How does PA utilize system resources and is it constant across multiple architectures?

That's interesting. I can only hope that they can streamline this process moving forward in a future release. Also, I am wondering what that issue stems from?? Did Uber build this game engine from scratch, or are they using somebody else's?

The engine is completely made from scratch except for two pieces of middleware I believe, f-mod, and coherent ui. Order for them to make PA required an engine to be made from scratch. Do to how unique the game is.

When you said this, I was at a total loss. But knowing that you use a proprietary engine in conjunction with fmod and coherent UI as middle men, as one poster put it, puts your statement into better context.

I kept seeing the tab in a browser analogy. Knowing now that coherent UI uses the webGL (web graphics library) API ( based off openCL ) in conjunction with HTML5, CSS and javascript.

I will need to spend a day or two reading I think to learn enough to ask more intelligent questions.

two more observations:

1) while playing, the game will only utilize 4 Gigs of RAM. I currently have 10 installed. I have no idea what sort of memory requirements there are for games built on this platform, so it may just be super efficient in terms of system memory consumption. Or it may be a cap built into the system?
--> this is not a negative or a positive, just an observation.

2)I keep going back to the UI bottleneck. Nobody has been able to answer this but I am curious how the UI refreshing. its' rate of refresh? and weather or not it has to redraw static portions of the UI constantly? <- That would seem like a waste!

Are there UI updates in the works? Do you know if it is cosmetic? or a change to the way it is going to operate? I am just curious, if there is a thread regarding this, if you could post a link here that would be very helpful!

Oh, everything is simple. When you create game you don't want to implement everything on your own. You'll use some code which already exists to build your game.

Actually PA use multiple 3rd-party components, but most of them small and open source. But also game use two proprietary components:

• FMOD. It's middleware which handle anything related to sound output.
• Coherent UI. It's handle GUI.

Both components aren't actually shouldn't affect game performance a lot, but seems like Coherent it's brand new middleware and probably it's have some problems with compatibility.

It's not analogy, it's just fact. Coherent is Google Chrome. It's work exactly like Google Chrome, but it's a bit modified version of it.

Are you ever tried to create hm 8-10 planets? I'm totally sure memory usage will be higher than 4GB.

I'm not totally sure what do you want to ask, but: UI only updated when something in it changed (e.g your economy statistics). When your stats changed often UI updated for each frame.

I'm mostly sure devs can artificially limit update rate, but then we won't able to create smooth animation in UI for example. So I think they want to fix reason which cause this problem and not just use some "temporary solution".

Wrote this in another thread:

User interface is completely separate from the graphics. In fact there both running in isolated processes. here's a quote fom Mavor's blog.

Jon Mavor. (2012, Nov 22). Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update [Online]. Available: http://www.mavorsrants.com/2012/11/planetary-annihilation-engine.html

other thread:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/experiences-on-linux.51945/

So in theory, neither of the 2 pieces of 3rd party software should be holding back performance?

Well Uber said the UI is still first pass, which means it's a temporary one to just be able to play the game. I have no idear how the new UI looks, when it will be available, since uber does not give information about this topic. I can only hope it will be a far better one then it is now ^^

Obviously yes, but probably something need to be fixed first.

FMOD actually don't affect performance at all, it's solid middleware used in dozens AAA titles. It's have some crash behavior when no sound card found, but I'm not 100% sure if this FMOD or PA bug.

In a properly designed and builded system the i7 4960X will utterly crush a FX-8350. FX-8350 is still a great cpu but it just cant beat a i7 4960X. Dont look at benchmarks for this because both intel and amd optimize their cpu's for these benchmarks to get higher scores. But these scores dont reflect normal everyday use at all.

When going for value i would pick the FX-8350 for multithreading and a good i5 for singlethreading. But when money doesnt matter to me its a no brainer to take the i7 4960X.

I find it sad to see though that AMD just cant compete with intel in the high end market anymore. This is bad for us because intel can use big premiums on their cpu's. Luckily i heard intel is having some real trouble shrinking their architecture to 14nm so maybe AMD can use this time to catch up (they are still on 28/32nm) which gives intel a big advantage in power usage (which is very important for laptops which is a very big market).

Iam not fan of anyone. Sometimes AMD beats intel and sometimes intel beats AMD.

Nah that is not proper overclocking. Never buy the extreme the bang for buck ratio is awful and generally there's not much head room for overclocking.

I never said extreme processors give you the best bang for buck. I said if money was not a problem i would get a extreme processor.

If you want bang for buck then AMD is a good choose. That or getting a good i5. Unless you want absolute max performance there is no point in going much higher than that.

So I made yet another interesting observation today. While tracking Memory and GPU load at various intervals ( much like my processor load tests) I noticed an interesting phenomenon while in the 'join game' page and also in the game lobby.

RAM Usage - GPU Load
@ Idle: 2.09GB - 1%
@ Main screen: 2.48GB - 27%
@ Join Game: 2.48GB - 0-40% **
@ Game Lobby: 3.89GB - 0-50% **
@In game Start: 3.70GB - 65%
@In Game 20 min In: 3.86GB - 33%
@In Game 40 min In: 3.99GB - 28%
@In Game End 4.01GB - 63%

With this data (small 1 game sample) I have come to a few conclusions. Just more observations as I am just generally curious about what makes this game tick.

** while in the 'Join Game' and 'Game Lobby' I noticed quite the regular pulse of GPU load. I timed it for a while with a stopwatch and noticed that it happens at a 1 second frequency. (roughly, I am only human!). without writing software to track the pulses down to milliseconds, I think this number will suffice. Its not a big part of my observation anyways. Anyways, I think the pulsing load on the GPU stems from simple UI refreshing at a 1 second interval.
-For the 'Join Game' page I imagine this 1 second pulse is a call to refresh and repopulate the list of available games to join.
-For the 'Game Lobby' I imagine it is similar in that it is calling and refreshing the list of users, types of commanders selected, team colors, read/waiting status, and messenger, etc..

Why I find this curious is I would have expected those UI processes to be done at the processor, not the GPU. Hell, you can open up task manager and see all of the Coherent UI stuff populating the list. So, is there a way to see what kinds of instructions are being sent to the GPU? kind of like the task manger, but for the GPU in specific? That could be a really dumb question, but I have never needed to see it before..

I know the core concept of WebGL is to take load off of main CPU and put more of the game processing on the GPU. So this may account for why I see the spikes on the GPU, and not the CPU.

For game insself you can use any OpenGL trace tool:
https://code.google.com/p/glintercept/
http://apitrace.github.io/
There is also more professional instruments like AMD CodeXL:
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous-computing/codexl/
There also debugger for Intel HD:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/intel-gpa
I don't think those might be useful for person with no 3D programming experience, but anyway.

Also Coherent (which is same as Google Chrome) do not use OpenGL on Windows, it's use Direct3D though ANGLE. And you can get lot of performance-related information using it's debugger:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ui-debugger.50276/page-2#post-800540

Forget about WebGL it's high-level entity which is not found outside of browser.

while multiple cores in general allow multithreaded single apps/games, the best positive effect up to now is, that you can still run your half dozen standard applications (video, winamp, browser, skype,..) on the side without affecting the game too much, at least that's mostly the situation beyond dedicated multithread/multiprocess computing.

One aspect, which might be interesting in this discussion, is that we are currently talking about one window at gaming time. When we get more we will probably also see more threads covering the main application, at least that's my guess.

On the topic of extreme processors, sure they are nice but not worth their money and when money isn't a topic then I would go for a dual or quad socket board with the top shelf xeons which are still a bit faster than the extreme series plus a few titans while we are at it.
Talking about systems/procs without money context is a futile endeavour regardless of private or business case.

2 problems with xeons:
-They have lower clockspeeds than other cpu's
-Hard to overclock (even with the best cooling dont expect to go over even 4Ghz).

The only places where dual/quad xeons would shine would be heavily multithreaded situations where each core can be 100% used. Examples of this are: rendering, encoding, generating etc. In other area's a i7 4960X would actualy beat it.

That being said i dont think there is any game out currently you cannot run on max with overclocked xeons or extreme cpu's with a few titans.

haven't overclocked in years, given that the of the shelf speed of reasonable priced cpus is more than enough for the corresponding GPUs I'm willing to buy not to run in other bottlenecks. Aside from that, clock speed is not everything the bit of more cache of the xeons might come in handy, depending on the application.

But that wasn't my point, I was just pointing out that making performance evaluations/recommendations with out the performance per price calculations is useless, you can always pick from the top and be reasonable sure to run any game and application on it.
It's something I rarely see outside of private computer setups. Usually, people start from their minimal/targeted requirements and choose the cheapest way to get there with the quality conditions they insist upon. When I buy a car I don't sort the list by by price descending other than for fun.

grmml, I made a RL comparison and it had even a car in it.. it can only go downhill from here.

I have an overclocked i5 2500k with 4,5Ghz

I watch my system with my G19 LCD and AIDA64, so I can see when ever I want the system load etc.

PA uses 40-100% (yes games maxes out my monster)

RAM usage is about 5-9GB

GPU is about 30-70%

just my two cents

what you want is absolute max performance!

Let me tell you something, you haven't got a monster.

SXX, you always bring me the interesting data! I will pour over this stuff, just to get a better understanding. Your insights, as always, are greatly appreciated!