My testing with a Core i7 3930K suggests that SC2 will only make use of 4 cores. This is regardless of whether a process affinity mask is set to use all 6/12 or not. 2 of the 4 show moderate to high usage, while the remaining two are fairly low. That's not an unreasonable distribution for a multi-core capable program as 1-2 threads will always be more intensive than the remainder.

So my question is, sine LOtV is stand alone install, have you work on supporting more cores?

even with my i7 3930k i get massive FPS drops on TeamGames as well as 1v1 games when we are maxout army.

[F_]aths

Germany3947 Posts

November 23 2014 15:23 GMT

With HotS, SC2 does not gain much advantage with more than two cores (even though it shows having 63 threads on my task manager.)

(Please note the difference of using X cores versus profit from X cores.)

LotV will probably not a be standalone-install, since it has to integrate WoL/Hots. We can assume Lotv and Wol/Hots use the same client, with different campaigns / multiplayer options enabled depending on the login credentials.

Multicore optimization is easier said than done. There is not info yet if Blizzard improves it. It would allow more complex maps but also shift the minimum specs. For the latter reason I doubt that there will be a 64-bit version of the client either.

Cyro

United Kingdom20282 Posts

November 23 2014 16:09 GMT

sc2 only uses ~1.4 cores with no real scaling to 3+ (it mostly needs that one core) and LOTV likely won't change that. It's the same engine

what clock is your 3930k at?

Ropid

Germany3557 Posts

November 23 2014 16:39 GMT

Blizzard apparently improved something significant about the engine of that newest WoW expansion. You can now raid at more than 60 fps with a strong CPU even if you have your whole raid in your view and effects going off and whatnot. Does anyone know what's going on there, if it maybe uses more CPU cores than it did before? If they made an effort like that for WoW's engine, there might be hope that they'll also look into it for LotV?

Cyro

United Kingdom20282 Posts

November 23 2014 16:53 GMT

On November 24 2014 01:39 Ropid wrote:
Blizzard apparently improved something significant about the engine of that newest WoW expansion. You can now raid at more than 60 fps with a strong CPU even if you have your whole raid in your view and effects going off and whatnot. Does anyone know what's going on there, if it maybe uses more CPU cores than it did before? If they made an effort like that for WoW's engine, there might be hope that they'll also look into it for LotV?

It still uses ~1.5 cores. Looks pretty similar to sc2, actually - the performance gain going from 2 cores enabled to 3 cores is too small to blind test (you need a benchmark run and/or a consistent environment) but it scales really hard on CPU performance and also maybe from memory

ZenithM

France15952 Posts

November 23 2014 17:05 GMT

It's true though that some effort could be made in that direction. In 500+ unit battles (for examples maxed out armies in 2v2), it's clear that CPU is a bottleneck (and not GPU as is usually the case) and yields megabad lag, stutters and overall loss of framerate.

Cyro

United Kingdom20282 Posts

November 23 2014 17:26 GMT

It's more than clear.. pretty easy to see numbers like 5-10% GPU load on overclocked haswell quad core and 970

Here's a pic from WoW:
[image loading]

pretty much exactly the same as sc2

BonitiilloO

Dominican Republic614 Posts

November 23 2014 19:59 GMT

On November 24 2014 02:26 Cyro wrote:
It's more than clear.. pretty easy to see numbers like 5-10% GPU load on overclocked haswell quad core and 970

Here's a pic from WoW:
[image loading]

pretty much exactly the same as sc2

thats bad imo... they should do something with it... is a shame that i cant use my cpu as i wanted on 2v2 or 3v3 matches

when you have big army is really a mess your FPS drops like to 20s....

Isualin

Germany1903 Posts

November 23 2014 21:07 GMT

Do you guys know any game that takes advantage of 2+ cores for any serious processing?

ZenithM

France15952 Posts

November 23 2014 21:58 GMT

#10

When I think about it, it does sound hard to parallelize that shit. Each round, interactions between multiple units and terrain elements are computed, but they're not really easy to deinterlace, they seem quite interdependent. What's more, they must be computed in order, because you have to keep the game deterministic and sometimes the only way to do that is to attribute some kind of arbitrary order between interdependent actions (typically in SC2 that would be the ID of the units or something)

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