High Cpu usage 1 core, rest are low?

[Darthenron]

Specs: Fx- 8350 4.3
Nvidia gtx 760 2 gigs
12 gig ram
windows 7
Motherboard: asrock 990fx extreme 4

So i was tinkering around trying to figure out why my framerate goes from 20 fps to 130+ fps outside of towns and whatnot. When i went to my resource monitor tab Cpu's 1-7 were at 20% while cpu 8 was at 95%. I disabled cpu 8 for ffxiv and then core 3 went to 95% and the rest were at 20%. FFXIV is not utilizing more then 1 core. The threads are just sitting on 1 core.. This would explain the fps drops people are having in crowded areas because our cpu's are randomly getting nailed from the inablity to offhand the load.

[Syx]

See my post: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post1234692

It is an issue with DirectX 9's poor multithreading support. There is no fix outside of rewriting the game engine specifically with a multithread DX9 rendering pipeline with a good thread synchronization backend or updating AND migrating the engine to DX11, which Squeenix claims should happen sometime next year with the launch of the PS4 version.

[JamieLee]

See my post: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post1234692

It is an issue with DirectX 9's poor multithreading support. There is no fix outside of rewriting the game engine specifically with a multithread DX9 rendering pipeline with a good thread synchronization backend or updating AND migrating the engine to DX11, which Squeenix claims should happen sometime next year with the launch of the PS4 version.

Thats not 100 percent accurate.. The client itself still needs to support parallel processing to take advantage of multi threaded multi core.. systems if its not its still bound by one cpu core.

[Syx]

Thats not 100 percent accurate.. The client itself still needs to support parallel processing to take advantage of multi threaded multi core.. systems if its not its still bound by one cpu core.

You are correct. An application must be specifically written to take advantage of multithreaded rendering (MTR). The main problem FFXIV currently faces is pushing graphical features inherent in the DX11 API through a DX9 rendering pipeline. The code for these features and effects resides in the game engine, so every time the feature is rendered, it has to travel all the way back to the engine code to render the appropriate effect on objects and send the draw instructions to the DX9 API. This will be improved when switching to DX11, which supports these features in the API itself, so the draw calls have a shorter distance to travel to the GPU. DX11 natively supports MTR thanks to a built-in thread synchronization engine. The game absolutely does have to be initially programmed to take advantage of this feature, though. Retrofitting this feature to DX9 would be an extremely difficult task as a synchronization engine would have to be created to keep all the rendering threads synchronized with each other, and this would introduce greater overhead in the rendering pipeline.

[JamieLee]

You are correct. An application must be specifically written to take advantage of multithreaded rendering (MTR). The main problem FFXIV currently faces is pushing graphical features inherent in the DX11 API through a DX9 rendering pipeline. The code for these features and effects resides in the game engine, so every time the feature is rendered, it has to travel all the way back to the engine code to render the appropriate effect on objects and send the draw instructions to the DX9 API. This will be improved when switching to DX11, which supports these features in the API itself, so the draw calls have a shorter distance to travel to the GPU. DX11 natively supports MTR thanks to a built-in thread synchronization engine. The game absolutely does have to be initially programmed to take advantage of this feature, though. Retrofitting this feature to DX9 would be an extremely difficult task as a synchronization engine would have to be created to keep all the rendering threads synchronized with each other, and this would introduce greater overhead in the rendering pipeline.

There in lies the problem trying to push features though a pipeline that wasn't designed to run that feature... Yes we know and are well aware that dx9 is from 2005 and lacks alot of modern enhancements.. I do get why they targeted dx 9 to begin with it allows the most ammount of user base across a wide range of hardware... What i don't understand is why they just didn't Leverage Open GL over a dx9 then dx 11 client as it supports all the same features as dx9 and dx 11 without as much issue... In before windows (windows does support Open GL) Anyways yes a move to DX11 will help some so long as its coded to a support multi core multi threading across the pipeline and is actually programmed properly.. IF not were going to wind up with massive overhead with very little visual difference.

To those that asked why i mentioned Open GL.. Is the ps3 and ps4 both use open gl well opengl ES or Ps3 case PGL. Its pretty cross platform and can be adapated to Stock open gl without much effort. Actually Open GL will run PGL and es apps without any intervention.