NPU for a.i

[Lorena_Scout]

It's a little bit early for sure, but there is any value using NPU's on the new intel/amd processors for a.i in general flight sims?

 

since it will take the load off from a few processes from the sim itself, maybe a few fps there and there and better ai, no more starwars rolls and some epic ground battles going.

 

or kind of falcon 4.0 dynamic campaign stile.

 

just a thought

[Aapje]

The issue is that many people won't have it in their PC, so you would then need both the old and the new system.

[Lorena_Scout]

2 minutes ago, Aapje said:

The issue is that many people won't have it in their PC, so you would then need both the old and the new system.

 

It's like when cliffs release, no one had the Pc specs to run it.  

 

But after a while, there it is.

 

It's more than a technical question for the devs, if this is possible.

 

But the new desktop processors will be release by the end of 2024 and probably beginning of '25.

 

After that we will see what the new tech can bring to the table. But if some of the devs already read about and have some expertise about current tech, for sure would be nice to hear.

 

 

[LLv34_Flanker]

S!

 

We have screaming hot hardware these days, yet lack any games that truly use all cores etc. Is it too expensive to code a game/sim from ground up utilizing the multicore CPUs or devs just too used to their old ways? No idea. Would be great to see a game or sim some day having a true multicore engine🤔

[Aapje]

It simply makes no sense to go overboard with multicore programming, because the overhead of transferring work to and from other cores and otherwise managing them will in many cases be worse than just doing the things on one core. So it's all about using other cores when it makes sense, but not when it doesn't.

 

Games typically cannot make sensible use of more than a relatively limited numbers of cores (6-8), also because the most parallelizable work is already done in a specialized device that has many more cores than your CPU, which is the video card. 

[LLv34_Flanker]

S!

 

Flight sims tend to be more CPU intensive than GPU. There was one thread about a submarine sim in the works that was programmed so that it used multicore. He had made "threads" that included different parts of the simulation running on different cores, but the so called "main thread" ran on first core of the CPU. So basically he could make run for example one core for crew etc. To simplify it. 

 

DCS is one flight sim that could use a lot of work in optimisation and performance. Not sure how much Vulkan API will bring to the table in that regard, but in X-Plane a friend reported increased performance with Vulkan. So there are ways to improve things in other ways too as you said Aapje

[Aapje]

The programmers doesn't actually select which core to run things on. They split things up in separate work processes that are indeed called threads. Then the operating system/driver decides where to run what threads.

 

This is not always done well, especially with e-cores, which is why disabling e-cores can help, or using Project Lasso or Intel APO, to make sure the right stuff runs on the correct cores.