SimCity single core rumour - not true!

[SirChick 184]

Just so you know SimCity is not made as single core usage only. I saw the rumour floating around and so I asked one of the SC devs they confirmed it does use multi cores!

 

Quote from Guillaume:
 

I have an 8 core machine and I've seen SimCity take 23% of my CPU power, so it's definitely using more than 1 core.

If any of you were initially put off or concerned by the "single core" comments, fear no more! There is a lot of mis information being posted it would seem, thought i would help to clear this one up. When in doubt ask them 

[The_City_Builder 299]

I've never heard this rumor.

[Hoipus 292]

What do you say to this?

https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/296355832998801408

@mattcrwi The main sim + game loop is on a single thread, so extra cores don't help. We do make use of extra CPU for audio/rendering

 

The game does use multiple cores, just not to help the actual gamey part run better.

[SirChick 184]

I guess thats what started the worry about the single core

Threads are simulated cores they are slightly different to cores i believe.

Example:

3 core processor with 6 threads won't beat a 6 core processor with no extra threads

[Cyclone Boom 16,938]

There's quite a lot of false and conflicting information about this game. It's best to ignore rumours like this, unless there is official confirmation from the developers.

 

In this day and age, it would be unwise not to take advantage of multi-core technology in some form.

[DrKing2020 8]

I'm gonna run it on Windows 7 with Bootcamp on a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM. Would love to be able to throw all 24 virtual cores at my cities as I do with video encoding.

[Sunfighter 186]

Does he really have an octocore machine or a quad core with hyperthreading?

[BravoGreenONE 120]

Just so you know SimCity is not made as single core usage only. I saw the rumour floating around and so I asked one of the SC devs they confirmed it does use multi cores!

That statement is awefuly fushy. I mean if they know its multicored say its multicore. That statement could mean that hes looking at his power bar and could be running sc on one core and the rest of the processes on seperate cores.

Quote from Guillaume:

I have an 8 core machine and I've seen SimCity take 23% of my CPU power, so it's definitely using more than 1 core.

If any of you were initially put off or concerned by the "single core" comments, fear no more! There is a lot of mis information being posted it would seem, thought i would help to clear this one up. When in doubt ask them

[Timmystwin 201]

I hadn't heard the new one being done for single core only, but I know SC4 works miles better if you just run it on 1, maybe there was a bit of confusion there?

[nhgriffith 179]

I'm pretty sure I remember a tweet from Ocean saying that their engineers saying there would be no advantage to multi-coring the simulation aspect of the game--it wouldn't improve performance. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

[SirChick 184]

I'm gonna run it on Windows 7 with Bootcamp on a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM. Would love to be able to throw all 24 virtual cores at my cities as I do with video encoding.

 

Why did you waste so much money on memory ? No consumer product out there uses that much memory or virtual cores, and probably never will =/

[Hoipus 292]

Maybe he does a lot of rendering or something

[Ma8thew 77]

Just so you know SimCity is not made as single core usage only. I saw the rumour floating around and so I asked one of the SC devs they confirmed it does use multi cores!

 

Quote from Guillaume:

 

 

I have an 8 core machine and I've seen SimCity take 23% of my CPU power, so it's definitely using more than 1 core.

If any of you were initially put off or concerned by the "single core" comments, fear no more! There is a lot of mis information being posted it would seem, thought i would help to clear this one up. When in doubt ask them 

The simulation runs on a single core. Other stuff like music and rendering runs on other cores. However, the bulk of the processing will occur on a single core since the simulation is the most taxing component of the game by far. Parallelising this kind of thing is a difficult problem, so I suspect this decision was made out of pragmatism.

 

Here, from a Maxis developer:

Glassbox runs entirely on the CPU (sadly, single-threaded at the moment).

[DrKing2020 8]

I'm gonna run it on Windows 7 with Bootcamp on a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM. Would love to be able to throw all 24 virtual cores at my cities as I do with video encoding.

 

Why did you waste so much money on memory ? No consumer product out there uses that much memory or virtual cores, and probably never will =/

 

I own a video production company and this is my main system. I shoot over 100 projects a year so it's not uncommon to be editing, encoding for delivery, rendering in after effects, burning in encore, and a host of other system intensive tasks. I will sometimes have 20-30 apps open and running smoothly. When I sleep I can assign all 24 virtual cores to an encoding job. It splits the video into parts, encodes them separately and reattaches them on the other side. H.264 encoding is a good 10x faster than my last machine. With 32GB ram I still occasionally get page outs so I may put another 32GB in one day. I even skipped the SSD and use PCIe storage for the OS. I know I paid a premium for it but it's a champ. Dual 30" Dell displays are nice too. Can't wait to play SimCity at 2560x1600.

[BravoGreenONE 120]

I'm gonna run it on Windows 7 with Bootcamp on a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM. Would love to be able to throw all 24 virtual cores at my cities as I do with video encoding.

Why did you waste so much money on memory ? No consumer product out there uses that much memory or virtual cores, and probably never will =/

I own a video production company and this is my main system. I shoot over 100 projects a year so it's not uncommon to be editing, encoding for delivery, rendering in after effects, burning in encore, and a host of other system intensive tasks. I will sometimes have 20-30 apps open and running smoothly. When I sleep I can assign all 24 virtual cores to an encoding job. It splits the video into parts, encodes them separately and reattaches them on the other side. H.264 encoding is a good 10x faster than my last machine. With 32GB ram I still occasionally get page outs so I may put another 32GB in one day. I even skipped the SSD and use PCIe storage for the OS. I know I paid a premium for it but it's a champ. Dual 30" Dell displays are nice too. Can't wait to play SimCity at 2560x1600.

Well you wont have problems with rendering the new sc. Theres not that much to render

[SirChick 184]

 

 

I'm gonna run it on Windows 7 with Bootcamp on a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM. Would love to be able to throw all 24 virtual cores at my cities as I do with video encoding.

Why did you waste so much money on memory ? No consumer product out there uses that much memory or virtual cores, and probably never will =/

I own a video production company and this is my main system. I shoot over 100 projects a year so it's not uncommon to be editing, encoding for delivery, rendering in after effects, burning in encore, and a host of other system intensive tasks. I will sometimes have 20-30 apps open and running smoothly. When I sleep I can assign all 24 virtual cores to an encoding job. It splits the video into parts, encodes them separately and reattaches them on the other side. H.264 encoding is a good 10x faster than my last machine. With 32GB ram I still occasionally get page outs so I may put another 32GB in one day. I even skipped the SSD and use PCIe storage for the OS. I know I paid a premium for it but it's a champ. Dual 30" Dell displays are nice too. Can't wait to play SimCity at 2560x1600.

Well you wont have problems with rendering the new sc. Theres not that much to render

Graphical rendering is all sent to the GPU (or on board GFX chips) not CPU. GPU's have their own memory.

[Nique 291]

In a nutshell: This game is made for 2003+ pc's.. ridiculous if you ask me. The gamers who have actually a 'game' pc are being punished. Single core pc's are obsolete. Don't play games on your dads laptop.. just don't. If you want to play games; buy a pc that can handle modern (2009+) games.

 

Got a 4 core pc with  16GB Ram.. 13GB = waste for this game. 2 cores = waste for this game.. Great...

[DrKing2020 8]

Yea I figured as much. Sucks. Oh well at least we can max out the graphics preferences.

[Ma8thew 77]

In a nutshell: This game is made for 2003+ pc's.. ridiculous if you ask me. The gamers who have actually a 'game' pc are being punished. Single core pc's are obsolete. Don't play games on your dads laptop.. just don't. If you want to play games; buy a pc that can handle modern (2009+) games.

 

Got a 4 core pc with  16GB Ram.. 13GB = waste for this game. 2 cores = waste for this game.. Great...

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make an agent-based simulation engine like Glassbox multithreaded? Maintaining global state while simulating the interactions of thousands of agents does not parallelise in any obvious way. If EA were to have developed Glassbox multithreaded then the game would have cost possibly an order of magnitude more, would have taken far longer to develop, and would be much more difficult to test (and therefore, more unstable). Multithreading is not just a switch you can flick. It is one of the hardest problems in computer science.

 

Your conjecture that the simulation is single threaded in order to target single core 2003 PC's is nonsense, incidentally. The minimum specification for the game is an Athlon 64 X2 or a Core 2 Duo, both of which are dual core, and were produced from 2005 and 2006.

[Nique 291]

Yea maybe i undue the pc spec date a bit but still. It's like developing Simcity 4 (2002) for a 1994 PC.

[Ma8thew 77]

Yea maybe i undue the pc spec date a bit but still. It's like developing Simcity 4 (2002) for a 1994 PC.

No, it really isn't. As I explained, the simulator is single threaded for very good, pragmatic, engineering reasons that are unconnected with the hardware that the game targets.

[Alonjar 13]

In a nutshell: This game is made for 2003+ pc's.. ridiculous if you ask me. The gamers who have actually a 'game' pc are being punished. Single core pc's are obsolete. Don't play games on your dads laptop.. just don't. If you want to play games; buy a pc that can handle modern (2009+) games.

 

Got a 4 core pc with  16GB Ram.. 13GB = waste for this game. 2 cores = waste for this game.. Great...

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make an agent-based simulation engine like Glassbox multithreaded? Maintaining global state while simulating the interactions of thousands of agents does not parallelise in any obvious way. If EA were to have developed Glassbox multithreaded then the game would have cost possibly an order of magnitude more, would have taken far longer to develop, and would be much more difficult to test (and therefore, more unstable). Multithreading is not just a switch you can flick. It is one of the hardest problems in computer science.

 

Your conjecture that the simulation is single threaded in order to target single core 2003 PC's is nonsense, incidentally. The minimum specification for the game is an Athlon 64 X2 or a Core 2 Duo, both of which are dual core, and were produced from 2005 and 2006.

I'd say you're very wrong.  I create testing systems for a world famous amusement park, and simulating a multitude of concurrent "agents" is a perfect environment for multicore processing.  It actually doesnt get much better than that.

 

Single core was chosen because its lazy, fast (read: cheap) programming.  Simple as that.  They were able to rip code from EA's thousands of other projects, splice them together with some refinishing, and spit out something they could sell in short order.

 

Its the same reason almost all of the design decisions went the way they did.  Its EA's prime business strategy.  They buy "great" titles/companies, and then spit out "good enough" games under that brand until its used up and tossed away.  Rinse and repeat.

[Ma8thew 77]

 

In a nutshell: This game is made for 2003+ pc's.. ridiculous if you ask me. The gamers who have actually a 'game' pc are being punished. Single core pc's are obsolete. Don't play games on your dads laptop.. just don't. If you want to play games; buy a pc that can handle modern (2009+) games.

 

Got a 4 core pc with  16GB Ram.. 13GB = waste for this game. 2 cores = waste for this game.. Great...

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make an agent-based simulation engine like Glassbox multithreaded? Maintaining global state while simulating the interactions of thousands of agents does not parallelise in any obvious way. If EA were to have developed Glassbox multithreaded then the game would have cost possibly an order of magnitude more, would have taken far longer to develop, and would be much more difficult to test (and therefore, more unstable). Multithreading is not just a switch you can flick. It is one of the hardest problems in computer science.

 

Your conjecture that the simulation is single threaded in order to target single core 2003 PC's is nonsense, incidentally. The minimum specification for the game is an Athlon 64 X2 or a Core 2 Duo, both of which are dual core, and were produced from 2005 and 2006.

I'd say you're very wrong.  I create testing systems for a world famous amusement park, and simulating a multitude of concurrent "agents" is a perfect environment for multicore processing.  It actually doesnt get much better than that.

 

Single core was chosen because its lazy, fast (read: cheap) programming.  Simple as that.  They were able to rip code from EA's thousands of other projects, splice them together with some refinishing, and spit out something they could sell in short order.

 

Its the same reason almost all of the design decisions went the way they did.  Its EA's prime business strategy.  They buy "great" titles/companies, and then spit out "good enough" games under that brand until its used up and tossed away.  Rinse and repeat.

I'll have to defer to your expertise then. Could you explain (or give me something to read) how simulations with as much inter-dependancy as SimCity are parallelised? I do take issue with your claim that the Glassbox engine was written by splicing together other EA projects. Which of EA's other games use agent-based simulation?

[croxis 150]

When I watched the glassbox gdc video the agent system sounded similar to entity-component design. If it is then the agents themselves are little more than a collection of variables and then a system loops through the agents its tracking each tick. Each system lends itself to threading fairly well. This means the traffic system could be on a different thread from the health system, with a little bit of boiler plate to make sure an agent isn't being accessed by two systems at the same time.  What would be more difficult in this setup is splitting one system over two threads.

[jcole4lsu 32]

I'm pretty sure I remember a tweet from Ocean saying that their engineers saying there would be no advantage to multi-coring the simulation aspect of the game--it wouldn't improve performance. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

You are either wrong or they (Ocean) is flat out lying.  I would advise everyone who stumbles upon this thread to re-read Alonjar's post on multi-core processing.  There is no excuse for Glassbox to run on a single thread, other than pure laziness by the design team.  This makes me question if Glassbox is really new from the ground up or if its just a mash up of previous IP's under EA's umbrella.  I was pretty much on the fence about buying this game, but I think this has sealed it.