Multi-Core Texture Loading

In a previous post I discussed the basic ideas behind using multiple threads in an application to get better performance out of a multi-core machine.

Now before I begin, I need to disclaim some things, because I get very nervous posting anything involving hardware. This blog is me running my mouth, not buying advice; if you are the kind of person who would be grumpy if you bought a $3000 PC and found that it wouldn't let you do X with X-Plane (where X includes run at a certain rendering setting, framerate, or make your laundry) my advice is very simple: don't spend $3000. So...

• I do not advocate buying the biggest fastest system you can get; you pay a huge premium to be at the top of the hardware curve, particular for game-oriented technologies like fast-clock CPUs and high-end GPUs.
• I do not advocate buying the Mac Pro with your own money; it's too expensive. I have one because my work pays for it.
• 8 cores are not necessary to enjoy X-Plane. See above about paying a lot of money for that last bit of performance.

Okay...now that I have enough crud posted to be able to say "I told you so"...

My goal in reworking the threading system inside X-Plane for 920 (or whatever the next major patch is called) is, among other things, to get X-Plane's work to span across as many cores as you have, rather than across as many tasks are going on. (See my previous post for more on this.)

Today I got just one bit of the code doing this: the texture loader. The texture loader' job is to load textures from the hard drive to the video card (using the CPU, via main memory) while you fly. In X-Plane 901 it will use up to one core to do this, that core also being shared with building forests and airports.

With the new code, it will load as many textures at a time as it can, using as many cores as you have. I tested this on RealScenery's Seatle-Tacoma custom scenery package - the package is an ENV with about 1.5 GB of custom PNGs, covering about half of the ENV tile with non-repeating orthophotos.

On my Mac Pro, 901 will switch to KSEA from LOWI in about one minute - the vast majority of the time is spent loading about 500 PNG files. The CPU monitor shows one core maxed out. With the new code, the load takes fourteen seconds, with all eight cores maxed out.

(This also means that the time from when the scenery shifts to when the new scenery has its textures loaded would be about fourteen seconds, rather than a minute, which means very fast flight is unlikely to get to the new area before the textures are loaded and see a big sea of gray.)

Things to note:

• Even if we don't expect everyone to have eight cores, knowing that the code can run on a lot of cores proves the design - the more the code can "spread out" over a lot of cores, the more likely the sim will use all hardware available.
• Even if you only have two or four cores, there's a win here.
• Texture load time is only a factor for certain types of scenery; we'll need to keep doing this type of work in a number of cases.

This change is the first case where X-Plane will actually spread out to eight cores for a noticeable performance gain. Of course the long-term trend will be more efficient use of multi-core hardware in more cases.