Request for multi-core support

[Millerzeit]

Love the games, (own every one) but as a real-time player, this game absolutely chugs, my comp swims through Battlefield no problem and gets respectable frame rates even on Rome II, but as this engine has no multi-core support, it feels like it is severely handicapped the performance of higher end machines (multi-core are now the "standard").

Obviously performance increases for We-Go, but I prefer real time when not playing multi.

I get pretty sub par even on balanced settings.

As shown by the recent update to CK2 for multi-core support, that game's performance has markedly increased for many gamers and RT's new massive maps almost demand a multi-core support.

I know this takes time and $, but I have faithfully paid and waited (I believe this has been requested for years now), and after this I cannot justify more. again love the series, but please support it for the future.

**Secondary wish, in multiplayer allowing for multiple players per side, each controlling a company etc.**

Thanks,

[womble]

ISTR Steve saying that multicore won't help much. The big bottlenecks are memory and GPU. A single CPU core is more than capable of calculating the results and progress of a turn in less than a minute; it's the ready-access storage of the large maps and the rendering of the vast numbers of elements on those maps which choke machines.

It sounds plausible but I could be misremembering.

[Bulletpoint]

(multi-core are now the "standard").

I agree, even my ancient laptop is a dualcore.. and it's the computer I use to play the game, so even for me it would give a performance boost. I only play WeGo though.

[para]

I like Real Time but stay away from big battles. Everything practically stops which is disappointing.

I have a pretty decent spec PC too.

[Battlefront.com]

We are certainly working on this. As you guys say, by now it's pretty safe to cut off support for people without at least 2 cores. So we are exploring ways to allow limited use of other cores when it offers a big payback in performance. For example, we have identified a specific part of game loading that typically maxes out a single core. By rewriting just that portion of the code we can speed up the loading process significantly and quite "safely".

Extending multicore support to runtime game elements is a lot less "safe". It has to be done carefully and tested like crazy. But there are definitely things we have in our crosshairs. A couple of things having access to other cores could make a big difference.

One thing we will not do is rewrite the entire game engine to be compliant with multicores. This is absolutely not viable for us. It's a massive code base and we'd basically have to stop all work on everything for a very long period of time. And for the most part it won't do much to speed up the game more than the selective approach we're exploring.

If any of you guys lived through the transition of the old Motorola based Mac processors to RISC PowerPC the above will sound familiar to you. For several years the MacOS, and most of the programs that ran on it, were selectively optimized for the newer architecture. Things got progressively faster without a huge gap of time when there was no progress at all.

In general our approach to CM improvements is like this.

Steve

[para]

I have more or less moved across to we-go now with the H2HH games i play. I like RT, but big battles on big maps was far too frustrating and mostly impossible for me.

It is good to know that you are still looking at ways to improve load times and game performance though.

Hopefully, sometime in the not too distant future i will be able to get back to big battles in RT

thank you Steve.