AbleDark
So, I'm just speculating, I don't know enough about Frostbite's engine architecture to be really certain about things.
I'm a professional game dev, who has also done some engine dev (mostly toy engines, but I do sometimes contribute to some more serious open source stuff), it doesn't really make sense for a CPU from 2018 with 6 cores to be struggling with the gameplay code of Battlefield 6. If the official statement from the devs is to upgrade that CPU, I would say that is unacceptable.
However, assuming this is actually a problem on the devs end, you guys should be a lot more loud about this. I just recommend you do a bit more due diligence to rule out some weird stuff on your end first, more on that below.
I personally am quite impressed by their GPU work from the limited knowledge I have. Which tells me they're very competent engine engineers. So, it's probably a bug somewhere causing a death spiral. As opposed to a really bad architectural decision that requires a lot more thought and work to fix (in such cases, it just wont get fixed when management steps in).
When you think about a game engine and how it actually works, most of the heavy computations are on the GPU. A CPU is responsible for:
- physics
- character controllers are usually using kinematic physics, which is cheap computationally
- vehicles are using rigid body physics, this is more expensive, but shouldn't be an issue at all in a game like BF6
- player input
- gameplay code
- netcode (which really an abstraction, it's hard to point and be like HERE is the netcode, it has its tentacles all over)
- speculation: I posted above on how this could trigger a lot of redundant physics work during client/server desyncs
- network transport layer
- sometimes engines abstract gameplay code out to a scripting language of some sort, this almost always slower than compiled code, but there's too many things to consider to speculate further
- scheduling things and sending them over to the GPU
- particles that have physics usually means being done on the CPU, doing it on the GPU is usually just far harder architecturally
- client sided anti cheat
- note: not an expert here so I don't really know how intensive this is
When you compare to older Battlefields and other FPS games, this stuff hasn't really changed too much...which is why I have a feeling the performance issues are a bug. Like honestly, even if this stuff was all single threaded I'd still be saying the same thing.
If it's something on your end, I would check your RAM and GPU. Which you'd thing is completely contradictory to everything I just said above, but if the CPU is waiting on a response back from them it could look like the CPU is the problem.
Edit: oh and if they're for some reason saving some stuff to your storage drives too often, that would be another area, I highly doubt they're doing that though.
Edit 2: oh, I forgot, BF6 has destruction, this could be a big area of slowdown, especially if it gets looped into physics rollback code...oooooof