How Well Modern Linux Games Scale To Multiple CPU Cores

[cj.wijtmans]

Agreed. But I think the point eydee was making - which I agree with - is that if you get a Ryzen 7 instead of an i5 you won't suffer much in game performance. That's not true if you got an FX-8350 instead of an i5.

It seems like a really nice CPU indeed. It might be my next one when i build my round pc case this year. But we are only a niche :3

[qsmcomp]

Agreed. But I think the point eydee was making - which I agree with - is that if you get a Ryzen 7 instead of an i5 you won't suffer much in game performance. That's not true if you got an FX-8350 instead of an i5.

You can castrate an i7-7700K to 0.8 gigahertz

[mastercoms]

I play games and compile things, as I'm a developer. Therefore, Ryzen looks very valuable to me as my next purchase.

[chimpy]

Great article Michael. So I guess it's true that most games just use between 2 to 4 cores.

[bug77]

Quite shocking how bad the scaling of even modern games (escp. Talos!) is.
I guess the "fast enough" mindset when developing commercial games is dominant - most games are GPU limited anyway and quad core CPUs are dominant right now - so not a lot manpower is used to optimize any further.

So AMD was right when telling the world the games were the issue with Ryzen-7.

It's not all about optimizing. At some point, no matter what you do, you have to sync with user input.
And even if you split the work over, say, 8 threads and each thread needs just 10% CPU time on average, all those threads will run just as fine on two cores. Scaling is a bit more complicated than people think it is.

For me, the choice is simple: I always keep a CPU indicator in my tray. If it's not full for a significant amount of time, then I don't need more cores.

[dungeon]

Great article Michael. So I guess it's true that most games just use between 2 to 4 cores.

On current steam survey 46.19% of people have 2 cores and 47.74% have 4 cores.

So games are optimized for the mass and that ~94% of userbase, which is kind of normal and expected

[Xaero_Vincent]

So this shows that for the purposes of Linux gaming, a basic quad core with hyper threading usually turned off (except for a couple games) tends to be the best choice for now.

[darkbasic]

"How BAD Modern Linux Games Scale To Multiple CPU Cores"

Fixed for you.

[cj.wijtmans]

On current steam survey 46.19% of people have 2 cores and 47.74% have 4 cores.

So games are optimized for the mass and that ~94% of userbase, which is kind of normal and expected

or most people justb uy 2/4 cores because thats all you need for a game. correlation =/= causation.

[indepe]

Great test, good idea! For the next time, I hope for even more (popular) games, like Tomb Raider and Shadows of Mordor.

Great article Michael. So I guess it's true that most games just use between 2 to 4 cores.

Yes, however some of the games (of the same type) also show that it is in fact possible to "parallelize" the CPU tasks as well. (For the GPU, that was already obvious.)

Thus, it seems, Ryzen 7 could become the best gaming CPU, if game developers choose to make it so.