It is common for modern video games to be badly optimised due to, partly, inefficient usage of multiple cores on a CPUs.
I’d assume that developers know this, but don’t have the time to rectify this.
So, therefore, what are the difficulties in utilising various cores of a CPU effectively? Why does it require so much focus, money, or perhaps time to implement?
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This is the deceiving nature of parallelization and multi-core CPUs.
First you need to realize that not every computational problem can be solved in parallel. This means that your application will always be limited by the aspects that solve these sequential problems. This leads to a very underwhelming realization that most computer programs cannot utilize all your CPU cores and instead use mainly a single core.
Example from Wikipedia: You have an applikation that takes 20h to solve a problem using a single core. Lets assume that 95% of the problem can be parallelized, which is a ridiculous amount. Now we use the new Intel i9 120000k with a bazillion cores and let it loose on our program. It will still take at least an hour, since this part of the problem does not benefit from more cores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
Video games are not an exception. Most video games operate with a game loop where the player input gets parsed, the game state updated. This is hard to parallelize since each execution of the loop is dependent on the result of the previous execution.
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