| curl-6 said: No matter how powerful hardware gets, you will always be able to process twice as much per frame at 30fps as you can at 60fps, and that goes for gameplay systems as well as visuals. Expecting every single game to be 60 simply isn't realistic. |
This isn't necessarily true. It really depends on how these simulations are implemented and how they must scale with respect to rendered frames.
Sometimes, for example, in order to maintain precision of say a physics simulation, internally the simulation might update more often than the frames rendered per second even if the game is only rendering 30fps to the screen you could have a simulation that updates 60 or 120 times per second or even less than the rendered frame-rate if it doesn't need to be very precise. You might not need to spend extra compute with more frames on said simulations.
There is also the matter that sometimes the platform is bottlenecked in other ways and core utilization isn't at 100% because of that. Even if it is a matter of the calculations scaling linearly with rendered frames, you might be able to utilize the cores better to make up for it.
Where I'd imagine CPU bottlenecking to occur for current gen platforms is in highly serialized workloads that need high single-core CPU performance. That'd be any piece of code or game process that depends on a bunch of branching if-else statements. Things like game AI fall in that category. But also alternating between scripts and game-modes.
Physics simulations (which tend to be highly parallelizable and mostly limited by memory bandwidth), object permanence (which has existed since Morrowind), etc shouldn't be big issues with an 8 core 16 thread, relatively modern CPU -- unless the engine and company aren't doing very well at utilizing the cores and multi-threading, maybe even leveraging the GPU where it makes sense (doing matrix multiplication) for compute rather than render loads. This is where I think Bethesda is probably struggling. Not because their game is complex, but because their hands are tied by the technology they use for business reasons and they likely aren't leveraging the hardware to the best advantage.
A lot is up to speculation until we actually get to test the game. But my guess is that we'll see far less CPU-core scaling than we do with other titles released in late last gen and this gen. And if that is the case, then it isn't a matter of them not being able to achieve 60fps but rather them having chosen not to.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 17 June 2023
