SLI Suport ?

[vaffel]

hey is it possible to get SLI support soon? maybe SLI will help a little on the low FPS

[bekkar]

maybe you should invest in a better cpu.

[vaffel]

maybe you should invest in a better cpu.

first off how can you tell me to invest in better cpu when you do not know what I have.
that being said it is not the CPU that is the problem it is the poor optimization of the game.
so full SLI support would be of great help

and if you were wondering bekkar I play on the following configuration

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3, Socket-2011
CPU:Intel® Core i7-3970X Extreme 6 core 4,5 GHz
GPU: x2 GeForce GTX TITAN BLACK 6GB SLI
RAM:Kingston 32GB DDR3 2133MHz minne
PSU: Cooler Master 1200w silent pro gold
HDD: Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 480GB systemdisk
Screen: BenQ 24" 3D LED XL2420T

[bekkar]

wasn't meant to offend you. just wanted to tell you that the game uses the cpu as a main resource. i've also done some cpu overclocking, maybe it's interesting for you: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=59686

[VoiD88]

SLI support would mean an increase in graphics card power. As you might have noticed, this game is not very graphically demanding AT ALL. So SLI support won't do anything to increase anyones fps.

Bekkar is correct, the main bottleneck of Prison Architect is raw CPU processing power.

[xander]

It is possible to off-load non-graphics computations to the graphics cards---Nvidia even provides a framework for doing so (see CUDA). That being said, even if this is what the original poster is suggesting, I have trouble believing that it would really be worth the effort. The biggest bottleneck appears to be path-finding which, at the end of the day, scales in complexity a lot faster than you can throw extra computation time at it. When you consider the trade-off of writing parallel code (which is often quite difficult to maintain, is prone to bugs if you aren't really careful, and has it's own computational cost), it seems possible to me that benefits simply don't make up for the problems.

xander

[vaffel]

wasn't meant to offend you. just wanted to tell you that the game uses the cpu as a main resource. i've also done some cpu overclocking, maybe it's interesting for you: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=59686

It's okay. and sorry if I was a bit harsh so i apologize and thanks for the link and overclocking's always interesting.
I've overclocked from 3,5 to 4.5GHz but the game does not seem to use more than 20% of CPU and the GPU use at 45%.
and if it is as you say that the game use cpu as a main Resource. is it a bit strange that it fails to use more CPU Power ?
or is it just me who is a noob

[VoiD88]

Your CPU has 6 cores. A program has to be made in a specific way to be able to use all cores to their fullest extent, and not all programs are able to be split into that many threads. Also, as xander said, it is very difficult to program and maintain this so called parallel computing.

Prison Architect uses two, maybe three threads and not all of them always tax the CPU core they are running on to its maximum. The biggest computational challenge of Prison Architect is pathfinding, which simply cannot be spilt into multiple threads.

So the pathfinding thread uses its core by 100%, which in a 6 core CPU means that the operating system shows a usage of 16.6% (100 divided by 6). the remaining 3-4% are all the other calculations Prison Architect needs to do.

That's why I stated earlier that the main bottleneck of PA is rew CPU power: The faster that one core on which the pathfinding is running can calculate, the faster PA becomes.

[bekkar]

CPU:Intel® Core i7-3970X Extreme 6 core 4,5 GHz

could you tell me how much prisoners you have and how much fps you have? i wanna know if i should invest in i7.

[vaffel]

CPU:Intel® Core i7-3970X Extreme 6 core 4,5 GHz

could you tell me how much prisoners you have and how much fps you have? i wanna know if i should invest in i7.

my New prison currently room for 908 prisoners. and i have 178 prisoners now
When I zoom out completely, I have a fps on 30-35 and a normal image I have a fps on minimum 44 FPS and Maximum 71 FPS

and my prison number two currently room for 1300 prisoners. and i have 1600 prisoners

When I zoom out completely, I have a fps on 23-25 and a normal image I have a fps on minimum 31FPS and Maximum 35 FPS

[bekkar]

thanks for info. will definately buy i7. very nice.

[xander]

The biggest computational challenge of Prison Architect is pathfinding, which simply cannot be spilt into multiple threads.

That isn't really true. Finding a path for one entity is something that can't be parallelized (to the best of my knowledge), but there is no reason that, for instance, each entity couldn't be given its own thread for finding a path. One *could* spawn a new thread every time that an entity needs to find a path. The problem is that the actual effect on performance can be quite unpredictable. For instance, if a ton of very short paths were all requested at about the same time, the extra overhead induced by the parallel code might actually cause the pathfinding to take *longer*. Since the game can't know ahead of time whether a path is going to take a long time to compute or not, assigning resources to individual pathfinding tasks is a bit dicey. Moreover, even if you do a really good job of working through all of the probability theory issues, and write really well optimized parallel code, there are still the issues of maintainability (parallel code is more difficult to maintain and modify) and actual benefit (if doubling the number of cores *actually* doubles the speed at which paths can be found on a given map, how does that scale as maps get bigger?).

xander

[MFWIC]

My solution to this would involve simply running multiple pathing processes and dividing the number of path tasks equally between them.

[xander]

My solution to this would involve simply running multiple pathing processes and dividing the number of path tasks equally between them.

Every complicated problem has a simple, elegant solution that is wrong. I don't mean any offense, but you have found at least one such solution. There is actually a fairly deep area in mathematics (a part of queueing theory) which attempts to understand how to assign tasks which have random completion times. It is not a trivial problem. Just ``dividing the number of [tasks] equally'' among the various ``workers'' (CPU or GPU cores, in this case) is generally not a very good strategy.

xander

[KocLobster]

SLI support would mean an increase in graphics card power. As you might have noticed, this game is not very graphically demanding AT ALL. So SLI support won't do anything to increase anyones fps.

Bekkar is correct, the main bottleneck of Prison Architect is raw CPU processing power.

+1 This. SLI would do absolutely nothing.

When a game is 2d and looks like PA does, you should probably realize that graphics and SLI don't play much of a factor.