I am wondering if the UE4 engine version 4.8 will support the use of the intel® xeon phi™ coprocessor, as in, will it use the extra cores in builds and processing? I am looking at purchasing the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 31S1P 1.1G 57 core model which would more then double my total cores available (currently have a 32 core xeon system)
ok thanks for your reply, we are working on a very large project, with 4k texturing and I had the chance to pick up the coprocessor for a very good price, so I assume by your answer that it would in fact work.
Not really my place to ask but… what on Earth for?
I’m being amazed how fast and efficient UE4 runs on my quad-core i5, and you have 32-core Xeon and need more?
The only possible use I can think of is lightmapping MMO-scale worlds on Production quality. If you don’t need that done in, like, minutes, I’d advise against the purchase.
I think anwser here if OS treats it as extra processors (since for OS cores are seperate CPUs… they are seperate CPUS if you think about it) and assigns normal processes to that coprocessor, is it seemless or not, if it’s not… then no, if yes then yes.
Also in order to get any use of it, you need to change something in engine code, and that is MAX_THREADS constant in engine task worker system, it currently set to 8 (i remeber it was set to 4 in the past)
Tick manager (and tick is event that updates object) if it has a lot of ticks (20 for each worker thread) to deal with is multithreading the ticking process and do individual tick group in parallel. I think you will also need to modify that condition, since you should need to have 1280 objects to make UE4 consider multithreading ticks:
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/c9f4efe690de8b3b72a11223865c623ca0ee7086/Engine/Source/Runtime/Engine/Private/TickTaskManager.cpp#L604
I don’t think that coprocessor will help you with 4k texture, maybe in producing them, but no using them, thats GPU job.
I am curious about your recommendation to modify the max threads but I could not access the github links.