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Originally Posted by SEE
Great post FS_Phat, thanks for keeping and posting those comments and reminding us all of the technical challenges this sim imposed!
One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?
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Forgive me if im a little out on this as your testing the limits of my knowledge here.. but i believe the CPU determines how fast polygons and triangles co-ordinates are calculated and the GPU renders the scene when all co-ordinates are complete for each frame. So for complex scenes with many polygons and triangles the CPU is very important.
I believe that currently the 3d rendering engine in the game is not running on separate cores yet so occasionally it hitches/stutters while it waits for the cpu core to complete some other instructions before it gets back to computing the polygon co-ordinates for the next frame.
When they move rendering to a dedicated core (or even split it over 2 cores) I believe most of the stutter issues will be gone. A lot of work has already gone into streamlining the rendering pipeline since the first release which is why stutters are all but eliminated in the current version. IT WILL only get better over time. Maybe they wont get it 100% first go with the next big change but they will keep working on it as its a very complex issue to spread the load across multiple cores and still keep the game fluid and everything in the game world in sync with each frame. 1 or 2 cores just isnt enough CPU power for everything that has to be calculated in this game, and more than 2 cores is harder to get everything running smoothly and in sync. Add SLI or Crossfire to the equation and its even harder again!
PS. This is why 4way SLI on my rig runs smooth as silk in split frame rendering mode because the scene is split into 4 smaller windows with less polygons per GPU to handle and no stutter in the rendering pipleline waiting for each frame to be rendered as all 4 GPUs render to the same frame at the same time. This also splits the load a little more over the CPU cores because Nvidia drivers are multi-threaded.
SLI Split frame rendering is smoother than a single card and way way way smoother than SLI alternate frame rendering, especially when 4GPUs are involved.
Forgive me for any inaccuracies, im just a sales guy working in IT with enough knowledge to be dangerous!
