Concurrent Rendering Support: Taking Another Step Forward

Update 1.0 was truly a landmark for World of Tanks. It enriched our game with a completely revamped engine, Core, with sparkly new graphics and high-quality musical scores. 

With all the hard work put in last year, the game has become more visually stunning. But what you might not know is that, behind the impressive graphics, a key part of the new engine opened the floodgates for performance optimization and further implementation of concurrent rendering. Thanks to new technologies, we’re able to get the most out of each and every graphics card and clock it at 100%.

But we didn’t stop there. We’ve done our best to make the most of the CPU’s power too.

Brief Overview

Until recently, it didn’t make much sense for us to introduce concurrency technology as most players were playing on computers with dual-core processors. Well we’re already using the full capabilities of both cores in this case.

But, over the last few years, there’s been a noticeable shift in the number of players with 4- or 6-core CPUs and this increase shows no sign of slowing down. Currently, 60% of our player base have PCs with quad-core processors.

After careful analysis of the statistics, we realized that it was finally time to add an important technological feature to World of Tanks–full concurrent rendering support, developed in collaboration with Intel. To do this, we needed to “teach” the engine to perform calculations not in turn, but simultaneously on all available cores.

A Challenging, Yet Interesting Task

Sounds great, but it’s a really tough challenge.

The problem is that with the lowest settings, the CPU must process multiple tasks for rendering. But when you set the ultra-high settings, the number of these tasks increases. To complicate the situation, these tasks are uneven – some of them are calculated faster, others slower. Many of them depend on each other, and before starting new calculations, you need to wait for the results of the previous ones.  

The performance gain of a particular PC will depend on many factors, including:

• The version of your operating system
• The processor, motherboard, graphics card and other components

You also need to understand that сoncurrent rendering support is not a static, but a dynamic feature that performs differently on various presets, i.e. for different quality graphics settings.

• On computers with low-spec CPUs and graphics cards, the performance gains will be minimal.
• If the CPU is powerful and the graphics card is slow, there will be no noticeable performance increase either. The graphics card will already be clocking at the maximum even without concurrent rendering support, so it will not be able to provide the best graphics quality.
• If, on the contrary, the processor is multi-core, but not very powerful, and your graphics card is fast, performance gains will be clearly noticeable.

Concurrent rendering will also be appreciated by those who play World of Tanks on a laptop. Typically, laptops are equipped with multi-core processors with low frequency and turbo-boost technology support. It increases the voltage on one core, temporarily raises its frequency and thereby increases its performance. A uniform load of all the cores will also help reduce the power consumption of the laptop therefore increasing the playing time when running off the battery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Surely you may have questions related to performance gains of your PC and other technical aspects. Get the answers to these and some other questions that you have left on our forum in this F.A.Q. section!

• Is there a difference between “concurrency” and “multi-core”?

Actually no. The only difference is that “concurrency” is a more encyclopedic, or even scientific, term used mainly by technical experts, while “multi-core” is a more colloquial term that is circulating among players and ordinary people.

• What game parameters will affect the implementation of concurrent rendering support?

It may increase your FPS. It’s all dependent on the characteristics of your PC. Please note that not all users will get performance gains, and those who do, might not notice them.

• Will Concurrent Rendering only work on PCs with Intel CPUs?

Concurrent Rendering was developed to support PC configurations with any multi-core CPUs, not just Intel, on all PCs.

• How will concurrency be implemented for dual-core or single-core CPUs?

It will be implemented as well as the 4-8 core CPUs. The number of cores doesn’t matter – if there are many, we’ll be able to better use the computing capabilities of the processor. If the CPU has few cores, we’ll be able to squeeze the maximum out of it faster and more likely will not be able to load the graphics card by 100%.

• My graphics card is 100% loaded, and the CPU is only 30-40% loaded. Will concurrent rendering support allow to increase the performance of my PC? And whether this technology could harm my graphics card?  

There will be no performance gains in this case. Don’t worry, this technology will not cause any harm to your graphics card. It’s necessary to understand that if the game clocks the graphics card at 100%, there will be no performance gains.

• Will my laptop/computer’s power consumption rise?

On the contrary, it will decrease, since all processor cores will be evenly loaded, and on configurations with a large number of cores, this load will not even reach 80%. Accordingly, the system will not have to raise the frequency for the CPU, which will have a positive effect on heat release and power consumption.

• Will NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire technologies be supported?

Yes, these technologies will be supported.

• Will Intel Hyper-Threading and AMD SMT technologies be supported?

Yes, all CPUs supporting these technologies will be more efficient in our game.

What’s Next?

The implementation of concurrent graphics rendering is an important first step, the foundation for our future work. This solution will allow us to implement concurrent rendering in other game subsystems.

One of the goals that we’re pursuing here by implementing concurrent rendering support is that you can enjoy great graphics and dynamic gameplay on PCs you already have, without the need to upgrade them. We want the graphics and sound in World of Tanks to be even more realistic and exciting, but the system requirements remain the same.   

Testing Our Solution

Currently we’re testing concurrency technology on PCs of various configurations. These tests take a lot of time, because our players have computers with a variety of system parameters. But it’s possible to now say already that this technology performs stably on PCs of various configurations. Check out what results we’ve achieved during the most recent tests!

All results were obtained in ideal conditions, during our internal testing.

We’ll continue to work on optimizing and improving the Core engine. Keep an eye out for more updates!