than 6 years actually.

 

 

I get Intel and AMD mixed up... you know what I'm talking about, it's pretty much the same technology just under a different name because... reasons.

 

That cpu has 4 cores and 4 virtual... according to task manager, 4 of them aren't working. My assumption is it's either the virtual cores sitting idle or the server only uses 2 cores and 2 virtual and the rest sit idle (which is very much unlikely).

 

My Ryzen has no problem with the client side though... all 12 threads being used to some degree. I should maybe try loading a dedicated server with it to see if it's just exclusive to the old FX series CPU.

I have always considered hyper-threading to be less than a physical core, this was based on my Pentium 4 from 12 years ago. I know the tech has changed, but the idea that it is simulating threads has always struck me as just being synthetic. Over the years thinking about workstation CPUs for rendering multiple buckets as seen in Cinebench I have always considered a hyperthreading core count of say 8 cores 16 treads to be more like having 12-14 cores in the workload. Again this is base on my crappy Pentium 4.

 

When I picked out my 9700K without more research due to being impulsive, I realized It had 8 psychical cores and no logical cores like the 8700K. I was not really concerned about it at all believing the logical cores above the 8 physical cores is just fluff in most games and apps other than say rendering video and large scenes in a 3D app.

 

I like the new AMD Threadrippers and Epyc, and I would have never even noticed the multithreading performance until I witnessed some benchmarks looking for a gaming CPU like my 9700K. These CPUs are insane in 3D and high end video apps. I have been an Intel guys since the Core 2 Quad and always dreaming of a Xeon workstation, and I never payed attention to AMD since the X2 4200 I had, so I guess Intel is really not all that anymore in computing beyond gaming.

 

I have my 9700K clocked @ 4.7Ghz on all cores and it really shines in 7 Days to Die, getting a solid 60fps (vsync on) with all settings at high, with a tiny dip to 40-50 in large cities. On Ultra I get down in the 30s at times and the difference in quality is not much, so I stick to keeping the settings on high, this is 1080P of course. I think the 32gb DDR4 3000 also a sweet spot in this game as well, my aging GTX 1080 is holding its own, but the idea of an RTX is not even being considered until the next or next beyond that generation come out and the mid range of those really beats my GTX 1080.

[Liesel Weppen]

That cpu has 4 cores and 4 virtual... according to task manager, 4 of them aren't working. My assumption is it's either the virtual cores sitting idle or the server only uses 2 cores and 2 virtual and the rest sit idle (which is very much unlikely).

Can you post a screenshot of your taskmanager?

I think that is where you are wrong, but i don't know how it exactly looks with a bulldozer CPU.

 

An Intel 4-core without hyperthreading shows 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores. That does NOT mean there are 8 cores, because logical and virtual add up. The system only uses virtual cores! Even the system can not differentiate between what a virtual and a physical core is. And it doesn't need to, because that makes no sense at all.

An Intel 4-core with hyperthreading shows 4 physical and 8 virtual cores. It's still just 8 virtual cores, not 12 or whatever.

Also my 8-core Ryzen hast 8 physical and 16 virtual and it never becomes 24 cores in whatever way.

 

Should look like that:

https://community.amd.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-2755232-112277/processor.png

So same as any other cpu with SMT. So from at least the OS-view it doesn't have 8 "real" cores.

[bobrpggamer]

Won't CPUz do this as well? The bottom right shows physical and virtual. I still think logical cores are overrated for every day computing and games, only benchmarking can prove this.

[Fox]

Can you post a screenshot of your taskmanager?

I think that is where you are wrong, but i don't know how it exactly looks with a bulldozer CPU.

 

An Intel 4-core without hyperthreading shows 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores. That does NOT mean there are 8 cores, because logical and virtual add up. The system only uses virtual cores! Even the system can not differentiate between what a virtual and a physical core is. And it doesn't need to, because that makes no sense at all.

An Intel 4-core with hyperthreading shows 4 physical and 8 virtual cores. It's still just 8 virtual cores, not 12 or whatever.

Also my 8-core Ryzen hast 8 physical and 16 virtual and it never becomes 24 cores in whatever way.

 

Should look like that:

https://community.amd.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-2755232-112277/processor.png

So same as any other cpu with SMT. So from at least the OS-view it doesn't have 8 "real" cores.

I think we're talking about the same things but getting confused with language / terminology, or your math skills suck. My bulldozer FX8320 CPU has 4 physical cores, a total of 8 threads, not 12. I don't even understand where the number 12 came from or why this is a topic for discussion. A simple google search would explain it all within seconds.

 

I have always considered hyper-threading to be less than a physical core, this was based on my Pentium 4 from 12 years ago. I know the tech has changed, but the idea that it is simulating threads has always struck me as just being synthetic. Over the years thinking about workstation CPUs for rendering multiple buckets as seen in Cinebench I have always considered a hyperthreading core count of say 8 cores 16 treads to be more like having 12-14 cores in the workload. Again this is base on my crappy Pentium 4.

I agree. Hyper-threading is just fluff to make a CPU look twice as good, giving it only a maximum of 30% more performance if you're lucky. There's actually some instances where Hyper-Threading was proven to reduce overall performance. It's kind of like Dual Channel ram, it's worth having since it's free performance, but would anyone pay a lot of extra money to have it?

[Liesel Weppen]

I think we're talking about the same things but getting confused with language / terminology, or your math skills suck. My bulldozer FX8320 CPU has 4 physical cores, a total of 8 threads, not 12. I don't even understand where the number 12 came from or why this is a topic for discussion. A simple google search would explain it all within seconds.

Maybe terminology because you talked about, what i understood 4 physical cores + 4 virtual cores and a total of 8 cores.

 

I already red from many people in many forums making the mistake thinking like:

My CPU has 4 cores plus 4 threads, so 8 "whatever" in total. If it would have 4 cores and 8 threads it would be a total of 12, but it has only 8, so this must be wrong.

I think they really imagine there are X physical cores and the virtual cores are then added to that.

 

I agree. Hyper-threading is just fluff to make a CPU look twice as good, giving it only a maximum of 30% more performance if you're lucky. There's actually some instances where Hyper-Threading was proven to reduce overall performance.

Yes, i also could reproduce some cases a cpu with active SMT was slower than without back then. But that have been more or less bugs in the cpu-scheduler or the microcode, because on a 2-core/4-thread cpu 2 threads run on on the same physical core, so just performance of one full core plus ~30% SMT, instead of using 2x full core. If you disabled SMT, this of course could not happen anymore. But i have never seen that effect again on modern CPUs like core-i from 2010 or later.

 

It's kind of like Dual Channel ram, it's worth having since it's free performance, but would anyone pay a lot of extra money to have it?

ATM it seems to be more or less equal price between 2x8GB and 1x16GB so why renounce on dual channel?

1-2 years ago, when RAM was much more expensive it most times was even cheaper to take 2x8GB instead of 1x16GB.

[SylenThunder]

It's kind of like Dual Channel ram, it's worth having since it's free performance, but would anyone pay a lot of extra money to have it?

ATM it seems to be more or less equal price between 2x8GB and 1x16GB so why renounce on dual channel?

1-2 years ago, when RAM was much more expensive it most times was even cheaper to take 2x8GB instead of 1x16GB.

Yeah, but performance-wise it's mostly a gimmic. I went from dual-channel to quad-channel, and I think it might have made a difference of maybe 5% overall. It's really not worth going out of your way to spend the extra money to achieve it.

[Liesel Weppen]

Yeah, but performance-wise it's mostly a gimmic. I went from dual-channel to quad-channel, and I think it might have made a difference of maybe 5% overall. It's really not worth going out of your way to spend the extra money to achieve it.

dunno if we get to far from topic with that, but just because you do not feel an effort by going from dual to quad, doesn't mean there is no reasonable effort by going from single to dual.

I went from sata ssd to nvme ssd and there is was no reasonable effort. But there was indeed a reasonable effort from going from hdd to ssd.

But the performance effort got so high already with sata-ssd, that there is no mentionable reason left for going any further.

 

It depends on the software. If you do stuff which requires heavy RAM-load, you would recognize your quad-channel. But games are obviously not taking reasonable advantage of it.

 

It's the same as saying my newly ryzen 8-core doesn't bring any advantage in 7d2d according to my previously 4-core intel. But if i encode video... holy ♥♥♥♥... it DOES.

 

And i'd really prefer 7d2d taking advantage of more cores, since it does mostly not even use more than 2 cores (where i have ♥♥♥♥ing SIXTEEN virtual ones), e.g SI does even only use one core. It lags massively and cpu usage bottlenecks still on one core. I know it is not that easy to multicore such stuff, but it is possible (maybe anyway not a target for alpha, i understand).

In A17 landscape generation was even faster on a i7-7700K@5ghz then on my ryzen 2700X, because it utilizates only one core... what a shame.

[SylenThunder]

Some articles you might be interested in....

https://techguided.com/single-channel-vs-dual-channel-vs-quad-channel/

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1349-ram-how-dual-channel-works-vs-single-channel

https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/does-dual-channel-memory-make-difference-in-gaming-performance/

They all show very negligible gains between single, dual, and quad.

 

Something I have noticed on my system, that seems to differ from what others are experiencing. In a16, I only saw the client using one core. In a17 I saw it using 4 or 5 cores. In a18 I see it using all 12.

 

Again, I'm running an i7-3930k with 6 physical cores, and 6 hyperthreaded. As near as I can tell, pretty much most software threats it as if it were 12 physical cores.

[Hollowprime]

Some articles you might be interested in....

https://techguided.com/single-channel-vs-dual-channel-vs-quad-channel/

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1349-ram-how-dual-channel-works-vs-single-channel

https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/does-dual-channel-memory-make-difference-in-gaming-performance/

They all show very negligible gains between single, dual, and quad.

 

Something I have noticed on my system, that seems to differ from what others are experiencing. In a16, I only saw the client using one core. In a17 I saw it using 4 or 5 cores. In a18 I see it using all 12.

 

Again, I'm running an i7-3930k with 6 physical cores, and 6 hyperthreaded. As near as I can tell, pretty much most software threats it as if it were 12 physical cores.

 

Question, are we talking about multiple cores or multiple threads? Multi threading seems more reasonable given the OS is responsible for utilizing the threads of each core. I doubt the game actually uses core coding as in sse coding.

 

Also people mention the ssd is the most important part of the upgrade, I disagree. I think the most important part is ram. I have 8 gb of ram with an i5 8300 intel and a gtx 1050ti. The game runs above 60 fps and lags every time new zombies spawn or whenever I open the inventory.

[SylenThunder]

Question, are we talking about multiple cores or multiple threads? Multi threading seems more reasonable given the OS is responsible for utilizing the threads of each core. I doubt the game actually uses core coding as in sse coding.

 

Also people mention the ssd is the most important part of the upgrade, I disagree. I think the most important part is ram. I have 8 gb of ram with an i5 8300 intel and a gtx 1050ti. The game runs above 60 fps and lags every time new zombies spawn or whenever I open the inventory.

Unity 2018.1 introduced multi-core support and new rendering pipelines.

 

For many builds, the HDD bus was the biggest bottleneck. Which is why the recommendation for a SSD. If your system is slow loading the world data off the disk, it causes a lot of problems.

[Jugginator]

Unity 2018.1 introduced multi-core support and new rendering pipelines.

 

For many builds, the HDD bus was the biggest bottleneck. Which is why the recommendation for a SSD. If your system is slow loading the world data off the disk, it causes a lot of problems.

 

I am curious about what you said about SSDs there, is there really any difference besides load times? If the load times on an HDD are slow, do you mean it can cause some things to go wrong mid-game? I've really been curious about the whole HDD vs SSD in gaming, besides load time debates.

[erlgrey]

Many games (open world especially) rely on streaming assets in and out on the go, and which makes these large "maps" possible at all, otherwise you would ned much much ram. If this is the case, and it will be more and more in the future, ssd is mandatory. If you have a tiny map and devs didn't screw it up, you just have longer loading times when you load the level.

 

bulldozer has no virtual cores, it has 2 integer cores and 1 fpu per module.

Theoretically you have twice the integer compute power but you are sharing also l2 and frontend and in the end you have only one fpu, not sure what of this weirdness the bottleneck was but who cares anyways.

If win10 shows virtual cores and distributes the load preferred on every second core, and I have no clue if this is true, it's maybe a trick to handle this weird architecture. In the end, it probably just tries to avoid performance issue by running only one thread per module, instead of 2 because bottleneck with fpu, l2 or frontend.

 

SMT allows the execution of two (or more...) threads at the same time on one core, main feature is that you can use existing resources of the cpu more efficient with very low additional cost. (power) only 30%? 30% are massive!

[Hollowprime]

Unity 2018.1 introduced multi-core support and new rendering pipelines.

 

For many builds, the HDD bus was the biggest bottleneck. Which is why the recommendation for a SSD. If your system is slow loading the world data off the disk, it causes a lot of problems.

 

Well I have an nvme ssd and it doesn't make a difference except when loading the game to the HDD on the laptop loading times are very noticable.

 

Do you know if the devs use more than one (the main Unity thread) for A18?