Games, Games, Games

Games aren’t noted for embracing the multicore world. Intel chips, with their stronger singlecore performance, are still the CPUs of choice for gaming PCs, but that doesn’t mean AMD’s offerings, which are stronger in multithreaded applications, are being left behind. Gamers are more likely to be GPUlimited than waiting on their CPUs right now.

BattlefieldV appears to spread itself across a lot of threads, but never utilizes our 16-core Threadripper above 25 percent, which the math tells us equates to 100 percent usage on a quad-core. It’s nothing a Ryzen 5 couldn’t provide. TotalWar: Warhammer II makes better use of the same system, but tops out at around 50 percent usage. A Ryzen 7 could handle that.

As compute-heavy tasks such as AI are shifted to GPUs, there will be less for the CPU to do. However, as games become more complex and realistic, the tasks left to the CPU require more power. Oculus VR’s CTO, and former id Software chief, John Carmack opined back in 2005 that single-threaded applications had had their day, but there would be diminishing returns from the first generations of multithreaded games, as developers figured out how to use parallel processors.

By 2008, he was starting to make progress, explaining at an Intel keynote that the id Tech 5 engine (used for the first Rage) split its game logic into one thread and its rendering system into another, with a third to manage streaming, compression, and analysis. Rage was a beautiful game, but a very static world, lacking many of the physics interactions we now take for granted.

Ten years on, he seems to have cracked it, stating in a video made in association with AMD that the upcoming id Tech 7 engine, which will power next year’s Doom

Eternal, will “consume all the CPU Ryzen can offer.” That’s Ryzen, not Threadripper, but the new, more parallel, game engine, along with the Vulkan graphics API that accelerated Doom, should show some exciting performance when we get to see it.