Will the new Unity Englne in A17 be kinder to multi-core CPUs?

[ricp]

Yay! It's our favourite topic - performance! There is a TL;DR at the end so to avoid my pre-amble, just skip to that.

 

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Look, from the very outset I wish to point out that this is a discussion and not the blame train. I really don't want lame ass comments like "It's alpha, dude, you can't expect optimisation on alpha", or, "no wonder it runs like crap your system is crap". Neither of these progress the discussion at all and just end up in fanboi battles.

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Now... let me explain. I have an old 8320. It's actually a surprisingly decent chip considering it's age, but it is old (nearly 6 years old - the chip variant not my actual chip!). It's even to this day pretty decent at running multi core apps/games but sucks at single core. Ask anyone and you'll know that it's IPC (instructions per chip) is pretty poor in relation to it's Intel cousin. I also have a GTX 960 which is fine enough and while not great is pretty solid and won't get pushed too hard by 7DTD. Sadly 7DtD seems to rely on single core IPC.

 

I've got back onto the hype train for A17 by replaying some of the A16 mods (WotW, Starvation, etc). These seem to add extra overhead to the game and the game itself has never ran that well for me. I can have 80 fps out in the open wilderness but throw me into the city and it'll spike between 40 and 20 which is pretty difficult to deal with when you have any number of zombies coming at you.

 

I know why this is, I am not blaming 7DtD or TFP for this. They have based their game on the Unity engine and without wholesale re-writing of the core rendering engine that won't change - and in many ways there is no need for it to change as it does what it needs to. Unity however is not overly kind to multi-core CPUs, like my FX. Sure there is multi-threading but previously there wasn't full support for multi-core. I believe that has changed, with Unity now capable of utilising all those lovely cores. This is the version of Unity that has delayed the roll out of A17 (or at least that is what I'm led to believe - either way A17 should be on that newer version).

 

There is also the question of optimisation, and it's something I don't really want to get into with this as it's not going to be an short term answer. It's only going to polarise the rest of the debate so let's just drop that (for now at least).

 

TL;DR?

 

With the new version of Unity capable of offering much better multi core CPU support, will we see an improvement for us poor souls who use FX based chips?

 

Thanks in advance guys and as I've tried to make clear I don't really want this discussion to revolve around either (a) alpha/optimisation or (b) amd vs intel. Here's hoping anyway...

 

 

 

Minor Edit: Sorry I should say that I actually run 7DtD at a pretty low res/quality and still get the FPS performance mentioned above (80 at good, 40 spiking to 20 at bad). I could paste a screenshot of my settings but essentially I have all LOD and view distances way below 50% and with water turned off and all anti-aliasing and graphics settings to med to low depending on their impact. This is all running at 1600:900 resolution. It's not like I'm pushing this thing to the limits, I've really dialled it down and still struggle.

[Fox]

I don't know about the FX series CPUs, but I do know this game hasn't been using the hyperthreaded cores on the AMD Ryzen side while it does use them for Intel's CPUs. That said, when you have a Ryzen 5 or better, you don't really need the hyperthreaded cores for this game anyways.

[ricp]

Thanks for the reply.

 

I'm stuck with the FX for now, and as I say it's not that bad a performer in other "similar" games despite it's age. I will move to Ryzen at some point and with it the IPC issue the 8320 has will be forgotten.

 

In the meantime, and as I see myself having 6 months (heh, depending on release!) of A17 before updating my CPU, I'd hope that the newer Unity engine will be a little kinder to those of us currently stuck in the FX tier. I'd done just about everything to make the thing look dreadful in order to make it run better but while I don't mind lowering everything for an online FPS where milliseconds count, I'd much rather a richer single player offline experience.

 

In short I know why it performs like it does, just a bit of a perfect storm of low IPC and poor Unity multi-core implementation on the FX (and of course optimisation but as I've said I'm loathe to hang my hat on that peg just now), I'm just wondering if anyone can say if I should expect an improvement on FPS along with the obvious improvement in quality that new Unity engine will bring.

[LuckyStar]

I don't know about the FX series CPUs, but I do know this game hasn't been using the hyperthreaded cores on the AMD Ryzen side while it does use them for Intel's CPUs. That said, when you have a Ryzen 5 or better, you don't really need the hyperthreaded cores for this game anyways.

 

 

Ryzen is ahead of it's time.

 

One day the world will catch up with those visionaries at Ryzen and we'll all be better for it.

About time someone knocked Intel off their perch. They have been skating on their reputation the last few "upgrades".

 

I'm hoping it'll be about the time the next gen consoles come out.

That's not too long a wait and since developers are going to have to adjust to the next gen Hardware anyway.....

 

Well there's hope.

For now .... we wait and see.