Multithreading - The root of most problems with AOE4

Age of Empires IV IV - Report a Bug
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Some of you might have seen the new Digital Foundry video (timestamp 12:32)

In it is clearly visible that the game uses Multithreading very poorly.

The reason why this is the case is probably because the engine on which the game is running is a relic(no pun intended) on which relic made a lot of games like Dawn of war series, Company of heroes etc. and comes from a different age. Although it was surely updated over the time it is clear that it is not up for the job when it comes to games of today.
If you look at a different video about the RTS Ashes of singularity from 2018 you can see that lately lot has changed Ashes of the Singularity | i9-9900K + Vega 64 LC | CPU & GPU Focused 1080P Benchmarks - YouTube

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The reason why I’m saying this is the root of most of the problem is that it is very likely that:

  1. It is the reason why there is a 200 unit pop cap.
  2. It is the reason why the zoom is so small.
  3. It is the reason why the models are relatively low poly compared to what people expected from a AAA studio full priced game helmed by microsoft
  4. It is the reason why there is huge framedrop when moving the camera.

Can this be fixed? I don’t know. Probably not. If not then they should have made the game on a different engine.

10 Likes
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Yea there should be tons of likes here. Unfortunately this i don’t think will ever change, i guess it’s just the engine matter and to change it would require huge amounts of work(like 10 people working over it for a year or two) and this is just simply not worth a work which those workarounds can be applied which you mentioned. This is really sad and i think this will kind of kill this game - performance issues and no real multihread support. What is really sad that this is year 2021 where 6/12 cpu or 8/12 are really common and 4/8 is defacto standard in gaming rigs and even so game has problems to utilize even 2 cores fully(on my ryzen 3600x there is only one thread utilized fully like 80%+ and another one like 40%+, all other are staying max up to 10%).

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I always had a hunch that the zoom issue was due to technical limitations. like… how could they not fix this is any of their games?

cuz it cant be fixed.

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It could be fixed but optimizing a app or game engine to make good use of multiple cores/threads is a lot of work. I’m amazed it wasn’t done during development though.

This explains things like busy 4v4 matches being able to drag my RTX 3080 to 48-50 FPS @1440p. And when it happens GPU usage is less than 50 percent and one out of 12 threads on my CPU is at 95-98 percent usage while the other 11 are barely doing anything.

Meanwhile I can play red dead 2 maxed out with a rock solid 60 FPS but when I look at CPU usage it’s making efficient use of all 12 threads to keep the GPU fed with data.