Quiet about Graphics jobs

So Graphics jobs was introduced as experimental long time ago. But its been very quiet about the feature from UT ever since. Its still in experimental, it still crashes the player both in DX11 and Vulkan.

Now when 6 and soon 8 cores are the norm for gaming PCs it would be nice if we could distribute the render load over multiple cores

 

6 and 8 cores still definitely aren't the norm for your average gaming pc, but regardless, I share your concern about graphics jobs. Has anything changed about it in recent times?

 

Clicked thread expecting to type something about using Unity Connect....

 

Even with only 4 cores 8 threads you benefit from graphics jobs. In the mainstream segment maybe 4 cores is still the norm, but VR and none casual gamers are moving toward Ryzen and Intel 8700k

But never the less its still interesting getting this feature for anyone with more than one logical processor?

 

Truth be told I don't bother with that for experimental features, I use that time to report bugs on stable features
But its easy to recreate, just check the Ghraphics Jobs, build game and it will crash almost instant. I test it once every new release I upgrade to

 

Oh I definitely agree that it's still very useful for 4C/8T and even 4C/4T (which I'd say IS the common gaming CPU). Maybe VR, sure, but you have to realise they are by no means the average gamer, but high end and/or a niche. I'd say mainstream and even medium core gamers will still be on 4C, most games just don't benefit from more so there isn't the incentive yet

 

Odd, I use graphics jobs without crashes

 

We are getting there fast though the new Ryzens are crazy cheap, and I bet the 1700x will drop now

 

We use forward rendering and SteamVR, single pass rendering, soon we switch to single pass instanced when all our shader bugs are fixed (Though instanced only saves on batches and not set pass calls and for us it seems the set pass calls are by far the most expensive thing). I dont know if its a combo of those. But Im pretty sure I tried it in a vanilla project too. Maybe its becasue I'm on 16 threads?

 

Vanilla forward rendering for me, no issues yet. The only issue I've found is that if you stop remote profiling a remote dev build it crashes

 

Any performance gains?

 

I think I saw a speed boost but I haven't compared in a long time, was worth turning on

 

I tried with 2017.4.1 and no crash for the short time I tried, thats nice!

But also no real perfomance gain either. I'm on a 8 core ryzen 1800x

Here with Gfx jobs enabled, watch the CPU frame time above graph


And here without gfx job


This part of the map culls pretty bad so its many set pass calls here

 

Single pass instanced does not seem todo much either for performance just yet

 

Tested jobs a bit more, and it seems it distributes work over more cores



Right side is with Graphics jobs. Since frame rate is locked to 90 fps in SteamVR GPU usage will not change. But the frame time for teh CPU is not changed either, isn't that strange?

 

Do you test with builds or in the editor?

Also are you sure there isn't anything else bottlenecking your frametime on the cpu?

 

Built, can't really bench in editor, SteamVR has a built in tool which calculates the time between frames both on CPU and GPU. Our domain is really thight and only adds a few fractions of a millisecond. There is no change in CPU frame time between gfx job enabled and disabled

 

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

4 physical cores is a big chunk of gaming rigs these days. No idea if they are hyperthreaded or not...

 

Isn't that what I claimed?

 

You guys are all forgetting just how many PS4's and XBOnes there are out there that Unity's very well supporting. I think those have a fair few cores. Threading is high on Unity's list of priorities (possibly near the top).

 

They probably need to perfect the syncing of the threads, my guess is that the overhead of thread syncing is too big and that's why I don't see any performance gains.

Also maybe Vulkan works better I only tried dx11

 

If you use profiler you can see where the work goes (the built in Unity one).

 

Technically, you don't 'sync' threads so much as you wait until all of them have finished their work. In practice this means that the program is only as fast as the slowest thread, however in most cases the gains from breaking up the processing are so high that it's easy to ensure all the required work gets done in the time budget...

That is if you don't bury yourself in mutex locks or stuff inordinately large amounts of data on message queues...

 

I revisited this today, Unity 2017.4.5

DX11 No jobs


DX11 with Jobs, a small performance boost it seems


Also tried Vulkan, didnt get Jobs to nto crash so this is only without Jobs, seems Vulkan needs more work

 

It has been experimental for at least two years and it barely does anything.

I’m not holding my breath.

 

It hurts seeing 15 cores basically doing nothing...

 

It would be so awesome if we could see some real performance gains from jobs, it could mean so much more fidelity for VR games

 

Chatting away with unity folks here https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/co...d_rendering_graphics_jobs_unity_best/e0lblch/

Will try 2018.1.4 tonight, he claims I'm render thread bound thanks to DX11 and Vulkan should work under 2018

 

Tried 2018.2.1 and Vulkan + gfx jobs. Does not crash so thats an improvement, but I get exactly the same perfomance with Vulkan with Jobs as I get DX11 with no jobs

Vulkan with Jobs



DX11 no jobs


Edit its possibel somehow above screens are not valid and it was not built with gfx jobs and or vulkan enable for some reason, becasue now I cant get Vulkan + gfx to work

 

This. The PlayStation 4 models have eight cores. The Xbox One models have eight cores. Nintendo Switch has eight cores.

There are at least 79 million PlayStation 4 consoles on the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4

There are at least 18 million Xbox One consoles on the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Sales

There are at least 17 million Nintendo Switch consoles on the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch

Steam has 125 million users.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/21534/

With the hardware survey we know there are about 29.5 million on two cores and 90.75 million on four cores.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

Add up the Steam numbers and you get about 120 million and while that's huge it's not that many more than the number of console users. Add up the console numbers and you get about 114 million. Keep in mind that the numbers are old for both sets and that Microsoft is tight lipped with their numbers as well.

 

I have a strange bug with 2018.2.1 that the game closes itself and reopens in a new process and window. The second window will not connect to the profiler, so cant profile. It might be related to Steamworks.

 

You should post a bug report because that has nothing to do with this thread

 

Well it was more an explain why I cant supply profiler screenshots

 

Guys, please vote on this issue

https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...g-vulkan-and-openvr-and-graphics-jobs-enabled

 

Currently Graphic Jobs simply freeze Unity, while keeping a full core busy.

Tested on 2018.3.0f2, with both DX11 and Vulkan

 

Its a pretty abandoned feature sadly. Which is really sad since 8 cores are now the norm and we will see mainstream 10,12 and 16 core with Zen 2 in just months

edit: Its pretty crazy how unity pitch all these features and then just let them die

 

No worries, it will be eventually replaced by another similar feature, which will be experimental for a few years and then will also be abandoned.

It’s the typical Unity cycle after all.

 

If you're able to reproduce this issue, could you please submit a bug-report, with an example/project to reproduce it, as described in the following document:
https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/bug-reporting

If there exists no bug-report for this issue in Unity Technologies database, then it's probably not on their radar, thus will never get fixed.

After you submitted the bug-report, you receive a confirmation email with a bug-report Case number. You can post this Case number here (in this forum thread) for Unity staff to pick up, in case they see it.

 

There are already a dozen reports on the matter, but sure, the more the merrier
Unity really should prioritize this feature, soon 10 cores are norm

 

Eight cores is only the "norm" because of the consoles. I wouldn't be surprised if the consoles kept their eight cores for at least one more generation though because just going from Jaguar to Matisse will provide more than enough performance.

Plus there are far more important things to improve than core count. We need more memory (8 GB isn't that great when you consider the console itself is taking a portion of it) and we need SSDs instead of HDDs in the consoles.

 

Who cares about consoles? I'm talking desktop here. With zen 2 we are pushing 16 cores in the mainstream segment.

16 and 32 gigs are standard these days for gamers, but 8 works too.

 

Okay, but in that case the norm is four cores with the second highest being two cores. Six and eight cores combined just barely push one-tenth of the market. It's only when you factor in the actual consoles that it becomes the norm.

I'll concede on the 16 GB because it's practically neck and neck with 8 GB for standalone platforms, but greater than 16 GB is less than one-twentieth of the market. It's definitely not a standard.

 

Not true, 6 and 8 are most common, I know because I have access to steam hardware survey. And zen 2 is around the corner with cheap 8, 10, 12 and 16 cores.

 

Where did you think I was pulling my numbers from? Six and eight cores together is only 10.9%.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

Spoiler

 

Yeah well, I talk about my games hardware survey which is VR. There are alot of crap on steam which is played on crap hardware. Even the poor ones on 4 cores will benefit from a working Vulkan/gfx jobs implementation though. And those that have 4 cores with hyper threading will gain even more. Good for everybody

 

Yes, I fully expected that to be the case. I just couldn't remember if you said it in this thread and I wanted to poke you until you fully clarified that point. Just keep in mind that while it may be the norm for people who have purchased your game, it won't necessarily be the norm for other audiences including other gamers into VR.

I'm too lazy go searching too deeply for headset sales, but I'm fairly certain it's in the double digit millions between all of them and I can't imagine you've sold that many copies or you would have quit your day job a long time ago.

 

Its been in preview for a very long time along with Vulkan and its never talked about from Unity. You can start by looking at this issue please

https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...g-vulkan-and-openvr-and-graphics-jobs-enabled

 

Well I can only speculate since I dont have data for other VR games. But a good guess is that similar none casual VR titles have about the same hardware demographic. I would also guess that triple AAA desktop games have about the same.