Does DX9 only do single core rendering?

[Hicksimus]

I had a hard time googling this. So here we go.

I was not particularly happy with Planetside 2's CPU bottleneck on my Phenom II X6 in large firefights(hundreds of players at once) so I started trying a few different things. I disabled 3 cores and then 4 cores and did not experience a change in frame rate. As long as it had multiple cores 1 core would be at roughly 75% all of the time and PS2 would spread/combine other threads on the remaining cores. So I asked on their forums and somebody brought up that DX9 only uses a single core to deal with data for the graphics card.

So is this the truth? I find it hard to believe that a company would use dx9 to appeal to something like 20% of the market when that 20% likely doesn't have the hardware to deal with the game in the first place. Of course, it is Sony.

 

[ssjwizard]

The graphics API doesn't really have much to do with how effiiciently the game runs on multiple cores. My guess sony just programed it for very few threads, and probably has an outrageously low setting for people with 5-6 year old laptops to be able to play.

 

[Hicksimus]

Maybe your answer is solid and I don't understand or maybe I didn't give enough info, I'll provide a bit more .

It was suggested that this is a limit of dx9 where there is no multicore rendering option. Particularly that older dx doesn't deal well with draw calls leading to extreme performance degradation because the CPU can't feed the GPU fast enough in modern scenarios. Perhaps this is why the devs have been turning down the render distance of infantry and grass etc? It seemed to be a logical explanation to me but I felt it was a fact I should check...is the answer still no?


As far as the part about running on older machines goes, as the game stands it would run horribly on any non-recent+non-intel laptop. I have a friend who I do a lot of gaming with and while he can play BF3 and Skyrim just fine on his laptop Planetside 2 tanks to between 0 and 15fps when a fight starts to grow. His quad core works great in the other games and his FPS is much higher than I get on my ollldddd e6850/8800GTS 320mb machine but in Planetside his FPS is worse because of the single core-bound performance.

 

[Hicksimus]

Just figured I'd update this as the folks at Sony decided to respond.

"The person who talked about DX9 later in the thread is pretty much correct. We can only do rendering processing in a single thread."

So, problem solved, using DX9 for a game like Planetside 2