why do consoles ''require'' single | Unreal Source | Page 1

gloomy grotto Nov 10, 2025, 10:09 PM

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I haven't worked on Switch but I believe it has very few cores, and effectively only 1 for game code.

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I didn't intend to say that all consoles require 1 core, only that it is required to support 1 core to support all the target consoles.

limpid yarrow Nov 10, 2025, 10:10 PM

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switch 1 has quad core arm chip, but I don't know what is avaiable or not

gloomy grotto Nov 10, 2025, 10:10 PM

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So if your target hardware is something that you know is going to be limited to very few cores, it's not worth spending much time working on crazy parallelization since that adds maybe more overhead than it's worth.

limpid yarrow Nov 10, 2025, 10:11 PM

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uhh well I guess 8 cores, its arm with big and small cores irrc

gloomy grotto Nov 10, 2025, 10:11 PM

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But if you have a lot of cores available then the overhead of coordinating between threads is less of an issue.

limpid yarrow Nov 10, 2025, 10:12 PM

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Im pretty sure most game engines now are going to head towards paraellelizing workloads

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because of single thread optimization limitations either way

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overall ue has been dragging on code from 10-20 years ago so its no surprise most of it is single threaded

gloomy grotto Nov 10, 2025, 10:13 PM

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"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" and that code makes billions/year in profits so it isn't going anywhere any time soon. 🙂

#why do consoles ''require'' single