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[arwan]

so first and foremost i have no idea where i should be actually posting this. so i threw my hands up and threw the dart in here.

how many processor cores does starsector support. and also, how well does it really use those cores. or in other words. is it able to say split the work loads up something close to 50% on core XXX and 50% on core YYY for example. or is it more like 90/10 split etc.

please excuse my crappy wording in the question i really dont know exactly how to form the question. but i "hope" that its worded well enough to get the question im trying to ask across.

[Alex]

Most of the work is done on a single thread/core. Some stuff that's easy to split off (music playback, for example, and some loading tasks) does use other cores, but overall, you're not going to see much benefit from having more cores.

(If you're curious about why: 1) it would increase the complexity of the code (and thus occurrence of bugs, and the time to write/change/test the code) *a lot*, and 2) would not do much to help the game run well on low-end computers, and so would be of questionable value as a performance optimization.)

[Goumindong]

Is that because the game is primarily GPU limited? 

Because most machines now always are multi-core, even the low end ones.

[Alex]

Right, I'm sort of assuming a dual core machine as the lower end. The game is something like 60/40 cpu/gpu but that can vary wildly depending on the cpu and gpu in question. At any rate, 1) would be reason enough not to do it, 2) is just the cherry on top.

[Dark.Revenant]

In my experience, unless you're working in a very light environment, you receive peak performance from N threads on N+1 processors.  That's not to say you should allocate M-1 threads if you have M processors, but that the gains for that last thread won't be as good.

There are a number of quad-core systems with poor Starsector performance.  That number is not statistically significant compared to the number of dual-core systems with poor performance or M-core systems with good performance.  To really benefit, that would essentially mean you're trying to run the game on a Bulldozer-era AMD CPU, a Core 2 Quad, or one of the rare older low-power 4-core Intel mobile CPUs.  Even in the latter case, multi-threading enhancements would not save you, since this game runs poorly on older integrated graphics solutions anyway.

I have run into situations where new, expensive computers work very poorly for single-threaded applications, however, and that's in servers and some types of workstations.  Try taking a real-time simulation designed to work on a 3 GHz dual core CPU and putting it on a 2 GHz 12-core Xeon.  Sigh...

[Alex]

I have run into situations where new, expensive computers work very poorly for single-threaded applications, however, and that's in servers and some types of workstations.  Try taking a real-time simulation designed to work on a 3 GHz dual core CPU and putting it on a 2 GHz 12-core Xeon.  Sigh...

(Reminds me of working with like a 32 core IBM-built box (460? I forget), running DB2... and it getting grossly out-performed by Postgres running on a quad core intel processor.)

... but, yeah, it just seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth. Also, there's some overhead/time spent waiting to running multi-threaded unless what you're doing is absolutely ideal for it, so running on say 2 cores would not be a 2x boost or even particularly close, even discounting graphics.