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Turn 10 Confirms That Forza Motorsport 7 Intentionally Runs Mostly on One Core

The 100% core thing seems to be the main thing causing consistent performance problems beyond stremaing issues as I see in the performance thread. It also seems to be a massive limitation in getting the game at all anywhere near High Refresh Rate (100hz - 165hz). Is it possible to run this game at 144hz at all?

I am not sure if I fully agree with this decision and explanation. I mean, there are examples in other games of greater parallelism inducing input latency (the multithreading in the TLOU PS4 purposefully induces 1 frame of latency IIRC), but surely that is not the only way things need / could to be done... some of the lowest input latency games on PC and on console are heavily multi-threaded! Call of Duty! Titanfall 2! DOOM!

Also, how does that work exactly on xb1 with horrible IPC of one of the threads? :0
 
Damn. Well I'm not buying it if that's the case. I have a 4690k and I had a horrible experience with FH3 until it was fixed. Not going through the same thing.

Sorry T10 but you lost a sale based on this bizare decision.
 

dr_rus

Member
PCARS2 it is.

I've never heard of multithreading causing input lag. Is this legit?

No. Even if somehow - and that already requires some talent - you will have such user input code that it will require a whole modern CPU core to work with minimal latency you can still offload everything else to other cores, and this isn't the case with FM7 demo. This is just a badly designed (or probably "ported" is a better word) engine.
 
So that's why demo had weird lag in menus on my PC. Gameplay itself was stable and perfectly fine on 4K resolution, but in main menu i had 2-5 seconds freezes, so i dropped demo after second race.
 
No. Even if somehow - and that already requires some talent - you will have such user input code that it will require a whole modern CPU core to work with minimal latency you can still offload everything else to other cores, and this isn't the case with FM7 demo. This is just a badly designed (or probably "ported" is a better word) engine.
Yeah, I am completely at a loss with this. Their reasoning does not seem to make much sense in the context of xb1 versions of this game existing, nor does it make much sense in the context of extremely low latency heavily parallel engines that exist out there. It especially makes little sense given the Horizon 3 update which purposefully introduced greater multi-threading... which seemingly only had a net positive for 90% of users not running dual cores?!
 
Are they for real? I mean, come the fuck on. Playground Games fixed the issue with patches later on (near the Hot Wheels update), and they're trying to pull this shit now?

Use only one core if old, etc.

Uhh...

They say it's normal for a core to run at 100%. Not that the game only uses one core.
 

Skyr

Member
Are you effin kidding me turn 10?

If it's no issue and intentional why did you fix it in TWO games that had the very same problem before.

For me these kind of microstutters are a no go in a fast paced racing game and they are definitely apparent in the demo, just like in horizon 3 before they fixed it.
System specs: 4790K@4,6ghz / 1080Ti / 16gb ram

I bought every single game of the series since forza 2 but if they won't acknowledge that issue I'm done with it.
 

BigDug13

Member
Isn't this basically the only real franchise that Microsoft has left? Why wouldn't they put not just their "best foot forward", but "ALL their feet forward" on this franchise?
 
Uhh...

They say it's normal for a core to run at 100%. Not that the game only uses one core.

Of the whole thing, that's your problem? That I used one word wrong (use instead of max)?


Here:

mV9bFz7.gif
 

Phinor

Member
I guess this explains what I was wondering about earlier today. Initially I was running the game at 100fps with an overclocked 7700K but core 3 was always at 100% usage, never dipping even a bit. Today I decided to try 60fps to fix some major stuttering issues and the same core is still at exactly 100% usage at all times. (My stuttering seems to be fixed by updating Afterburner/RTSS and adding Forza 7 profile to RTSS, no idea if going from 100fps to 60fps also had an effect.)

In any case it's an interesting decision.
 

Nheco

Member
If it has problems to run well on an modern desktop grade processor, what is the fucking magic turn 10 did on Xbox one with a shit jaguar cpu running at 1,75 GHz? This excuse is clearly bullshit.
 

AlStrong

Member
I recall something similar being discussed with DF about NFS: Hot Pursuit (made by Criterion) with regards to input latency & threading, although it was a 30Hz title.

Alex Fry: Yeah. We learned a hell of a lot in Paradise. One of the things you learn when you do a game... from your post mortem, you put together a lot of your experiences: what went well and what didn't go so well and what can you do better. Sometimes what you can do better means you need to make some big changes.

The biggest change we did was to the threading model for this game, so it's all new. We went from dual threaded which is what Paradise used. We had update and render threads. We dropped it and went back to one thread. The reasons for that were... well, there were several reasons.

Firstly we wanted to do a 30Hz game that looked stunning and we wanted fast controller latency. With an extra render thread at 30Hz you have serious latency issues so we went single-threaded. So 30Hz... it'll be really interesting to see what your latency measurements come out as. We think latency is pretty good.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-needforspeed-tech-interview
 

Gestault

Member
Damn. Well I'm not buying it if that's the case. I have a 4690k and I had a horrible experience with FH3 until it was fixed. Not going through the same thing.

Sorry T10 but you lost a sale based on this bizare decision.

If it's actually a situation where you wanted to play the game, you could download the free demo out right now and see how it runs on your system. If anything, it's a more stringent test, because I doubt the demo has final optimizations.
 

Paragon

Member
It's probably so they can trick you into enabling Game Mode for this title. :x
Game Mode has its uses, it's just not always better in every situation.
By default, enabling Game Mode absolutely destroyed performance in the Forza 7 demo for me - though using it was required to improve things.
Quoting my post from the demo thread:

It has the same CPU optimization problems of Apex and pre-patch FH3; most of the workload is only being placed on two threads.

I don't understand how they can have this problem for the third time now - even after having largely fixed it in Horizon 3 after several patches, and despite somehow getting the game to run at 60 FPS on the Xbox with its low-power Jaguar cores.
Do they have a different team handling the PC version of the game or something?

Well whatever the reason for it is, I've found a solution that fixes 90% of the stuttering on my system.
"Disabling Core0" does nothing to fix the problem for me. I suspect that's for 4c/4t systems that are having issues with the game stalling other important system processes because the load is so high.
I noticed that happening in some recent games on my system with an i5-2500K at 4.5GHz, where even the mouse input could be interrupted by high CPU usage in games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

This is what CPU usage is like on my system with an R7-1700X at 3.9GHz after doing a couple of laps in the Nissan event:
You can clearly see that the game is only stressing two of the CPU cores.
I did not bother to close everything else running on the system so not all of the remaining CPU usage is Forza, but it doesn't impact these results.

This is what CPU usage is like after the same race with Windows 10 CU's Game Mode enabled:
This is the opposite of what it's supposed to do.
Instead of moving system processes to the first 25% of the CPU and giving the game exclusive access to the remaining 75%, this ends up moving most of the game's workload onto the first four cores and ends up causing significantly worse stuttering problems for the game.

And this is what it's like if I enable Game Mode, but then set the affinity to disable the game on the first 25% of the CPU. (in my case, the first four cores)
CPU usage is now spread out far more evenly across all the available cores, and you can see that real cores are being prioritized over 'virtual' cores.
Now the polling rate was set quite low for this, so it doesn't catch the times that one or two of the cores would still hit 100% usage briefly and the game would stutter, so it's not running perfectly. However it is a significant improvement in smoothness.
The game goes from being completely unplayable with frequent and long pauses/hitches in gameplay, to having only a handful of brief stutters per lap.

This is still not how it should be performing when the game is locked to 60 FPS on the Xbox with a significantly weaker CPU, and I wouldn't even consider buying the game unless they fix this, but if you really want to play it and it's been a bad experience for you, this will hopefully help.
I don't know how much it will do for people that have a 4c/4t system, but it's worth trying.
 

Xcell Miguel

Gold Member
As long as I get constant 60 FPS I don't see the problem.

Note to that those with stutter : how can you be sure this is the issue ?
A friend has random stutter without having the first core and even the GPU going to 100%.
Sometimes he does not have stutter at all, sometimes he has it a few times a race with huge drops (less than 20 FPS).

I did the 3 races of the demo, on the first screen you can se the framerate ("images par seconde"), staying at 60 without drops except when I paused the game a few time to change settings and during loadings :

In this one you can se the CPU cores utilisation, CPU 4 seems to be the 100% core, and CPU 1 the main one :

I'm using an Intel 5930K (6 cores, 12 threads) at 4.4 GHz and a 1080 Ti, game was running at full settings in 1440p, 200% resolution and MSAA 4x.

Ok that's a powerfull CPU, but some with a less powerful CPU and GPU could get constant 60 fps too, so there may be something else causing drops/stutter.

And remember the demo is an older build, we'll see how the final game run next week.
 
As long as I get constant 60 FPS I don't see the problem.

Note to that those with stutter : how can you be sure this is the issue ?
A friend has random stutter without having the first core and even the GPU going to 100%.
Sometimes he does not have stutter at all, sometimes he has it a few times a race with huge drops (less than 20 FPS).

I did the 3 races of the demo, on the first screen you can se the framerate ("images par seconde"), staying at 60 without drops except when I paused the game a few time to change settings and during loadings :


In this one you can se the CPU cores utilisation, CPU 4 seems to be the 100% core, and CPU 1 the main one :


I'm using an Intel 5930K (6 cores, 12 threads) at 4.4 GHz and a 1080 Ti, game was running at full settings in 1440p, 200% resolution and MSAA 4x.

Ok that's a powerfull CPU, but some with a less powerful CPU and GPU could get constant 60 fps too, so there may be something else causing drops/stutter.

And remember the demo is an older build, we'll see how the final game run next week.
Can you run the game at 120 fps at all?
 

dr_rus

Member
Yeah, I am completely at a loss with this. Their reasoning does not seem to make much sense in the context of xb1 versions of this game existing, nor does it make much sense in the context of extremely low latency heavily parallel engines that exist out there. It especially makes little sense given the Horizon 3 update which purposefully introduced greater multi-threading... which seemingly only had a net positive for 90% of users not running dual cores?!

How is running everything on one core even improves latency? It may improve latency stability but when you have a 100% Skylake core load you're dealing with what is essentially the worst possible latency on a modern system as everything must wait for it's turn to be able to execute. Splitting this between four cores will effectively cut this latency in four although there may be some synchronization overhead and corner cases which can push the latency back up to single core 100% load figures - but it would still be a lot better on average, not worse.

Edit: maybe the meaning behind this statement is that they try to fight CPU power saving features this way? But it's still stupid even if true.
 

Xcell Miguel

Gold Member
Can you run the game at 120 fps at all?

I think Helios said the demo build was limited to 60 FPS for now, but I'll try.

EDIT :
PC Issues:
•Unlocked framerate is currently not supported in the Forza Motorsport 7 demo but will be available with a future update.
•Currently, players cannot change video options during a race. We will be releasing an update in the future that will allow players to change video options mid-race.
•Machines with integrated Intel GPUs may experience initial load times as high as 8 minutes. Please allow the game to load and don’t close the demo. Loading the same track and car again will be significantly quicker. A future update will improve initial load times.
•Machines with integrated Intel GPUs may experience poor performance and/or instability. Players may also experience their game locking up due to overheating. We recommend keeping your device in a well-ventilated area, turning down the screen brightness and checking for driver updates from your device manufactures.
•Machines using older AMD video cards may experience checkerboard-like graphics on screen while driving. We are working with AMD to resolve this issue but, in the meantime, we recommend updating your AMD drivers.
•Machines using a Nvidia GPU with drivers older than June may experience checkerboard-like graphics on screen while driving. We recommend that you update to the latest Nvidia drivers to resolve this issue.
•Benchmark mode may experience long load times or crashes after running the benchmark test.
•Players may experience the track not loading after using consecutive rewinds. If you experience this, please quit the race and start it again.
•When selecting your race, the car names maybe appear off centered or missing depending on the resolution selected. To resolve, adjust your resolution in the video settings of the demo.
•Players won't experience truly asynchronous display unless they are running the game in full-screen mode and setting the resolution option to “Native Window Resolution”.
•Players may experience graphics not rending properly when racing. If you experience this, we recommend turning down your in-game video settings.

Xbox issues:
•Players may experience an audio stutter when exiting the game by pressing B at the main menu.
•Players may be prompted with a controller disconnected message when trying to switch profiles while the demo is launched. If experienced, quit the demo completely and relaunch it.
 

ItIsOkBro

Member
it makes silent hill 2 run better on my pc, why not forza 7?

and I have to set it manually for silent hill 2!

thanks turn 10
 
I had serious issues with Horizon 3, but Motorsport 7 runs smoothly in races. The menus however, are stuttery.

Hopefully they can implement the fix from Horizon shortly after launch.
 

lmimmfn

Member
Thanks for the info, will avoid even though it may work OK, I.e. have 6800k with 6 cores/12 hyperthreaded and a 1080Ti but using a 34" ultrawide @3440x1440

I just detest gimped games, having said that there's nothing inherently wrong with a games main loop being single threaded if its just doing I/O and coordination with other threads for visuals/physics etc. but I doubt this is the case
 

tuxfool

Banned
Thanks for the info, will avoid even though it may work OK, I.e. have 6800k with 6 cores/12 hyperthreaded and a 1080Ti but using a 34" ultrawide @3440x1440

I just detest gimped games, having said that there's nothing inherently wrong with a games main loop being single threaded if its just doing I/O and coordination with other threads for visuals/physics etc. but I doubt this is the case

If you look at the cpu graphs people are posting, it definitely isn't the case.
 

ethomaz

Banned
I thought console going 8-core optimizatons will leave old PC multithread issues in the past.

Looks like no lol
 
I thought console going 8-core optimizatons will leave old PC multithread issues in the past.

Looks like no lol

It's weird, since Turn 10 would have had to multithread the snot out of Forzatech to get it running as well as it is on the Xbone. Them continuing to think that you should them undo all that work for a PC version is completely baffling, especially after Horizon 3 PC's less-than-warm reception on launch for this exact same issue.
 
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