Diablo 3 Hardware log

[Master&Puppet]

I just did a run through on the request of a friend who thought his Bloomfield i7 was causing some lag in D3 because of physics and got some interesting results.

I knew that Blizz made games on the light side to get the most possible amount of people to play it..but seriously?

1 core thread.
20% GPU use.

I just ran through a few caves and open areas with the logger on to get this. The dip in Core#3s use at the end is due to being in town selling stuff by the way.
Game is maxed out on all settings.
My CPU is a 3570k (for this run I had the turbo set to 4.2 across all cores).
My twin 7950s were at stock.
8gb RAM, 1600MHz (logger reported 3gb used +/-150mb if anyone is interested)

I think it is pretty poor that this is only a single thread title. The game locked itself to 60fps which is no bad thing actually (I think all games should have this option to save on hardware use) but that required a single Ivy Bridge core running at around 60-80% load @4.2 which is the equivalent to needing what...4.0Ghz?

In theory that means that every player needs to overclock to get 60fps. More power to the "few but more powerful single threads" argument I suppose.

At least it explains my mate's problem on his 920 (2.66GHz stock). Still at least it's persuading him around to letting me show him how to overclock!

 

[VengeanceUK]

the fact the game is not multithreaded just shows how much disdain activision has for pc gamers, as i believe wow suffered this blight for many years until public pressure forced activision to allow blizzard to release a multicore patch

 

[hmmblah]

D3 is multithreaded, how it uses those threads I haven't looked into yet. Some people have cured their stuttering issues by setting the affinity to only one core. This used to fix odd issues in WoW too.

That said, other than the rubber banding, this game runs excellent for me. A constant 60 FPS while folding. It's one of the few games I don't turn off folding when I play.

 

[Master&Puppet]

D3 is multithreaded, how it uses those threads I haven't looked into yet. Some people have cured their stuttering issues by setting the affinity to only one core. This used to fix odd issues in WoW too.

That said, other than the rubber banding, this game runs excellent for me. A constant 60 FPS while folding. It's one of the few games I don't turn off folding when I play.

Hmm gives me an idea. Back in a few mins!

 

[hmmblah]

There's also a D3Prefs.txt (not sure on exact file name) that you can set the number of cores to use. Some people find that to work better than setting the affinity.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Yea I've just read about that. Will re-do the test at a lower clock and see if the other cores pick up.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Decided to not change the clock but play with affinity.

So this is the same thing done again but with the affinity set to Core#3:

And again with afinity set to Core#2 & #3:

So I take it back - Diablo 3 does clearly hyperthread and only 2 cores were needed to get the 60fps.

I wonder if my mate's issue is because of hyperthreading. I'll get him to set the affinity to the none-HT threads and see what happens.

(for anyone who is interested you can change which cores the game works on by:
1. Loading up diablo.
2. Open task manager.
3. Go to the Diablo3 process .exe
4. Right-click and select affinity.
5. Untick "All cores" and select the ones you want to try on. I selected core #3 to start with, which is the 4th core, because the game at default used this core primarily.)