- Overall, do you think the 16 core is better than the 32 core? We do seem to be running into rapidly diminishing returns here.
- What percentage of the game today (circa 2020) do you think is multi-threaded? The blog post in 2017 said that 60--70% per frame was multi-threaded. Has that improved? Do you think that it will improve by launch day?
- Are different scenes more multi-threaded? Imagine a game with a unit limit of just 500, versus say, a unit limit of the full 2048 (the current engine limit). Would the 2048 unit game be more multi-threaded?
- Are there any other advantages to an HEDT CPU? The one that I see is that HEDT CPUs have quadruple channel RAM, but I don't think that this would translate into better FPS. Is Bannerlord CPU memory bandwidth bottlenecked? At 4k resolutions, it is not uncommon for games to be GPU memory bandwidth restricted (it also depends on the GPU), but less so CPU. I don't see how the other benefits of the HEDT platform would be beneficial (ex: more PCIe lanes).
- After the game is released (Ex: we already have a naval expansion planned), are there plans to make a higher percentage of the game multi-threaded?
1-Diminishing returns is a good term for explaining our situation. Besides the theoretical problems, on every game including Bannerlord there are some workloads that can be parallelized, and some that can't be. So consider a frame in a combat situation like: (2x ST workload) + (16x MT workload) + (1x ST workload) + (8X MT workload) + (3X ST workload). If you have a 4 core cpu it would be take 12x time (2 + 4 + 1 + 2 + 3). For a 8 core cpu with the same architecture it would take 9x time and for 16 core it would be 7.5x time. After 16 cores, core count doesn't affect too much, like for example a 32 core cpu would take 6.75x time. So a cpu with a faster single threaded performance would be a better solution after a certain number of cores. I wouldn't buy a CPU with less than 8 cores though, considering next-gen consoles have 8 cores.
2-We're always trying to improve how much of a frame that can be multithreaded and will work on this until full release.
3-I'm not sure about this. The parts of a frame that are better threaded are indeed related to units(like AI or physics) but they also have single threaded parts. Though, for example campaign parts are mostly single threaded.
4-HEDT CPUs tend to have low single threaded performance so I don't think they're very good for games besides some exceptions. I don't think we have cpu memory bottleneck at all.
5-Yes!
If I'm not mistaken, fastest consumer CPU for Bannerlord right now is 10900K. This may change after 5900X is released, so we'll see