Multicore gaming

[berserksteve]

With AMD releasing Ryzen and more cores becoming affordable for more people, could Ryzens new line actually get even more attractive as games finally start to move forward on using more cores now that more people can have them? Or is it still a while off? Just a thought that popped into my head when I seen Elder Scrolls Online is releasing an update this year to that effect but haven't heard of any other game mentioning it.

 

[Oussebon]

I think we're still a very long way off from that.

If the 7700k still beats/matches an R7 2700x in Ashes of all games:


ESO, from what I recall, is very, very single threaded. So by 'multicore' I suspect they mean thye're going to update the game so the performance doesn't blow quite as much. Well, that's a bit unfair to it, but the point is that in terms of multicore, it doesn't have anywhere to go but to get better.

Multicore CPUs have been around for a very long time too. AMD's FX 6 and 8 cores, and Intel's X99 platform. So, the FX series was not very impressive and the X99 CPUs weren't used by the masses due to price. But they existed, comprised together a reasonable share of the market, and yet an i5 2500k is still pretty passable and probably better than an FX series 6 core / 8 core in most cases for gaming.

I think you're right that more cores will be used in the future what with 6-core CPUs being mainstream, but we're not seen a particularly big shift and even some of the few (only?) respectable DX12 implementation as far as using CPUs well goes - Ashes - still doesn't always prefer moar coars. So it'll be a while yet, and probably quite gradual.

Possibly not surprising when one considers many games have been in development for years, long before Windows 10 was on the scene, let alone Ryzen.