Why does FM not utilise the CPU more?

[John_Yuki]

Whenever I simulate the game, my CPU is never used properly. I have an i7-7700, and simulating is fast, but I just holidayed forward a bunch to stress test using a database with 170k players, and my CPU usage never went above 50%. Why does the game not utilise the CPU more in order to speed up processing times?

[forameuss]

In leiu of an official answer, which will likely be along soon, I think it uses more power once you're using full detail, but outside of that there isn't enough parallelism to necessitate using more cores.  Improvements could be made I imagine, but it's not as simple as just opening the taps up.

[michaeltmurrayuk]

There should be a thread around with the full details in (benchmark thread?) - but the basics are it will use as many cores as you have, however the game can process matches quick enough that you need to be running a lot of leagues (if not all) on full detail to max out higher cored processors.

There are also limits on what can be processed in parallel as various things are co-dependent and have to run in order rather than at the same time.

[John_Yuki]

29 minutes ago, michaeltmurrayuk said:

There should be a thread around with the full details in (benchmark thread?) - but the basics are it will use as many cores as you have, however the game can process matches quick enough that you need to be running a lot of leagues (if not all) on full detail to max out higher cored processors.

There are also limits on what can be processed in parallel as various things are co-dependent and have to run in order rather than at the same time.

But shouldn't it still use as much processing power as it can to simulate faster? The game is basically forcing itself to process stuff slower just because the detail level isn't maxed out? The processing times with 170k were still pretty long, if the game fully utilised the CPU, I could actually play a 170k player database quite comfortably.

[forameuss]

Just now, John_Yuki said:

But shouldn't it still use as much processing power as it can to simulate faster? The game is basically forcing itself to process stuff slower just because the detail level isn't maxed out? The processing times with 170k were still pretty long, if the game fully utilised to CPU, I could actually play a 170k player database quite comfortably.

But as Michael said, it isn't possible to run everything in parallel, and the way the game processes there are always bottlenecks.  Without that degree of parallelism, there isn't much all the extra processing can do.  Your clock speed will help.

It's not as simple as saying "the game should fully utilise the CPU".  It clearly isn't designed that way.  Could it be?  Probably, although I'd imagine that would need a complete redesign of the way things are processed.  Or, perhaps more believably, they have to do it this way.  They're always optimising, so if there was a simple way to do what you're suggesting, they would have given the difference it would make.

[michaeltmurrayuk]

7 minutes ago, John_Yuki said:

But shouldn't it still use as much processing power as it can to simulate faster? The game is basically forcing itself to process stuff slower just because the detail level isn't maxed out? The processing times with 170k were still pretty long, if the game fully utilised to CPU, I could actually play a 170k player database quite comfortably.

It does but the non-full detail matches are processed so quick it's not filling your CPU, there are more details in this thread:

If you reduce the cores that FM can use to 4, then 2 and then 1 you should see that the game starts to take longer to process. (depending on other factors and the leagues you are running - running one league will see less differences than if you were running a couple of dozen).

[Transk53]

18 hours ago, michaeltmurrayuk said:

It does but the non-full detail matches are processed so quick it's not filling your CPU, there are more details in this thread:

If you reduce the cores that FM can use to 4, then 2 and then 1 you should see that the game starts to take longer to process. (depending on other factors and the leagues you are running - running one league will see less differences than if you were running a couple of dozen).

Thanks for clearing that one up. Answers a thought for me.