Game Dev Explained: Why Games don't use all your CPU cores.

In this new video series I try to answer questions about game development for non game developers. It's by no means a deep dive, rather then a high level explanation of why things are like they are in game making.

[rangelebert]

It's all about the game engines, usually they are not ready and even have limitations preventing such optimizations from working. Devs don't go on low-level programming, that's why the engines exists. We need to wait to the engines to automatically makes more use of the threads, as standard is NOT up for the game devs to do that, making game engines are completely different than using them to create games. Of course you can modify the engines or use some function to do that, but any messing around with threads are always a headache (trust me), it easily leads to errors, that's why no game dev will mess with that if they don't need to, so in the end it's up to the engines devs to optimize the engines.

There is another issue too, nobody wants to take that job to optimize since the majority of gamers doesn't have more than 4 cores (look at Steam Survey), a very few percentage have 6 or more cores, so there is no point on optimizing it if in the end it must play perfectly with 4 cores. I believe that's is the major point, they will only optimize it once the majority of players has more cores on their game machine.

But that's no reason to be concerned, as the entry-level CPUs begins to have more threads, these engines will be updated, up to recently entry-level CPUs has 4 threads, it was just NOW that 10th gen intel and Ryzen 3000 began shipping 4 cores / 8 threads CPUs on their i3/r3. Which means now cheap CPUs has up to 8 threads available, so we will start to see better scaling up to 8 threads (today usually is 4 or 6)

[papichuckle]

I have 64 cores and a 128 threads so basically I might aswell take a pair of tweezers to it and leave 1 core in and increase the ghz to 20, 000

[ThaMentalGod]

a PERFECT example of optimization is teardown btw, that game fucking runs smoothly on my shitass 4 core 4ghz, 1050 with 4gb shared mem and 8gb of ram laptop 😎altho i gotta set the res to 75% and low settings, but still looks great and runs most importantly smooth as hell as i said 😎rly impressive ngl. and i think the reason for that is bcuz the engine and the game was made by 2 ppl, so they had lots of freedom on tweaking and creating the engine to their liking obv

[pagey]

Oh that explains why RaceRoom is terrible on my 8 core 16 thread CPU, Plays much better on my 3770, , iracing plays better on the new PC 😊

[LoRdDyY]

No devs are just to lazy to do it instead they rather just give you a cash grab game knowing the sheeple will buy it up.