What cuts are necessary for “CPU bound” games to reach 60fps on consoles?

[WhtR88t]

With all the hoopla about the PS5 Pro being useless because it can't hit 60fps in all games, I'm kind of curious of what kinds of things would need to be scaled back or down in games like Baldurs Gate 3, Starfield, etc to reach a stable 60fps on consoles?

I think it's easy to point out scaling back RT, resolution, texture detail, draw distance, etc on the GPU to hit 60, but what are things devs would have to scale back on the CPU to hit 60?

Could these games still work with scaled back CPU intensive tasks? Or is there something inherently tied to their gameplay that absolutely requires more CPU power for the core gameplay to function and impossible to scale down like they do visuals on consoles to hit 60fps?

 

[pswii60]

AI, physics, world persistence etc.

RT affects CPU usage too not just GPU.

 

[Zafir]

Well there's not too many things you can do for cpu bounding. If the game had an option to scale back npcs/enemy numbers being computed then that could be one thing.

And yeah RT is a huge hit to CPU. It's why there's concerns whether the ps5 pro will still be able to do it well.

 

[Kerberosorthos]

I think a common thing is to reduce NPC's in games.

Wasn't that a debate when Cyberpunk released and had less NPC on PS5 than Xbox ?

 

[julia crawford]

you need to cut the console open and glue another cpu

 

[Pargon]

Draw distance/LoD distance and certain shadow quality options tend to have a toll on the CPU as well.
But much of the time it's not that the game is "doing too much" - it's that things are not being done efficiently, or old systems are being pushed beyond the limits of what they were designed to scale to.

 

[WackoWambo]

Hard and costly choice: Optimize the code agonizingly and spend months looking for 5-10% efficiency gains in all your code. (No one enjoys this, its equivalent to proof reading your essay after you already submitted it and think it's good enough)

Easy choice: Cut features

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

I think a common thing is to reduce NPC's in games.

Wasn't that a debate when Cyberpunk released and had less NPC on PS5 than Xbox ?

Click to shrink...

Huh. i didn't know this tbh. It also means last-gen consoles have less NPCs too?
Also XSX CPU is not that far from PS5 in clock speed cus 99.99% of times it's multithreaded in use so in SMT mode so it's 3.6 Ghz and just 0.1 Ghz more than PS5 CPU.

 

[Kerberosorthos]

Huh. i didn't know this tbh. It also means last-gen consoles have less NPCs too?
Also XSX CPU is not that far from PS5 in clock speed cus 99.99% of times it's multithreaded in use so in SMT mode so it's 3.6 Ghz and just 0.1 Ghz more than PS5 CPU.

Click to shrink...

Yeah I remember a twitter war because of that. But if it actually wasn't the case it is still a thing to reduce NPC's to free up workload of CPU.

 

[JasoNsider]

It's frustrating reading posts that all act like GPU is the only component in a machine. I don't think people realize how much developers work tirelessly at trying to get CPU under or at their target budget. 16.6ms is just such an insanely low amount of time to get all simulations updated. It keeps people up at night heh.
Yes it is a lot of optimizations, but these are usually some of the most difficult aspects to figure out. For example, CDPR took more than 4 years to fully parallelize their CPU pipeline and yet still their work will never fully be done. And some games like the ones at Rockstar are basically worst case scenarios for figuring out how to budget the CPU allotment.

Games are a miracle, y'all.

 

[elenarie]

More time to work on things and develop tech expertise, that's what's needed, in my opinion. You can do a lot of things with the current hardware. But usually time and feature / content constraints is what is preventing some of this to work more smoothly.

We managed to push 128 players chaos at 60fps on current-gen, so the hardware is quite capable. But you need to know where you are going and what you are willing to compromise upon.

 

[Bonfires Down]

The obvious one is geometry which will free up CPU time on any game.

 

[snipe_25]

Games (especially larger games with lots of real-time systems) are complicated computer simulation programs that vary from game to game. You're not really going to get a satisfying general answer to this question. It all comes down to the various systems in the game and how efficiently they run.

 

[RivalGT]

I think it comes down to the engine. RE engine for example is very CPU demanding even on a linear game like RE4 remake.

UE5 is CPU heavy, but it's something they are working on improving.

 

[Gusy]

The obvious one is geometry which will free up CPU time on any game.

Click to shrink...

Geometric complexity is cpu bound? Thats super interesting. I thought that was solved since hardware T&L was introduced in the GeForce 256.

 

[vixolus]

I think it comes down to the engine. RE engine for example is very CPU demanding even on a linear game like RE4 remake.

UE5 is CPU heavy, but it's something they are working on improving.

Click to shrink...

I think that's because RE Engine (or specific titles like RE4 and DD2) aren't multithreading properly so a lot of usage is on single core or few cores. And multithreading is very difficult.

The best way to maximize CPU usage is smart threading and parallelization but it's very difficult stuff. Even for relatively simple programs, let alone games.

 

[neoak]

Geometric complexity is cpu bound? Thats super interesting. I thought that was solved since hardware T&L was introduced in the GeForce 256.

Click to shrink...

CPU has to issue commands to the GPU, like draw calls, etc.

 

[Santar]

Just cut the graphics.
That was easy.
Next question.

 

[UnderJollyRoger]

Huh. i didn't know this tbh. It also means last-gen consoles have less NPCs too?
Also XSX CPU is not that far from PS5 in clock speed cus 99.99% of times it's multithreaded in use so in SMT mode so it's 3.6 Ghz and just 0.1 Ghz more than PS5 CPU.

Click to shrink...

As far as I remember this was due to the fact that Cyberpunk had no native PS5/XS release initially. Due to how the backwards compatibility works in the PS5 the game could literally not use anything beyond ps4 levels and just ran at a higher clock. Xbox backwards compatibility could leverage more of the machines power.

 

[pksu]

Parallelism is still a problem when it comes to game logic for example. Current languages and tooling just do not lend itself to easy & robust implementation scaling across multiple cores well. Some engines do extremely neat things but most are still rather primitive. It's not an easy problem to solve and often it's death by thousand cuts instead of one simple bottleneck.

 

[EvilBoris]

Endless endless things can impact it , however there is always a balance.
There are ways of constructing your meshes and geometry which will have smaller file sizes, but will increase CPU useage.
Or you can reduce the CPU usage and the amount of memory needed will increase.

Everything is a constant trade off and a constant battle

 

[Finaika]

NPCs

 

[MorshuTheTrader]

Really depends. You could cut NPC/object counts, lower draw distance, lower physics/AI/animation update rates (so they update at a slower rate than the actual frame rate), etc. But those are just straightforward cuts, and may not be enough to make a big difference in a lot of cases. Modern CPUs' strength lies in having lots of cores that can run in parallel. It's very hard to take full advantage of that in software like games where synchronization is extremely important.

 

[neoak]

As far as I remember this was due to the fact that Cyberpunk had no native PS5/XS release initially. Due to how the backwards compatibility works in the PS5 the game could literally not use anything beyond ps4 levels and just ran at a higher clock. Xbox backwards compatibility could leverage more of the machines power.

Click to shrink...

Correct, Xbox One version was "Series aware" at launch

Wasn't a thing on PS5 until recently

 

[RivalGT]

I think that's because RE Engine (or specific titles like RE4 and DD2) aren't multithreading properly so a lot of usage is on single core or few cores. And multithreading is very difficult.

The best way to maximize CPU usage is smart threading and parallelization but it's very difficult stuff. Even for relatively simple programs, let alone games.

Click to shrink...

I was rather surprised by RE4 remake, given how well RE8 ran on PC.

 

[Asterikolt]

It's the sort of thing that can only really be solved with profiling code and repeated testing to find actual hotspots per frame. Depending on the architecture of the game, the answer will vary.

 

[balohna]

I think a common thing is to reduce NPC's in games.

Wasn't that a debate when Cyberpunk released and had less NPC on PS5 than Xbox ?

Click to shrink...

Yeah, games with crowds of NPCs will often implement solutions that unload some of the burden to the GPU.

 

[Greywaren]

Less NPCs or dumber AI for them. Worse physics. Worse simulation, in general.

It strongly depends on the game and how it's coded, though.

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

As far as I remember this was due to the fact that Cyberpunk had no native PS5/XS release initially. Due to how the backwards compatibility works in the PS5 the game could literally not use anything beyond ps4 levels and just ran at a higher clock. Xbox backwards compatibility could leverage more of the machines power.

Click to shrink...

Yeah that makes sense.

 

[ChitonIV]

With all the hoopla about the PS5 Pro being useless because it can't hit 60fps in all games, I'm kind of curious of what kinds of things would need to be scaled back or down in games like Baldurs Gate 3, Starfield, etc to reach a stable 60fps on consoles?

I think it's easy to point out scaling back RT, resolution, texture detail, draw distance, etc on the GPU to hit 60, but what are things devs would have to scale back on the CPU to hit 60?

Could these games still work with scaled back CPU intensive tasks? Or is there something inherently tied to their gameplay that absolutely requires more CPU power for the core gameplay to function and impossible to scale down like they do visuals on consoles to hit 60fps?

Click to shrink...

Optimization and novel coding techniques.

For the multiplatform games----re-writing the game code to specifically work better with the cache sizes available.

Profiling games for CPU frame times, seeing how that aligns with the game code, and figuring out what they can do to clean up the code and lower the average frame time.

A lot of games depend upon one or two main threads. Spreading tasks out over more threads and cores, where possible, will help lower CPU frame times. SpecialK is able to do this for Elden Ring, as a mod. And it helps a ton. Imagine what could be done with the actual game code!
*paralellization isn't always easy. But, it should be able to be done to some degree.

Intelligent cuts. This is a simple example. But, look at Snake Eater on PS2. Most of the time, you are interacting with 1 or 2 enemies at a time. They have good ragdoll physics. However, use an explosive on multiple enemies, and only 1 or 2 of them will have detailed ragdoll. The rest will comically roll away like logs.