SL Multicore CPU support?

[cykarushb]

So ive got a terrible processor paired with a mid tier gpu, Athlon 5350 and a 750ti. Its a CPU bottleneck but in most games its not a big deal, i still push 60fps in GTA V, CSGO, etc all on decent settings in 1080p.

SL however, the CPU bottleneck really shows. There is little to no performance difference between Ultra settings and the bare minimum. Turning off water and shaders gives a small boost but not much. This is definitely because the single core performance of this athlon is absolute trash and is on par with the average 6xxx series Core2Duo.

Ive got SL set to top priority, allowing it to use all cores, power settings let max CPU usage occur, but SL never bumps above 24-25% of my CPU, obviously only using one core.

Is there any way to get SL to use more than one core? Do any 3rd party viewers support multicore processing?

[Nalates Urriah]

You all are right the AM1 is not as old as I thought. 2014

23 hours ago, cykarushb said:

SL shows the CPU bottleneck in that there is next to no performance difference between most settings that are GPU bound, no AA and 16x AA has no impact on FPS, i get ~30fps in places like Social Island instances, but ~10-15 in any place more complicated. So if im playing literal bare minimum settings 720p, i still get ~30fps. If i play absolute ultra settings in 1080p, I still get ~30fps. So my CPU is holding me back.

 

Overclocking may or may not work, i have the ECS Kam1-l mini itx board, its one of the few that doesnt have a dedicated 4pin for CPU power, so i dont want to push anything crazy through the 24pin which already has everything else to deal with. I think the bios utilities would let me do some form of FSB overclocking, but on the stock cooler most people can only push 2.2-2.3ghz and that wont be much of an improvement over 2.05ghz.

11

AA is far more a video card thing than a CPU thing. So, I am not surprised you see no difference when you change AA.

Turning shadows on and off is far more CPU intensive. I would expect a change as you enable/disable shadows.

The difference between 720p and 1080p is mostly a graphics card load. Enabling and disabling shadows makes about a 6% change in GPU load. The change in CPU load is none to maybe 6%... I'd have to do more testing to be definitive. But, the drop in CPU load is fuzzy from just eyeballing it, I would say no change mostly. I only see about a 15% change in FPS enabling/disabling shadows.

In general, I am going to run 30 to 60 FPS on an i5-6600 @ 4.1GHz w/GTX 1060 6GB. And with shadows, Sun/Moon, Projectors my GPU load stays <50%.

What you are expecting from SL is probably unrealistic and assumes similarities between SL and other games that do not exist. The Lab considers 10 FPS playable... Unless you are playing combat games in SL, they are pretty much right. The flexibility and diversity in SL are not available in other computer games. Since much of the SL world is made by non-professional hobbyists, you are going to see non-professional-performance. That the Lab's programmers get the performance they do from non-optimized everything I find amazing.

 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Short answer: nope, sorry! No multicore for SL.

Longer answer: how exactly does the CPU bottleneck "show" in SL? Slow loading times which aren't network related? Crashes? Low FPS? 
I'm actually surprised that you get 60fps in a game like GTA V or even the single core lover CSGO. But thay may depent on what you call "decent settings".

You might see mediocre improvement if you look into OCing that little APU moderately ... if your cooling and power supply is up to it.

But keep in mind that it was never meant for serious gaming purposes and rather for lightweight activities which may need good on-board graphics.

[cykarushb]

GTA V plays at 60fps normal in 1080p, the bottleneck is visible there since theres no performance difference from 720p to 1080p. CSGO performs better in 720p on all low, where i can push 90fps, but 60fps on medium/low in 1080p is optimal.

SL shows the CPU bottleneck in that there is next to no performance difference between most settings that are GPU bound, no AA and 16x AA has no impact on FPS, i get ~30fps in places like Social Island instances, but ~10-15 in any place more complicated. So if im playing literal bare minimum settings 720p, i still get ~30fps. If i play absolute ultra settings in 1080p, i still get ~30fps. So my CPU is holding me back.

 

Overclocking may or may not work, i have the ECS Kam1-l mini itx board, its one of the few that doesnt have a dedicated 4pin for CPU power, so i dont want to push anything crazy through the 24pin which already has everything else to deal with. I think the bios utilities would let me do some form of FSB overclocking, but on the stock cooler most people can only push 2.2-2.3ghz and that wont be much of an improvement over 2.05ghz.

 

So a game that does use multiple cores, GTAV for example, can take advantage of a fairly budget quadcore to properly utilize it and keep things in balance with the GPU for the most part. The bottleneck is still there, as i said, no different from 720p normal to 1080p normal, but if i can do that on the Athlon, if SL was multicore i could easily get better FPS.

But oh well, maybe in the future?

[Lillith Hapmouche]

GTA V is a rare example of plain brilliant optimizing even for low end hardware, so sadly not the norm. The beauty is that the FPS you mention for SL are absolutely fine for this kind of environment. Your AO animations might look a little smoother on your screen if you get to 60fps or above, but that's a plain cosmetic effect. 
If you had described serious loading issues inworld, some more investigation would have made sense. But in this case, I'd even forget about the OC idea, unless you seriously want to give it a try due to the real games.

By the way, you do have a SSD for your OS as well as your SL cache? That'll help immensely with the overall feel of performance and faster loading times, yet probably not with more FPS.

[cykarushb]

Yeah, Windows 8.1 and SL both use the 120gb SSD

I keep most of my other games on the 5400rpm HDD since i dont care much about loading times in most games.

[Lindal Kidd]

It's not instructive to compare frame rates for other games with SL.  In Second Life, almost all content is user created, and the users have no idea how to optimize their builds and textures for viewer performance.  Moreover, SL downloads content all the time, while most games download a lot of their content to your local hard drive where it can be retrieved faster.

I have a high performance CPU and GPU, and I'm happy any time I get more than 25 fps in Second Life.

[Nalates Urriah]

I am not sure why you think 25% use of the CPU means only one core is being used? My i5 quad core will run all 4 cores at 25% (varies from 15% to <50%) and say I am using 25% of CPU.

The SL viewers use multiple cores. For the last several years the Lindens have been increasing the thread count to improve performance. In general core SPEED is more important than core count, number of cores.

Using CPUID's Hardware Monitor you can watch the CPU core's firing up as a viewer starts. When I close the viewer I can watch some of my i5 cores drop to 0 or near 0 use. This indicates the viewer was dominating several of the cores.

There are a number of threads here about multi-core use starting in 2011. Back then V2 was a problem as it was pretty much a single thread for most of the viewer activity. But, that has changed. I haven't dug deep enough into the viewer program analysis to see if the render process is multithreaded now or not. But, most of the other supporting processes have their own threads.

The 4 cores you have will be used unless you have multithreading turned off in the viewer or your system controls.

From the Debug Settings:

• CurlUseMultipleThreads
• PluginUseReadThread
• RunMultipleThreads

Use the default settings for these Debug Settings.

I have no idea about where the AMD CPU control settings are. Google.

If you analyze the threads running on your system while the viewer is up you should see 20+/- 'viewer' threads running at any one time.

If you are seeing just one core in use with the viewer, something is wrong. The viewers have the capability to use multiple cores. But, don't guess at what is happening from aggregated performance numbers. Look to see what is really happening.

Your 2.2GHx CPU is going to slow you down. Actually your 5350 is spec'd at 2.05GHz. Your CPU uses the AM1 socket. I don't see any significantly faster CPU's for that socket. So, your bottleneck is a combination of CPU and motherboard. You are using old tech. SL is becoming dependent on newer tech while trying to support older systems. Yours is pretty old. But, it shouldn't be all that bad for use at Graphics Mid.

AMD uses the idea more slower cores are better. Intel thinks fewer faster cores are better. Intel works better with SL. But, AMD vs Intel in SL is an old debate and the measured results provide no substantially clear winner. One's advantage over the other is marginal as best I can tell. I prefer Intel.

I have a series of articles about hardware and Second Life here. Second Life Computer Specs.

Edited September 22, 2017 by Nalates Urriah
typo

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Just a quick rundown ...

1) cores != threads

2) Compared to some other ancient tech, the AM1 socket and that APU are merely 3 years old. But, for granted, they were always meant for media and very light gaming purposes. 

3) I keep struggling with the math behind this, but I'm under the impression that an overall CPU usage of 25% can be an indicator for a hard CPU limit for a quadcore, because it indicates that one of the four cores is under full load with a singlecore-optimized software... I think.
Hence why it's handy to have tools like MSI Afterburner which can show the single core load in realtime as a screen overlay. CPUID Hardware Monitor probably can log similar readings.

4) AMD vs. Intel sounds quite new and way less popular than the "get a Nvidia card, AMD doesn't work with SL" superstition ... and I keep cringing when I see the "do you have an ATI card?" in Firestorm's support chat. ATI has been dead since 2006, just let it rest in peace eventually.

5) Intel is pretty much struggling to adapt to AMD's new Ryzen generation. We'll see how Coffee Lake will end up in the review in early October...  

[cykarushb]

Ive got SL set to use all 4 cores, real time priority. But when its running its using mainly Core 0 and maybe Core 1? It doesnt touch the other two.

The Athlon 5350 is 4c/4t but not hyperthreaded like intel stuff is, the little kabini cores on their own are similar in performance to Conroe cores from the Core2Duo era of Intel. The 5350 is ~50% better in overall performance compared to a Core2duo E6400 at 2.13ghz which is a pretty even comparison of the two. So yeah, definitely compares to older tech, but AM1 is fairly new otherwise. DDR3 and SATA 3 and all that Jazz.

I know the AM1 stuff is for light use, its what its original purpose was, office machines, streaming boxes, NAS systems, etc. But paired with a decent graphics card its definitely capable of light gaming, as shown by GTA V, CSGO and the variety of other games i play.

All the above mentioned debug settings in SL dictate that SL should be using multiple threads, yet its just not utilizing it. Furthermore the bit that its using its not even maxing out, which is a bit disappointing, its a 19w processor, i dont care if its running at 100% 24/7, it should be using more of the 1 or 2 cores its utilizing. My power settings as well allow the CPU to be running at max performance all the time.

Pics related at the bottom, priority and usage.

For the slightly more unrelated things about AMD, this I also dont get. The whole "bunch of weak processors" debacle was true for the FX series processors, Bulldozer was trash and should've been scrapped on conception, but it still worked. AMD has had poor single core performance since they started all that. Early Sledgehammer and Newcastle chips were one of the things that made Intel frantically try and get better benchmark scores by bribing tech reviewers back in the Pentium 4 era. Which was hilarious tbh. But now AMD is back in competition in a few ways, the Zen architecture is blowing away Intels competing processors, Zen2 around the corner is probably going to do the same. Threadripper made their high end i7's and i9 chips look like single core celerons, and EPYC is absolutely demolishing the Intel monopoly on the server market, with a 16c EPYC leaving 20c+ Xeon Platinum chips in the dust.

Same thing with the whole AMD vs Nvidia GPU thing, they've been about the same for a long time, ATI was just more popular with low end notebook graphics (2004, my Thinkpad T42 had an ATI Mobility 7500, very weak GPU) and thats where they got their repudiation on SL, since a lot of people were using laptops with these awful dedicated graphics chips in them and wondering why they couldnt play, "oh it must be because its ATI", because everyone with Nvidia was on desktop hardware that was perfectly capable of playing SL. Nowadays theres no difference, even going back multiple generations, Nvidia has generally had more powerful top of the line cards, but AMD has always been price to performance going back to the HD 4000 series. RX Vega now is even competing with the ultra high end Nvidia cards.

Coffee Lake is also going to be an absolute flop, another generation of 1-5% performance increases and confusing Skews, Kaby Lake-X also seems like intel just flopping around trying to throw new stuff on the market to keep in the news. Have you seen the new dual core i3-7360X? A 112w processor on freaking x299? Retails for over 220$? 100mhz clock speed increase at almost twice the TDP as an i3-7350K (which was already a dumb chip on its own), on the HEDT platform designed for high end i7's and i9's.