Hi All,
I had looked into performance of GC3, and was stumped as to why my 8 core AMD 8320 processor was only using 6 logical cores instead of 8. Others in fact with the same processor had stated they only had 4 logical processors being used for the game. Well, I was doing another overclock effort this evening, and I discovered something that apparently was causing the problem. This is probably trivial to those that already know this technique, but in the past I have used 'game booster' software to optimize, and however that was for single core games, and I was unaware this technique affected multi-core so much.
In Windows control panel, go to Power Settings and change it from the default 'balanced' setting to 'performance' setting. The last time I really tweaked this manually was in my winXP days, and well, quite a bit has developed since then. Performance will ensure that the processor is working at 100% speed at all times. It also seemed to solve my logical processor utilization issue. Now all 8 logical cores are being used. Unfortunately, I can't do an apples to apples comparison, as I really dont want to benchmark back on my original settings. As well, I'm tinkering with the worst case scenario of 100 factions (I'd like to start a thread to get some performance comparisons from the community), first dozen turns or so of turn duration took 34s, and now at turn 175, its up to about 50s.
Using the performance power profile, the Cores are no longer throttling down to lower speeds all the time, and with all cores being used, it certainly will give performance improvements. I certainly can state that I am visually seeing A LOT more utilization than I did before (cores 7 and 8 were always at < 5%). However, I can say that my electricity bill will be higher I certainly dont want to leave my PC on all day, doing nothing, with these settings.
WARNING -
When doing this, just make sure you are monitoring cpu temp, so you can prevent auto shutdown/locks, as your cpu temp will certainly increase a bit. Right now, I'm overclocking my 3.5GHz 8320 at 4.5GHz, with a cpu temp of 49C, and a socket temp of 57C, all fans on max.
Hmmmm, so I can now see my overclocking and full utilization isn't helping my performance. Right now, I'm investigating a crash I am getting on turn 503. I had thought it might have been due to my overclocking, as I was running a fairly high cpu temp. However, when I go from 8 logical processor utilization at 4.5GHz OC, to a dismal 3.5GHz with only 6 processors being used (I went from performance to power saving mode, and in BIOS, I went back to energy saving mode, and disabled turbo), the amount of time in between turns is taking the same amount of time.
I'm thinking now that the bottleneck is my 'small' amount of memory. Granted, I am playing 100 factions on insane (a soak, not terribly interested in big games until micro is improved), I'm using about 15GB of memory (virtual) for this game atm. Only about 2GB is cached, so there is certainly LOTS of disk access, as I can see in performance monitor. Even though I'm on an SSD, I'm concluding at this point the latency of virtual memory vs physical memory is the Von Neuman bottleneck at the moment.
I have been thinking of spending $100-200 for an upgrade to my PC. On GC3, I truly think a memory upgrade from 8 to 16GB would be the better improvement, over a water cooler to further improve cpu performance. I might even go to 24GB, as I simply HATE that windows will write and read to a page file when you have PLENTY of physical memory. 16GB of course should certainly help a lot as I would expect my caching to grow from 2GB to several GB.
Other games, I have disabled my page file and have seen good improvements, but memory requirements for this game are obviously A LOT higher than your typical game. With 24GB, I should be able to disable my page file and play on the largest maps and max faction size, with the best possible performance.
Well, I have now concluded that adding more memory really wont help the game either. From looking at hard page fault counters in Resource Monitor, I am seeing a VERY low number of hard page faults with 8GB of ram (insane map 100 faction game is using about 15GB of VM, 1-2GB cached).
I then thought it might be the GPU, as this was indeed the HIGHEST utilized resource I have. 75%, just from idling, watching an empty spot on the map. This could cause contention with the CPU trying to non-graphical calculations (I was also under the assumption that GC3 was using the GPU for non-graphics calculations). Well, I disproved that, as you can go into a shipyard during soak, and my GPU went from 75% to 25%, and no change in my cpu utilization.
So, my cpu isn't limited, my gpu isn't limited, my ram really isnt limited.....I'm now convinced its SMP code issues. I'll put off any pc upgrades until we see some improvement in this area.
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